Helen Simeonoff doesn't look like Indiana Jones. She's bespectacled, quiet-spoken, not given to sudden moves and will turn 67 this month. Yet this smallish Sugpiaq woman from Kodiak is now receiving credit for discovering -- insofar as most Alaskans are concerned -- one of the most important troves of old art from her Native region.
She found it in France, among the towers of a 13th-century fort. Hundreds of items. Bowls, spears, bidarkas. And what may be the largest collection in existence of aged dance masks, witnesses to the era before Russian hunters claimed the area for the czar and Sugpiaq ways began to fade.
Her mind reeled as she stood among the artifacts, she said, the first Sugpiaq to view them in more than a century.
"I saw a beaded headdress from my mother's village of Old Afognak," she said. "And I thought, 'It could have been one of my ancestors who made that.' "
She knew instantly that other Alaskans would want to see the treasures. But "if somebody had told me that some day there'd be an exhibit of these things in Alaska, I would have laughed."
"Giinaquq (Like a Face): Sugpiaq Masks of the Kodiak Archipelago," a show of selected pieces that Simeonoff found at the Chateau Musee in Boulogne-sur-Mer, France, will open in the Anchorage Museum today and remain on display through Jan. 4.
It's a good day to laugh.
TEEN COLLECTOR
On an April day in 1871, Alphonse Pinart left San Francisco for Kodiak. Son of a wealthy French industrialist, Pinart hoped to determine whether Native Alaskan languages had any connection to Chinese or Japanese.
He was 19.
In the months that followed, he traveled -- usually by bidarka -- through the Kodiak area and Bristol Bay, taking careful notes on language, culture and rituals. He acquired 87 masks and other items that he brought back to France, to the acclaim of his countrymen.
The pieces received a major showing in Paris. Pinart received a gold medal for "the world's most important geographic discovery reported in 1873." He presented the collection to the museum in the fishing port of Boulogne, where they've been among the crown jewels ever since.
The collection remained largely unnoticed by the world at large, however, even in academic circles.
For Alaskans, it might as well have never existed at all. Virtually all knowledge of traditional Sugpiaq culture vanished by the late 1800s. In a 2006 essay in the Daily News, Alutiiq Museum director Sven Haakanson wrote that many contemporary Kodiak Natives were told "their forebears were impoverished stone tool users, not skilled artisans."
In 1994, Dominique Desson, a Frenchwoman doing graduate work at the University of Alaska Fairbanks, presented a lecture in Kodiak that included slides of the Pinart masks. Simeonoff stopped in to listen on a whim.
"I wasn't prepared for the material she had," Simeonoff said. As the slides whipped by, she scrambled to take notes and make sketches.
"I kept thinking, 'I wish everyone could see this. She's handing us our culture on a silver platter.' "
SOLO QUEST
Until 1993, Simeonoff worked in the warrants division at the Anchorage Police Department. The job was "tedious, boring, repetitive," she said.
But what really bothered her was being greeted by criminals when she went out in public. "Felons knew me on a first-name basis. It was a driving force to do something more positive."
So she became an artist, eking out a living with her paintings of things like wildlife, landscapes and cats.
"Fifteen years later -- no husband, no job, no Swiss bank account -- I've never missed a mortgage payment," she said with a note of pride.
But after seeing Desson's slides, the masks became an obsession. Someone, she felt -- an expert or elder -- needed to see them, find out what else was there and report back to Alaskans. She approached various groups with the idea, including Native corporations, and found no interest.
"It was always 'No,' " she said. "I was so dismayed at the apathy."
Finally she decided she'd have to do it herself, no easy trick when one's only income is the sale of art.
She set a regime of frugality for herself.
"I started putting all my groceries and utilities on Visa for airline mileage," she said.
It took six years to earn enough points for a trip to Europe.
She boarded the plane with trepidation. "I had never been on a jumbo jet before. It was my first trip out of America. I was so scared."
Alone in a foreign land, armed only with a camera and a letter of introduction from the Anchorage Museum, she ascended the hill to the Chateau Musee. Once she was inside, enthrallment quickly overcame fear. For five days, she spent every waking moment making notes and taking photos of the collection.
Returning to Alaska, she pushed harder than ever to have other Natives understand the importance of the collection. She kept talking about it and showing her pictures to everyone she met.
GAINING STEAM
One person Simeonoff met was Perry Eaton, a Kodiaker with a flare for fine art photography. After seeing her photos, he made the trip to France, where, after seeing the masks, he started carving Kodiak-style masks himself.
