Originally published in The Nome Nugget, Summer 1995
Every woman in America has to make some kind of peace with Barbie. The doll with the flaxen blonde hair, anorexic waist, and pink, wrinkle-free plastic skin has become an icon we live and fight with everyday. You don’t have to watch too many TV shows or look at too many magazine advertisements to see that Barbie is the model woman of America: tall, thin, Caucasian, and willing to mess with her hair everyday.
So imagine my surprise to see an “Eskimo Barbie” for sale at the store the other day. She’s part of Mattel’s “Dolls of the World” collection and comes with a map, passport, and guide book, tour tickets, and $80 in some unrecognizable currency. There is an igloo, a totem pole, and a glossary of words on the front of the package. Eskimo Barbie comes with a white parka with fake gray fur trim and white, polyester leggings with tiny cloth boots that look too thin for walking to The Corner Store on a warm, dry in June let alone standing on the ice in January.
I don’t know how many Eskimo Barbies Mattel is selling. I’d much rather collect real handmade Native Alaskan dolls. My husband brought me a gorgeous doll with a carved birch face made by Debbie Miller (who grew up in Kotzebue) and she now sits in my modest collection next to a ivory-faced doll made in Nome. I also have my eye on some other dolls over at the Chukotsk/Alaska store. Dolly Spencer (a master dollmaker also from the Kotzebue area) continues to make museum-quality dolls in the tradition of her mother Grace Mendenhall, Lena Sours, and Ethel Washington and other Inupiat dollmakers. Their materials include various furs and skins: wolverine, arctic ground squirrel, alder-bark-dyed sealskin, land otter, badger mane, coyote chin fur, bleached caribou skin, spotted seal belly, coyote cheeks, muskrat belly, willow-bark-dyed sealskin, deer hide, beluga sinew, blue fox, and ermine. Not an inch of polyester on these ladies!
The traditional dolls of the Arctic Native peoples are the real thing. We can support the craftspeople selling their art in our local stores and exhibiting at the International Circumpolar Conference (ICC) and leave Eskimo Barbie in her plastic package on the shelf where she belongs.
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