White-Faced Mask
White-Faced Mask
This mask is whitewashed, a technique used in Atłak´ima masks to signify a spirit and possibly in this case, a ghost.
Owner
Iwakalas, Harry Hanuse, Mamalilikala (Village Island)
Catalogue Information
Provenance
Owned by Harry Hanuse until its forced surrender to Indian Agent William Halliday on March 25, 1922. Halliday later displayed and photographed the seized pieces at the Parish Hall in Alert Bay. After doing an inventory, he crated the items in June, and at the end of September he shipped some of them to the Royal Ontario Museum in Toronto, on long-term loan from the National Museum of Man (now the Canadian Museum of History). They remained in the possession of the ROM until the NMM pulled its loan and returned the pieces to the Nuyumbalees and U'mista cultural societies in 1988. In September 1993 Dan Hanuse Sr. requested that his father's pieces be transferred from Nuyumbalees to U'mista as per the wishes of the majority of Harry Hanuse's descendants.
Materials
Wood, Red Cedar; Paint; Hide; Metal
Dimensions
27.0 cm x 18.0 cm
Accession Number
94.09.013
Physical Description
Lalułalagamł Ghost mask, crudely carved and painted, with the knife marks still visible. The elongated face has protruding rounded eyes with eyelids only on the inside of the eye. It has green paint that encompasses the eyes, some paint dripped on the eye socket, to look like a decomposed face. It has a small piece of leather nailed to the chin that had fur on it at one time, indicating that this mask is a male with a goatee. The mask is whitewashed, a technique used in Atłak´ima masks to signify a spirit and possibly in this case, a ghost. The mouth has an open expression which is said to be the look of ghosts as they speak and make their haunting sounds. The mask has nails hammered into their rims where cloth was once added to conceal the back of the dancer’s head. White, black, red, green.