In October of 2010, six men who were serving on the board of the Calista Elders Council (CEC) gathered in Anchorage with CEC staff to spend three days speaking about the subsistence way of life. The men shared stories of their early years growing up on the land and harvesting through the seasons, and the dangers they encountered there. The gathering was striking for its regional breadth, as elders came from the Bering Sea coast as well as the Yukon and Kuskokwim rivers. And while their accounts had some commonalities, they also served to demonstrate the wide range of different approaches to subsistence in different regions. This book gathers the men’s stories for the current generation and those to come. Taken together, they become more than simply oral histories—rather, they testify to the importance of transmitting memories and culture and of preserving knowledge of vanishing ways of life.

Lifeways in Southwest Alaska today remains inextricably bound to the seasonal cycles of sea and land. Community members continue to hunt, fish, and make products from the life found in the rivers and sea. Based on a wealth of oral histories collected over decades of research, this book explores the ancestral relationship between Yup’ik people and the natural world of Southwest Alaska. Nunakun-gguq Ciutengqertut studies the overlapping lives of the Yup’ik with native plants, animals, and birds, and traces how these relationships transform as more Yup’ik people relocate to urban areas and with the changing environment. The book will be hailed as a milestone work in the anthropological study of contemporary Alaska.

"This bilingual collection shares new translations of old stories recorded over the last four decades though interviews with Yup’ik elders from throughout southwest Alaska. Some are true qulirat (traditional tales), while others are recent. Some are well known, like the adventures of the wily Raven, while others are rarely told. All are part of a great narrative tradition, shared and treasured by Yup’ik people into the present day. The elders and translators who contributed to this collection embrace the great irony of oral traditions: that the best way to keep these stories is to give them away. By retelling these stories, they hope to create a future in which the Yup’ik view of the world will be both recognized and valued."--Provided by publisher.

"Brower was deeply committed to Native culture, and his life history is an expression of the Inupiaq way of life. He acted as a mediator between Inupiaq whalers and non-Native scientists and helped protect Inupiaq subsistance whaling by sharing his vast knowledge of bowhead whale behavior with researchers. He was a central architect of the Arctic Slope Regional Corporation boundaries, and served for over twenty years as a consultant to scientists at the Naval Arctic Research Laboratory."--BOOK JACKET.

This landmark volume will stand for decades as one of the most comprehensive studies of a hunter-gatherer population ever written. In this third and final volume in a series on the early contact period Iñupiaq Eskimos of northwestern Alaska, Burch examines every topic of significance to hunter-gatherer research, ranging from discussions of social relationships and settlement structure to nineteenth-century material culture.

"In fall 2014, Calista Education and Culture, Inc. (CEC, formerly Calista Elders Council) began a four-year study funded by the Office of Subsistence Management of the US Fish and Wildlife Service. The study focused on whitefish and other non-salmon freshwater fish harvested by residents of the Akulmiut villages of Kasigluk, Nunapitchuk, and Atmautluak, as well as those living along the Kuskokwim River just below Bethel in the villages of Napaskiak, Napakiak, and Oscarville. Harvest studies have been carried out in some of these communities (Ikuta, Brown, and Koester, ed. 2014) as well as two major ethnographic studies--one in Napaskiak (Oswalt 1963) and one in Nunapitchuk (Andrews 1989). Our intended focus was not on harvest amounts but rather traditional knowledge surrounding the harvest and use of the six species of whitefish, as well as pike, burbot, and blackfish, on which people from this area relied so heavily in the past and continue to harvest to this day. In fact, all three contemporary Akulmiut villages, as well as settlements in the past, were established at sites where fish fences were built across the river each fall to intercept whitefish as they migrated out of the lakes and sloughs toward the mainstem of the Kuskokwim River. If there is one food that defines people from this area, it is whitefish."--Provided by publisher.

This examination of the ideology and practice of the Yup'ik Eskimos of the Yukon-Kuskokwim Delta of southwestern Alaska includes traditions, ideology, relations with Christianity, warfare, use of animals, law and order, and the non-native perception of the Yup'ik way of life.

People are often able to identify change agents. They can estimate possible economic and social transitions, and they are often in an economic or social position to make calculated—sometimes risky—choices. Exploring this dynamic, A Tale of Three Villages is an investigation of culture change among the Yup’ik Eskimo people of the southwestern Alaskan coast from just prior to the time of Russian and Euro-North American contact to the mid-twentieth century. Liam Frink focuses on three indigenous-colonial events along the southwestern Alaskan coast: the late precolonial end of warfare and raiding, the commodification of subsistence that followed, and, finally, the engagement with institutional religion. Frink’s innovative interdisciplinary methodology respectfully and creatively investigates the spatial and material past, using archaeological, ethnoecological, and archival sources. The author’s narrative journey tracks the histories of three villages ancestrally linked to Chevak, a contemporary Alaskan Native community: Qavinaq, a prehistoric village at the precipice of colonial interactions and devastated by regional warfare; Kashunak, where people lived during the infancy and growth of the commercial market and colonial religion; and Old Chevak, a briefly occupied “stepping-stone” village inhabited just prior to modern Chevak. The archaeological spatial data from the sites are blended with ethnohistoric documents, local oral histories, eyewitness accounts of people who lived at two of the villages, and Frink’s nearly two decades of participant-observation in the region. Frink provides a model for work that examines interfaces among indigenous women and men, old and young, demonstrating that it is as important as understanding their interactions with colonizers. He demonstrates that in order to understand colonial history, we must actively incorporate indigenous people as actors, not merely as reactors.

Masks are an ancient tradition of the Alutiiq people on the southern coast of Alaska. Alutiiq artists carved the masks from wood or bark into images of ancestors, animal spirits, and other mythological forces; these extraordinary creations have been an essential tool for communicating with the spirit world and have played an important role in dances and hunting festivities for centuries. Giinaquq—Like a Face presents thirty-three full-color images of these fantastic and eye-catching masks, which have been preserved for more than a century as part of the Pinart Collection in a small French museum. These masks, collected in 1871 by a young French scholar of indigenous cultures, are presented for the first time in their complete cultural context, celebrating the rich history of the Alutiiq people and their artistic traditions. In addition to the stunning photographs, Giinaquq—Like a Face includes an informative text in three languages—English, Alutiiq, and French—in order to provide a cross-cultural understanding of the masks’ traditional meaning and use. This captivating and revealing book will be an essential resource for anyone interested in indigenous art and culture.

The volume is a major grammar of Central Alaskan Yupik (CAY). It is the culmination of the author's linguistic studies done in Alaska and elsewhere since around 1960, with assistance of many native speakers. Central Alaskan Yupik is currently the most vigorous of the nineteen remaining Native Alaskan languages. Descriptive in nature, extensive and deep, this grammar is of typological and of ethnological/anthropological interest. Given the severely endangered state of the language, this much of descriptive linguistic material is without comparison in the field.