Nunakun-gguq Ciutengqertut/They Say They Have Ears Through the Ground: Animal Essays from Southwest Alaska

By Ann Fienup-Riordan, Alice Rearden and Marie Meade

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.

• Language: English
• Publisher: University of Alaska Press
• Release date: May 15, 2020
• ISBN: 9781602234130

Book preview

Nunakun-gguq Ciutengqertut

They Say They Have Ears Through the Ground

Animal Essays from Southwest Alaska

Ann Fienup-Riordan with Alice Rearden, Marie Meade, David Chanar, Rebecca Nayamin, and Corey Joseph

Text © 2020 Calista Education and Culture

Published by University of Alaska Press

P.O. Box 756240

Fairbanks, AK 99775-6240

Cover design by UA Press.

Interior layout by Paula Elmes.

Cover image provided by Ann Fienup-Riordan.

Library of Congress Cataloging in Publication Data

Names: Fienup-Riordan, Ann, author. | Rearden, Alice, translator. | Meade, Marie, translator. | Chanar, David, translator. | Nayamin, Rebecca, translator. | Joseph, Corey, translator.

Title: Nunakun-qquq ciutenggertut They say they have ears through the ground : animals and others in Southwest Alaska / by Ann Fienup-Riordan ; with translations by Alice Rearden, Marie Meade, David Chanar, Rebecca Nayamin, and Corey Joseph.

Other titles: They say they have ears through the ground

Description: Fairbanks, AK : University of Alaska Press, 2020. | Includes bibliographical references and index. | English and Yupik parallel text.

Identifiers: LCCN 2019045486 (print) | LCCN 2019045487 (ebook) | ISBN 9781602234123 (paperback) | ISBN 9781602234130 (ebook)

Subjects: LCSH: Yupik Eskimos—Social life and customs. | Yupik Eskimos—Food. | Yupik Eskimos—Fishing. | Traditional ecological Knowledge—Alaska, Southwest. | Traditional fishing—Alaska, Southwest. | Subsistence fishing—Alaska, Southwest. | Human-animal Relations—Alaska, Southwest. | Oral history—Alaska.

Classification: LCC E99.E7 F4725 2020 (print) | LCC E99.E7 (ebook) | DDC 979.8004/9714—dc23

LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2019045486

LC ebook record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2019045487

Contents

Acknowledgments

Yup’ik Tradition Bearers

Introduction

I. Thinking on the Page

1. Uqlautekevkenaku | They Didn’t Make a Mess of It: Yup’ik Perspectives on Human and Animal Relations

2. How Raven Marked the Land When the Earth Was New

3. Ciissit | Insects in Yup’ik Oral Tradition

4. Urine, Blood, Saliva, and Slime: The Power of Bodily Fluids

5. Tua-i-gguq Makut Nemeryat Murilkelluki Pisqetuit | They Tell People to Be Careful around Those Eels

II. Gatherings

6. King Salmon on the Lower Yukon River: Past and Present

7. They Say Not to Fear Animals in the Wilderness since They Can Be Food: Yup’ik Understandings of Moose and Bear

8. Unguvalriit | Sea Mammals

9. Yaqulget Elpengcarilallrat | How Birds Notify Us

III. The Past Is Old, the Future Is Traditional

10. Ircenrraat, the DOT, and the Inventiveness of Tradition

Notes

Glossary

References

Index

Acknowledgments

First and foremost, we thank the many Yup’ik men and women who have shared so much over the years. Some are gone now, including Frank Andrew, Annie Blue, Paul John, Andy Kinzy, Theresa Moses, Dennis Panruk, and Neva Rivers. But many who contributed to this book are still with us—including John Andrew, Father Max Isaac, Ruth Jimmie, Grace Parks, and Francis Thompson—a new generation of elders who are testament to the fact that a Yup’ik view of the world is very much alive.

