Net Shuttle
date: label: Accession Date
content: 27 Jan 1910
name: label: Donor Name
content: U.S. Department Of Interior
notes: label: Notes
content: This object is on loan to the Anchorage Museum at Rasmuson Center, from 2010 through 2027.
label: Notes
content: Source of the information below: Smithsonian Arctic Studies Center Alaska Native Collections: Sharing Knowledge website, by Aron Crowell, entry on this artifact https://alaska.si.edu/record.asp?id=313 , retrieved 1-7-2022; see web page for additional information: Net shuttle, Inupiaq. Net shuttles made of ivory, bone, wood, or antler hold cord for making fish and seal nets, and are used to pass the cord through the mesh as knots are tied. This ... shuttle is the right size for tying small fish nets and the cord is made of twisted willow bark. Net shuttles-made of ivory, bone, wood, or antler-were used to hold cord for making nets, and to pass the cord through the mesh as knots were tied. Traditional nets were made from sinew, baleen or sealskin. Women usually made the line and men made the nets. Shuttles varied in size according to the purpose of the net. Small, slender ones-like this example-were used to make fine-mesh nets for fish while longer, wider ones were used when tying large nets for seals and belugas. In his book People of Kauwerak, Iñupiaq Elder William Oquilluk tells a story called "The First Net": One day Ekeuhnick walked around in the woods. Among the trees he saw a spider web. There were a few flies in it. He sat down and watched. Soon the spider came and ate the juice out of the flies. Then, while Ekeuhnick watched, the spider left. Another fly came and got caught in the web. Ekeuhnick thought: "Suppose I make a string, small and light, out of the hide of a small animal. I could make a net just like this web to catch fish." So, he prepared to make a web to catch fish from the water. He made thin strings from caribou hide. He knotted them together with even spaces between the knots to make a mesh. When it was complete, he put the web he had made in the creek and set it by fastening it to the bank. Sometime in the morning he looked into the net. Some fish were caught in it. From then on, every man made a net. Some made them out of the sinews of the big animals with different size spaces between the knots so the nets had many kinds of meshes to catch different kinds of fish. Now that men could catch many sizes of fish, they began to dry them to use when the fish were not so many in the rivers and the cold weather came.
label: Record Last Modified
content: 12 Feb 2022
label: Specimen Count
content: 1
place: label: Place
content: Kotzebue Sound, Alaska, United States, North America
topic: label: Topic
content: Ethnology
culture: label: Culture
content: Eskimo, Inupiaq
setName: label: See more items in
content: Anthropology
dataSource: label: Data Source
content: NMNH - Anthropology Dept.
identifier: label: Accession Number
content: 051115
label: USNM Number
content: E260163-0
objectType: label: Object Type
content: Net Shuttle / Cord
physicalDescription: label: Length - Object
content: 30 cm