Bent Wood Container
11 cm long x 11 cm wide x 9 cm tall
Dyed bent wood, leather handle
Bristol Bay, Alaska (Yup’ik), c. 1882
Collector: C. L. McKay
Museum ID number: MCK.C1.ad.0098
This type of wooden container may have been used in the late summer to collect berries. Men made bent-wood containers in the qasgiq (communal men’s house), where they steamed thin slabs of wood to bend them, and connected the ends with spruce root stitching and glue made of seal blood and ocher. Like this one, many containers were decorated with red and black paint. The wood used to make this particular container was most likely made of wood of southern origin. It has a leather handle made out of thin skin, suggesting that it is a summer skin. A water line within the container suggests that it was made to be watertight. Its craftsmanship shows that it was made by an experienced woodworker.