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 Wood is viewed as a feeling, knowing, being capable of both gratitude and revenge. Men carved masks to represent the yuaof the driftwood, which required as much attention as any other living creature.
A story is told about a tree. A man noticed a tree along the riverbank and stopped to cut it down. While he was splitting the wood, the tree tried with difficulty to prevent itself from laughing. As the man worked on the wood, transforming it into a
kayak,
the wood was happy, but it felt pain when someone else carved it. When the man finished the kayak and covered it with skins, the
kayak
became very hungry and was satisfied only when the man rode it out hunting, killed a seal, and filled it to the top with meat. Later the man gave the
kayak
away during a feast. The new owner was not like the first, and the
kayak
was poorly cared for and unhappy. The
kayak
then returned to its original owner in human form, refusing the owner's
hospitality
and eventually taking the man's wife.
The
Yukon
and Kuskokwim river deltas
are treeless. But the
Yup'ik people were dependent on wood for fuel, housing, hunting and carving. The lowland coast, however, received a wealth of driftwood from upriver.
The Yup'ik people made driftwood masks and danced to coax the precious driftwood to return when the rivers thawed in spring. Willie Kamkof (1994) explains this: "When they had the last dance with masks in Emmonak, the maker of this mask said that it was an image of equk [driftwood]. . .When people danced in the winter with equk masks and received their plea lots of driftwood would come out the Yukon River. They used driftwood for everything, they relied on it. The equipment they used to acquire food was made mostly out of driftwood. That was why the equk masks were always presented.
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