The chapters that follow are the culmination of a four-year project funded by the National Science Foundation, Office of Polar Programs (Grant 1512731) to document human and animal relations in southwest Alaska. We extend special thanks to our long-time NSF program officer, Anna Kerttula de Echave, for guidance and support throughout the project as well as to our new NSF program officers, Colleen Strawhacker and Roberto Delgado, who saw our work through to completion. We thank them all!

While most of these essays were written during the last four years, information included draws from decades of work in southwest Alaska funded not only by the National Science Foundation but also by the Alaska Humanities Forum; the Scholarly Editions and Translations Program of the National Endowment for the Humanities; the Office of Subsistence Management of the US Fish and Wildlife Service; the Smithsonian Urgent Anthropology Fund, National Museum of Natural History; and the Yupiit Nation’s Traditional Law and Governance Project. We also thank the Coastal Yukon Mayors’ Association, the National Endowment for the Humanities, the Rasmuson Foundation, and the Anchorage Museum of History and Art for support provided in preparation for the Yup’ik mask exhibit between 1992 and 1996, as well as the National Science Foundation, the National Park Service, and the Administration for Native Americans for supporting elder gatherings organized by the Calista Elders Council (CEC) between 2000 and 2012.

Over the years I have had the privilege of working with some of the best and most dedicated Yup’ik translators in the world, including Alice Rearden from Napakiak, Marie Meade from Nunapitchuk, David Chanar from Toksook Bay, Rebecca Nayamin from Chevak, and our brilliant young translator Corey Joseph from Kwigillingok. Once again, this team has worked together to make it possible for English readers to begin to understand how the Yup’ik world works. I am particularly grateful to Alice, who not only carried out translations for this project, but also patiently reviewed and commented on each essay as it appeared, serving as my first and best reader. CEC cultural director Mark John also played a central role in this work, not only helping to organize specific gatherings but also leading our discussions, often adding observations from his own considerable knowledge and experience. And thanks to CEC director Rea Bavilla and assistants Olivia Agnes and Nicole Baski for essential administrative support. We could not do this work without them.

Each of the chapters in Part 2 grew out of a particular gathering, and three of these were sponsored by CEC as part of our NSF project on relations between humans and animals. We owe special thanks to the staff of the Yukon Delta National Wildlife Refuge in Bethel, who gave us the use of both their bunkhouse and conference room to hold these meetings. The bunkhouse not only provided a comfortable place to sleep and a convivial place to visit, but using its huge kitchen we were able to cook and enjoy meals of seal meat, salmon, beluga, and moose—food Mark and the others brought to Bethel to share with the group.

Each of the other chapters has a unique history, and I have many people to thank for their help and inspiration. I wrote the first chapter, "Uqlautekevkenaku/They Didn’t Make a Mess of It: Yup’ik Perspectives on Human and Animal Relations, for a conference session, Arctic Crashes: People and Animals in the Changing North," at the annual meeting of the Alaska Anthropological Association, held in Anchorage in February 2015 and organized by Igor Krupnik and Aron Crowell. That paper has since been published by the Smithsonian Institution Scholarly Press in a volume with the same title (Krupnik and Crowell, ed. 2020). I wrote the story of Emmonak for a public presentation at the conclusion of NSF’s Bering Ecosystem Study (BEST) in 2011. It was subsequently published as part of a special issue of Deep-Sea Research, and I refer interested readers to the longer discussion (Fienup-Riordan, Brown, and Braem 2013).

I wrote the second chapter, How Raven Marked the Land When the Earth Was New, for a special issue of Études/Inuit/Studies, entitled Bestiare Inuit/Inuit Bestiary, edited by Frédéric Laugrand and Francis Lévesque (Laugrand and Lévesque, ed. 2017). Frédéric’s invitation to contribute to this volume nudged me to pull together what I knew about Raven the Creator and ravens generally—birds I very much admire. The third chapter, "Ciissit: Insects in Yup’ik Oral Tradition," was also written at Frédéric’s request for a volume he was editing for the Canadian journal Recherches amérindiennes au Québec on small beings (including insects) in Native American cosmologies. Frédéric translated my essay into French for inclusion in that volume (Fienup-Riordan 2017), but the English version has never been published. I owe special thanks to Frédéric for both invitations. Not only did his encouragement inspire me to reexamine what elders had taught me about both ravens and insects, but his planned Inuit Bestiary was the spark that set in motion my own thoughts about a comparable (but much more circumscribed) Yup’ik Bestiary—which is the book you now hold in your hands.

