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In what distinguished anthropologist James VanStone hats described as "a superb example of salvage ethnography, " The Inupiaq Eskimo Nations of Northwest Alaska presents a social geography of this far corner of the continent as it was during the early historic period. Author Ernest S. Burch, Jr., who has studied the area for over thirty years, contends that the Inupiaq Eskimos of northwest Alaska were organized into several autonomous societies equivalent to nations as we think of them today, but at the hunter-gatherer level of complexity. This book is a clearly written introduction to these tiny nations; it is based primarily on information the author was given by the last generation of Inupiaq elders born while oral narrative still was the primary form of historical record for their societies. The book emphasizes the identity of the nations in the region, their locations in space and time, and the numbers, lifeways, general distribution, and seasonal movements of their members. The discussion of each district includes brief summaries of previous research done there and accounts of how each nation met its demise during the second half of the nineteenth century. The work presents a substantial body of information that has never been published in book form before, and that can never be acquired again. It will endure as a major connecting link between archeological and historical research in northwest Alaska, and thus is of critical importance to understanding long-term social change in the region.
(source: Nielsen Book Data)

For the Tikigaq people of Point Hope, Alaska - the oldest continuously settled Native American site on the continent - the annual cycle of myth and magic that culminated in the spring whale hunt shaped every aspect of life for over 1,500 years. Packed close for half the year in underground whale-bone iglus connected by tunnels, Tikigaq people formed complex webs of kinship and alliance. But they were also connected to ancestor spirits, the spirits of the sun and moon, and the animals they both worshipped and ate. The peninsula itself was once, according to myth, a great whale, killed by a primal shamanic harpooneer, that lived on as land, part body and part spirit. Sustaining this myth, men and women conducted an elaborate series of rituals that filled the entire autumn and spring. To follow the Tikigaq year from storytellings, ritual athletics, dances, shaman seances, puppet shows, and divinations, through spirit guests, encounters with the souls of animals, and lunar rites conducted by women, to its climax in the spring with the annual whale hunt, is to enter a disorienting world where ritual and symbol become daily reality. Ancient Land: Sacred Whale is at once a work of anthropology and of poetry; it gives an account of Tikigaq lives and culture, formed in part by a long sequence of poems detailing the ritual year and its stories, narrated by the Tikigag storytellers who were the author's teachers. To the grandeur of Tikigag imagination, Lowenstein has brought the insight of a scholar and a poet's mastery, creating a work that combines many voices with dazzling power and haunting beauty.
(source: Nielsen Book Data)

Presents the observations of anthropologist Margaret Lantis of the Yupik-speaking Ninivaarmiut Eskimo technology and material culture on Nunivak Island in the Bering Sea off the coast of West central Alaska in 1939-'40. Includes contemporary photographs and map.

• 1. Introduction [Yupik Eskimos, Inuit, Native or Aboriginal peoples]
• 2. Where It All Takes Place: The Village of Gambell
• 3. Early History
• 4. Names and Families
• 5. Marriage
• 6. Life Passages [death, charms, pregnancy and birth, names & naming, sickness
• illness, health]
• 7. A Religious World View
• 8. Believing [traditional practices, Christianity]
• 9. Men, Women, and Food: A Subsistence Way of Life [hunting, fishing, foraging]
• 10. Conclusion: The Land, the People, the Future.

For more than fifteen hundred years Yupik and proto-Yupik Eskimo peoples have lived at the site of the Alaskan village of Gambell on St. Lawrence Island. Their history is a record of family and kin, and of the interrelationship between those who live in Gambell and the spiritual world on which they depend; it is a history dominated by an abiding desire for community survival. Relying on oral history blended with ethnography and ethnohistory, Carol Zane Jolles views the contemporary Yupik people in terms of the enduring beliefs and values that have contributed to the community's survival and adaptability. She draws on extensive interviews with villagers, archival records, and scholarly studies, as well as on her own ten years of fieldwork in Gambell and the wisdom of Yupik elder advisor Elinor Mikaghaq Oozeva, to demonstrate the central importance of three aspects of Yupik life: religious beliefs, devotion to a subsistence life way, and family and clan ties. Jolles documents the life and livelihood of this modern community of marine mammal hunters and explores the ways in which religion is woven into the lives of community members, paying particular attention to the roles of women. Her account conveys a powerful sense of the lasting bonds between those who live in Gambell and their spiritual world, both past and present.
(source: Nielsen Book Data)

Results of study of Walakpa archaeological site in Alaska, which show development of Eskimo culture from Birnirk to Thule.

