"How Will I Sew My Baskets?": Women Vendors, Market Art, and Incipient Political Activism in Anchorage, Alaska

When the alarm goes off at six o'clock on a late October morning, the Anchorage sky is sullen with clouds that have already dumped a foot of early snow on the city. As I splash water on my face, I hear Flora Mark (a pseudonym), my Yup'ik Eskimo collaborator on a long-term research project in the kitchen brewing coffee: "It's Starbucks!" she told me proudly last night when I arrived from Fairbanks.¹ We are hurrying to make the 7:00 A.M. deadline for setting up Flora's table at the annual Alaska Federation of Natives craft fair, which opens today in downtown Anchorage. We gulp down the coffee, and as we pack up to leave, Flora struggles into her best flowered qaspeq, the Mother Hubbard-like garment part way between shirt and dress that is regulation wear in every Eskimo village. In the city, qaspeq wearing isn't taken for granted, however, so as Flora pokes her head out through the opening, she feels compelled to explain: "They [the crafts fair organizers] want us to wear these."

In this article I examine the multifaceted role of the Alaska Federation of Natives crafts fair in the lives of Alaska Native women who have left their home villages and moved into Anchorage, Alaska's largest city. At the same time, this discussion raises broader issues such as the evolving politicization of women traders and the growing role of market art in the articulation of political concepts. These themes link Alaska Natives to Native Americans generally as they move from formerly isolated small-scale groups to multiethnic entities that participate in the globalized economies and emergent political institutions characterizing Fourth World peoples of the twenty-first century.² I argue that across Alaska, institutions such as the Alaska Native Federation crafts fairs help the increasing number of urban-based Native women in a variety of ways to adjust to city life while maintaining their connection to their home villages and to the land and animals from which they obtain the raw materials for craft production.

AFN and the Urban Experience

Founded in 1966 as an oversight organization to support Alaska Natives' ongoing land claim issues, the Alaska Federation of Natives ( AFN, as it is familiarly known) holds its annual convention each October. For three days, the city of Anchorage plays host to 5,000 to 10,000 of Alaska's 65,000 Indigenous people. At AFN time, Tlingit and Athabascan Indians, Inupiaq, Yup'ik and Siberian Yupik Eskimos, Aleut, and Alutiiqs flock into town to renew friendships, participate in debates about current land claim issues, do their Christmas shopping, and escape for a few days from the inevitable social pressures of life in small, rural communities.

At the same time that politics are being argued on the ground level of Anchorage's Egan Conference Center, the AFN craft fair, a second dimension of the conference, is going ahead full tilt on the floor below. Begun in the 1980s, as an add-on activity to help generate cash for in-town shopping, the AFN crafts fair is by now such an established institution that securing selling space at its tables is highly competitive. Formerly, Native people made the rounds of downtown gift shops with their wares tucked under one arm, or traveled across town to the Alaska Native Medical Center and set up shop in the reception area, but today, the AFN fair has mushroomed into the largest arts and crafts sale in the North, anticipated across Alaska by Natives and non-Natives alike.

The craft fair may originally have been organized to benefit rural residents in town for AFN, but in 2003 it also serves the growing number of Alaska Native vendors who have relocated to Anchorage mainly to take advantage of the economic opportunities in urban...