The chapter King Salmon on the Lower Yukon River: Past and Present was written as part of a collaborative project initiated and led by Catherine Moncrieff of the Yukon River Drainage Fisheries Association. Catherine received support from the National Science Foundation, Division of Arctic Social Science, to hold a CEC-style gathering on king salmon, which Mark John, Alice Rearden, and I helped her to organize and carry out. Following the gathering, I worked with Rebecca Nayamin’s translations to write this essay on king salmon. Catherine then reviewed what I had written, not only providing insightful comments, but overseeing its publication in booklet form for use both by agencies and schools throughout Alaska. This collaboration with Catherine taught CEC staff and me a great deal about king salmon; it also showed us the innumerable benefits of working together. We are in Catherine’s debt.

I wrote the final essay for inclusion in an edited volume entitled A Practice of Anthropology: The Thought and Influence of Marshall Sahlins (Golub, Rosenblatt, and Kelly 2016) in honor of my friend and mentor. While Yup’ik elders have been my teachers in southwest Alaska, Marshall Sahlins was my first teacher, before I came to Alaska. When in need of inspiration, I still go back to his work. Thanks to Alex Golub for including me in this book project, and to the Nunakauyak Traditional Council for permission to attend their 2006 town hall meeting, and to share what I learned.

Along with Frédéric, Catherine, and Alex, thanks to Aron Crowell, Sean Farley, Rose Kairaiuak, Larry Kaplan, Frank Keim, Igor Krupnik, June McAtee, Liliana Naves, Mike McKinnon, Richard Nelson, Alida Trainor, Thomas Thornton, and several anonymous reviewers for their thoughtful comments on earlier drafts of particular essays. Illustrations for this book also come from a number of sources. We thank Hajo Eicken; Gwen Emel; Candace Heckman; the Alaska Department of Fish and Game; the Ethnologisches Museum Berlin in Berlin, Germany; the Jesuit Archives and Research Center in St. Louis, Missouri; Mark John; June McAtee; Catherine Moncrieff; Ottawa University, Ottawa, Kansas; Warren Petersen, Peterson Family Collection; Nick Riordan; the Smithsonian Institution’s Department of Anthropology; and the US Fish and Wildlife Service for sharing photographs to enrich the book. We also thank Patrick Jankanish, Michael Knapp, Sustain North, and Ian Moore for preparing the excellent maps that accompany the text—vital tools helping readers place what elders have to say.

The orthography used consistently throughout this book is the standard one developed between 1967 and 1972 at the University of Alaska Fairbanks and detailed in works published by the Alaska Native Language Center and others (Reed et al. 1977; Miyaoka and Mather 1979; Jacobson 1995). Word lists following particular chapters as well as the book’s glossary build on the work of Steven Jacobson, published in the Yup’ik Eskimo Dictionary (Jacobson 2012). Without their groundbreaking work on the Yup’ik language, the detailed transcriptions and translations on which this book is based would have been impossible.

For overseeing the publication of this book, we are indebted to the fine staff of the University of Alaska Press, including Nate Bauer, Krista West, Elizabeth Laska, Laura Walker, Dawn Montano, and Amy Simpson, as well as freelance editor Dana Henricks, and designer Paula Elmes. Books aren’t made by authors but by teamwork, and it has been my privilege and pleasure to work with a great team.

