Social Encounters: Portraits of the Yup’ik Women of Taciq, Alaska, 1850–1851

During the mid-nineteenth century, over thirty maritime expeditions searched for the infamous missing Franklin expedition sent by the British Admiralty in 1845 that had vanished into the Northwest Passage. Several of these expeditions and individuals had extensive and sustained contact with Inuit, Yup’ik, and Chukchi people who lived in the region. The officers of these expeditions were required to keep accurate visual and written records of all that they encountered, while surgeons in particular were expected to keep details on natural history, including ethnographic information on Indigenous peoples of the Arctic. Many of these documents are overtly racist while others are underlain with less obvious, but highly pervasive, racist attitudes. Despite that, these records contain valuable, if flawed, information that can be of particular interest to Indigenous scholars and communities in the Arctic. Through examining written evidence and four watercolour portraits of women made at Taciq, Alaska, I show how such pre-photographic records can contain information that unsettles the assumed power dynamics between Indigenous peoples and agents of imperialism and can reveal traces of social encounters.