Yup'ik Maqii (Steam bath) Dillingham, Alaska Card

A maqii (in Yup'ik) or steam bath (in English) is a little building divided into two chambers. One chamber, the steam room, holds a stove–usually a wood stove–that heats the room and the pan of water on the stove. In the steam room, you sit on benches and get all nice and sweaty since the room is usually around 250-300 degrees, and then wash out of a dish pan to get all clean. The other chamber of the steam bath is the cool room. It has benches too and is where you go when you are getting too hot in the steam room. You are a weeny if you go in the cool room before anyone else. At the end of the steam, you pour water all over the stove to create water steam in the air which feels better than anyone can describe. As if every cell has been scrubbed. Your spine feels clean. Then you drink nineteen gallons of water because you’ve been totally medium-rared. Then you sleep like a rock and feel awesome in the morning because you have been cleaned from the inside out. This traditional bathing method dates back to the times before modern plumbing and is an efficient way to clean lots of people (we separate by gender, of course) with minimal water use. This image is the maqii my family used for nearly 40 years!