Yup’ik Tradition Bearers

Name Residence | Birthplace | Birth Year

Image: Figure 0.1. The Yukon-Kuskokwim delta region of Alaska, 2019. PATRICK JANKANISH

Figure 0.1. The Yukon-Kuskokwim delta region of Alaska, 2019. PATRICK JANKANISH

Introduction

Yup’ik people have made their homes in the delta lowland of southwest Alaska for thousands of years. They have done so in large part because from the time people first settled on the headlands of the Bering Sea coast, they found that both the land and sea were rich in animals. Although the subarctic tundra environment may appear cold and unforgiving to the first-time visitor, in fact it is among the richest habitats in the Far North, supporting a correspondingly large and diverse human population.

Seals, walrus, and beluga whales all feed in the shallow, nutrient-rich waters of the Bering Sea shelf, and men hunt them both from shore-fast ice and in open water. Saltwater fish are also abundant, including halibut, flounder, Pacific cod, and herring. Tomcod swim close to shore, and men and women hook tons of fish through holes in the sea ice. People also vary their diet by harvesting mussels, clams, and rockweed during low tide. The network of lakes, rivers, and streams that cover close to half the region’s surface with water supports freshwater fish of every size—from tiny needlefish to gigantic northern pike, and everything in between, including blackfish, burbot, sucker fish, lampreys, six species of whitefish, and five species of salmon. This same watery surface provides ideal breeding habitat for more than a million ducks and half a million geese annually. More than sixty varieties of edible greens and berries also flourish all across the delta, providing food for both humans and animals.

The same small fish that people harvest in abundance—particularly blackfish—are also hunted by smaller furbearers, including mink and river otter. In the past, muskrats made homes in every lake and pond, feeding on water plants like poison water hemlock and pond lilies. Arctic foxes roam the coast where they grow fat on eggs, baby birds, and voles. Farther inland, red foxes can also be found hunting for tundra hares along riverbanks and meadows. Moose and beaver have always been plentiful upriver, feeding on young willow shoots, pond greens, and spruce tips. During the last twenty years, as the climate has warmed and shrub growth expanded toward the coast, the populations of both beaver and moose have also exploded, moving west following the new growth. The moose are a welcome source of meat, while beavers are troublesome engineers whose dams block headwater lakes and reroute favorite fishing streams.

The lowland delta of the Yukon and Kuskokwim Rivers is bordered by the Kilbuck and Kuskokwim Mountains to the south and the Nulato Hills to the north. Caribou migrate through this high country, some herds moving north to south and others east to west. The mountains provide ideal habitat for ground squirrels and marmots. Larger furbearers are found in the wooded country away from the coast, including wolverine, martin, lynx, wolves, and black and brown bears.

The presence of particular plants and animals varies throughout southwest Alaska, depending on factors such as terrain, soil composition, annual snowfall and weather conditions generally, and distance from the Bering Sea coast. These variations, in turn, serve to define different regions, each dependent on a unique resource base. Coastal hunters, for example, have ready access to sea mammals, shorebirds, and saltwater fish—especially herring—while upriver hunters can more easily trap the larger furbearers and hunt for moose and bear. In the tundra region between Bethel and the coast, people rely heavily on four species of whitefish, which migrate in and out of the large headwater lakes of the Johnson River drainage. To this day all of their settlements are located at places along rivers suitable for building fish fences (weirs) that—in the past—enabled them to harvest the annual downstream fall migrations of whitefish.

These differences should not be surprising, as the Yukon-Kuskokwim delta is an enormous region. The traditional homeland of Yup’ik people, its size can be compared to Kansas or New York State. At present the region’s population of over 24,000 (the largest Native population in Alaska) lives scattered in fifty-six villages and the regional center of Bethel, where approximately 5,600 people make their homes. Today this huge region is crosscut by historical and administrative differences, including three dialect groups, three major Christian denominations, six school districts, two census areas, and three ANCSA regional corporations.