• Contents
• Preface
• Introduction
• Preamble: Where the Eskimo Came From
• The Epic of Qayaq: The Longest Story Ever told By My People
• Qayaq's Life with his Parents
• Qayaq Associates with Birds and Animals and a Man who Transforms into an Animal
• Qayaq Visits the Umialik's Village. The Influence of Ancestors Is Particularly Stressed
• The Story of the Big Flood as it Was Told by Qayaq's Wife
• From Another Storyteller: How a Young Orphan Boy Grew Up to Be the Umialik whose Daughter Became Qayaq's Wife

• Qayaq Receives the Uplifting Influence of Ptarmigans and CaribouQayaq Visits Two Communities, One in Alaska and One in Canada
• Qayaq Goes to a Western Community at the Mouth of the Yukon River and a Tlingit Village to the Southeast
• Qayaq Visits the Headwaters of the Selawik River and Eventually Finds his Way Home
• List of Plates

The Longest Story Ever Told by My People is a splendid presentation of an ancient northern story cycle, brought to life by Lela Kiana Oman, who has been retelling and writing the legends of the Inupiat of the Kobuk Valley, Alaska, nearly all her adult life. In the mid-1940s, she heard these tales from storytellers passing through the mining town of Candle, and translated them from Inupiaq into English. Now, after fifty years, they illuminate one of the world's most vibrant mythologies. The hero is Qayaq, and the cycle traces his wanderings by kayak and on foot along four rivers - the Selawik, the Kobuk, the Noatak and the Yukon - up along the Arctic Ocean to Barrow, over to Herschel Island in Canada, and south to a Tlingit Indian village. Along the way he battles with jealous fathers-in-law and other powerful adversaries; discovers cultural implements (the copper-headed spear and the birchbark canoe); transforms himself into animals, birds and fish, and meets animals who appear to be human. Qayaq is richly illustrated from the Priscilla Tyler and Maree Brooks Collection of Inuit Art, housed at Carleton University Art Gallery. A scholarly preface by Ann Chandonnet explains the conventions of Native Alaskan storytelling, and there is an introduction by Priscilla Tyler and Maree Brooks: art collectors, friends, and conservators of Oman's story legacy for many years.

• August
• Tulugak Lake and beyond
• Maps
• Anaktuvuk pass, you copy?
• They come in; They go out
• Picking
• The upside down season
• Fieldnotes
• Writing history from the pass
• The "new" Eskimo
• Of meat and hunger and everlasting gob stoppers
• Staying home
• Masks
• The only road that goes there the information superhighway
• Remembering Susie Paneak
• The exhibition
• Airplane! Airplaaane!
• Dispatches from the field
• Fifty years in one place
• Weekend nomads
• The things we carry
• Town
• May--north of north
• Ed's place
• Happy July fourth
• Faces of the Nunamiut.

In the roadless Brooks Range Mountains of northern Alaska sits Anaktuvuk Pass, a small, tightly knit Nunamiut Eskimo village. Formerly nomadic hunters of caribou, the Nunamiut of Anaktuvuk now find their destiny tied to that of Alaska's oil-rich North Slope, their lives suddenly subject to a century's worth of innovations, from electricity and bush planes to snow machines and the Internet. Anthropologist Margaret B. Blackman has been doing summer fieldwork among the Nunamiut over a span of almost twenty years, an experience richly and movingly recounted in this book. A vivid description of the people and the life of Anaktuvuk Pass, the essays in Upside Down are also an absorbing meditation on the changes that Blackman herself underwent during her time there, most wrenchingly the illness of her husband, a fellow anthropologist, and the breakup of their marriage. Throughout, Blackman reflects in unexpected and enlightening ways on the work of anthropology and the perspective of an anthropologist evermore invested in the lives of her subjects. Whether commenting on the effect of this place and its people on her personal life or describing the impact of "progress" on the Nunamiut-the CB radio, weekend nomadism, tourism, the Information Superhighway-her essays offer a unique and deeply evocative picture of an at once disappearing and evolving world.
(source: Nielsen Book Data)