The Tsimshian “monkey mask” was discussed upstream and I’d like to add to it, as well as discuss another artifact.
Here are two artifacts that are used by enthusiasts to bolster the idea that Native Cultures in NA knew of the existence of American apes. The first is a Niska Indian ritual mask collected around 1900 in northern British Columbia by a Lt. G.T. Emmons. Emmons intriguingly described the mask as representing ” a mythical being found in the woods and called today a monkey.”
The mask was donated to the Peabody Museum in 1914 by Emmons:
http://pmem.unix.fas.harvard.edu:8080/peabody/view/objects/asitem/search$0040/80/title-desc?t:state:flow=2a4d880a-d825-40d1-b67a-1998d6b61ca0
http://www.sasquatchcanada.com/uploads/9/4/5/1/945132/5682923_orig.jpg
Unlike other Indian artifacts purported to represent native apes, this one is unambiguously apelike or monkeylike. It has one humanlike characteristic though; its teeth are even in length and without prominent canines.
What are we to make of this? It has been suggested that this mask represents
bukwus, which in turn is said to be the localized term for Bigfoot in certain First Nation cultures. I have been unable to locate this pertinent article that might help: “The Monkey from Alaska: The Curious Case of an Enigmatic Mask from Bigfoot Country,” by Edwin L. Wade, in
Harvard magazine, Nov.-Dec. 1978, pp. 48-51.
Instead, I’ve relied on a secondary source that mentions Wade’s article,
Bigfoot: A Personal Inquiry into a Phenomena, by Kenneth Wylie, pp. 81-82. Here is the relevant parts of Wylie’s comments, after he relates the fact of artifacts “that reveal puzzling apelike creatures in a world where no known apes are found:”
The most famous of these is the “monkey mask” (now in Harvard’s Peabody Museum) representing a creature called bukwus
by the Tsimshian Indians. This has become notorious as an example of archaeological proof for the Sasquatch’s existence. The case has been examined by Edwin L. Wade, an ethnologist and archaeologist at Harvard who specializes in North American Indians. Wade notes that among the Tsimshians, bukwus is nocturnal, herbivorous, semi aquatic, and antisocial, but it is also small, no larger than a man….[The bukwus
]…looks rather like one of several varieties of monkey….
Wade does not shy away from the problem of explaining an apelike mask, such as bukwus
, in an area where no apes or monkeys are supposed to exist. He points out the simple fact that all of the peoples of the Pacific Northwest coast had regular contact with Europeans and American seamen, especially after whaling and merchant ships began to visit the region in the late eighteenth century. By the 1840s several of the coastal tribes had a “booming tourist-art business,” carving all kinds of exotic beasts for ships’ captains, fur traders, and merchants. Many of these carvings, usually done in slate, portray peacocks, lions, elephants, and, of course, monkeys, none of which are indigenous to North America. Northwestern Indians may have hired on as crew members on whaling vessels, being expert whalers themselves (like Tashtego in Moby Dick
, though he came from the opposite side of the of the continent), and so traveled around the world. Northwest Coast artists were allowed great liberty in interpreting their subjects, since their carvings were not religious icons and thus fixed in purpose or meaning. It would be easy enough for a native carver to incorporate a new and captivating “monkey” style, borrowed from abroad. This interpretation, Wade suggests, is at least as good as the one that postulates that the bukwus mask is based on a Bigfoot creature that exists in nature.
I would think Wade’s possible solution is much more likely than the Bigfoot enthusiast’s. Even Christopher Murphy has to credit a variation on this idea in his
Know the Sasquatch/Bigfoot. On page 22 he portrays the “monkey mask” and offers this:
Other than a sasquatch, the only plausible explanation for the source of this image is a pet monkey brought to North America by an early European sailor.
The second artifact is without provenience but found in Washington state’s Maryhill Museum. I assume it is thought to be from the Columbia River area where other First Nation carved heads from stone were excavated. Here is a picture:
http://orhistory.com/wordpress/wp-content/uploads/2012/06/Carved-Stone-Heads.jpg
This stone carving is said by some to represent an ape’s head. I don’t see that. This looks more sheeplike to me. The pronounce brow is probably the truncated curving horns of a mountain sheep, the elongated face and protruding eyes certainly don’t look-ape like. It looks more like a mountain sheep than an ape. More like this:
http://www.flickr.com/photos/mharrsch/2374261134/in/set-72157607725827914/