With experience as a businessman and corporate executive, Eaton knew how to go about getting grants, whom to talk to, what doors to knock on.
Things had changed from the years when Simeonoff couldn't find anyone who shared her passion. Archaeological excavations increasingly brought to light Sugpiaq artifacts that pointed to a sophisticated and technologically adept pre-contact society. Kodiak Natives were learning more about their ancestors and striving to regain what had been given up as lost for so long.
Kodiak now had its own museum, with Haakanson, fresh from earning his doctorate at Harvard, at its helm. Though he had a thousand things on his plate, Haakanson knew of the Pinart collection and Desson's work from his student days at UAF and was a well-respected mask carver himself. So when Simeonoff approached him, he said, "I took notice."
He began a series of trips to France, negotiating with the Chateau Musee staff. In 2006 he led several Kodiak Native artists, including Simeonoff and Eaton, on an emotional pilgrimage to make a close inspection of the items.
In his Daily News essay, Haakanson described the scene as the Alaskans entered a room containing 40 of the masks: "No one spoke for the first five minutes as sadness and joy passed through us. Several of the artists cried openly."
It wasn't just the antiquity of the masks but their meaning.
"Masks have a deep connection to Alutiiq spirituality. To us, they are not simply art; they are emblems of the Alutiiq worldview," he wrote. "Masks connected people to the universe's life-giving forces. They were a source of enhanced vision, a portal to the divine world."
And extremely rare. Haakanson said there are four Sugpiaq masks at the Alutiiq Museum, another 10 in St. Petersburg, Russia. The 74 Pinart masks that can still be accounted for are by far the largest known collection.
"One of my dreams is to bring some of the masks back to Alaska for an exhibition," Haakanson wrote after the trip.
It took combined contributions and cooperation of Alaska Native corporations, oil company sponsors and museum staff in two hemispheres. Issues of cost, logistics, ownership, legalities and Gallic bureaucracy were slowly resolved.
But, said Haakanson, what really made it happen was the visit by the Kodiak artists. The reverence with which the Alaskans inspected the collection and the joy they displayed as they reconnected with their lost heritage impressed and moved their hosts.
At the end of the 2006 trip, French authorities agreed to allow their national treasures to be shown in Kodiak and Anchorage.
TRADITION BEARERS
Most of the 34 masks in the exhibit that opens today are in two areas on opposite sides of the gallery. On one side are the big, battered, pre-contact or shortly post-contact masks, haunting in the way they exude both mystery and personality.
On the other side are what Haakanson calls the "young" masks; he thinks these were commissioned by Pinart to accompany songs he collected. Pinart was unique among anthropologists of his generation in that he was interested in how the masks fit into the larger cosmology of ritual and legend.
The good condition of Pinart's collection is particularly remarkable. Unlike the handful of Sugpiaq masks in Alaska museums, which were found in the course of archaeological digs, these were never in the dirt. They remain in excellent shape considering that some may be more than 200 years old.
Haakanson apologetically describes them as "remnants of the originals," because the paint has faded and adorning feathers and fur are now missing.
But the information they contain continues to cast fresh insights into the culture.
"Every time I look at these masks, I see something new," Haakanson said Wednesday as he helped mount the exhibit. "Just yesterday, Perry Eaton was looking at the back of several of the old masks and noticed that they were made by the same artist."
Another discovery from the past week came when Haakanson spotted hitherto unnoticed Cyrillic writing on the mouthpiece of a mask dubbed "Boils" and realized they had the wrong name.
Accompanying the exhibit is the elegant companion book, "Two Journeys," published by Koniag Inc. and dedicated to Simeonoff.
"She understood before most of us the importance of Alphone Pinart's work," it reads. "Her determination and perseverance opened our eyes."
She accepts the honor with modesty but said she feels silly when she's called a "tradition bearer."
"We had no traditions when I was growing up," she said. "Nor were there any books. It was almost embarrassing that I had to travel to France to see our culture."
The real tradition bearer, she suggests, was Pinart.
"We have reference materials thanks to that man," she said. "That man saved the whole culture."
Find Mike Dunham online at adn.com/contact/mdunham or call 257-4332.
GIINAQUQ (LIKE A FACE): SUGPIAQ MASKS OF THE KODIAK ARCHIPELAGO will open with a reception from 1 to 4 p.m. today in the Anchorage Museum at Rasmuson Center, 121 W. Seventh Ave. It will remain on display through Jan. 4.
By MIKE DUNHAM
mdunham@adn.com