If one defining feature of southwest Alaska is its abundance of edible animals and plants—what have come to be called subsistence resources—another is the region’s lack of commercially valuable resources. The absence of bowhead whales, sea otters, gold, and timber have meant that the region attracted a resident non-Native population relatively late compared to other parts of Alaska. The most dramatic impact following the arrival of the Russians in the 1830s was the rapid decline of the Native population due to epidemic diseases, and the first non-Natives to settle in significant numbers were neither prospectors nor whalers but Christian missionaries beginning in the 1880s (Fienup-Riordan 1991; Oswalt 1963, 1973). Schools and churches were not established in many lower coastal communities until the 1930s. The oldest men and women living in the region today were raised in small settlements residentially divided between a communal men’s house and separate sod homes for women and children, where residents spoke the Yup’ik language and engaged in traditional harvesting activities.

Among the most significant changes in the twentieth century were the abandonment of these small settlements (most ranging in size from 5 to 30 persons) beginning in the 1950s and the gathering of people into fifty-six permanent villages of between 200 and 1,200 each. While these villages may seem small by urban standards, they represent unprecedented population concentrations in the delta environment, with direct consequences for community viability—especially people’s ability to harvest animals.

Among the most striking features of life in southwest Alaska today are the uses its people continue to make of the products of the land and sea. Their lives remain inexorably bound to the seasonal cycling of fish, sea and land animals, plants, and birds. Yet as people gather closer together, animals and fish, although still abundant, are more distant. Now men often need to travel miles, either by gasoline-hungry snowmobile or skiff, to set their nets and traps. Many people still harvest from the fishing sites and hunting camps their parents used when they were young, but the cost is much higher. At a time when the market economy of southwest Alaska continues to founder, hunting and fishing activities become increasingly difficult to afford (Alaska Department of Labor 2010).

Both late contact and lack of commercial resources have meant that the Yup’ik region has retained many social patterns and a traditional knowledge base that has been lost in other parts of Alaska. The Yup’ik language is second only to Navajo in numbers of speakers (14,000) of an Indigenous language in the United States (Krauss 1980). This continued cultural and linguistic vitality has contributed to the position of Yup’ik people as among the most traditional Native American groups.

Yet the lack of commercial resources has also meant that while culturally rich, the region is—economically speaking—among the poorest in Alaska. Poverty and its attendant social problems continue to plague the region. Southwest Alaska has among the highest rates of suicide and domestic violence in the nation (Alaska Injury Prevention Center 2007; Berman 2014).¹

Residents have repeatedly assessed recent suicides as a consequence of the conditions existing at the time. They maintain that although individuals are responsible for their own actions, they cannot be expected to act appropriately if they are not in control of their land, language, and life. This assessment implies that a sector of the population has lost such a sense of control. Economic recessions past and present only make the situation worse.²

A major breakthrough in asserting pride in Yup’ik cultural history was the establishment of the Calista Elders Council (CEC) by Calista (the profit corporation for the Yukon-Kuskokwim delta) in 1991 and the placement of heritage preservation efforts in local hands. Mark John became executive director in 1997 and under his leadership, guided by a nine-member board of elders, CEC developed a program to address the rapid loss of traditional knowledge. Since 2000, these documentation efforts, supported by grants from the National Science Foundation as well as other federal and state organizations, have resulted in fourteen major publications, a museum exhibition, three websites, a school curriculum, and many papers and public presentations. As important, CEC has developed a collaborative approach allowing non-Native researchers and Yup’ik community members to work together as they learn and share knowledge in new ways.

Image: Figure 0.2. Barbara Joe and Maryann Andrews (seated, left and center) viewing photographs of Akulurak Mission during an elders’ gathering in Anchorage, April 2011, with Mark John and Alice Rearden looking on. AFR

Figure 0.2. Barbara Joe and Maryann Andrews (seated, left and center) viewing photographs of Akulurak Mission during an elders’ gathering in Anchorage, April 2011, with Mark John and Alice Rearden looking on. AFR

In 2014, the original CEC merged with the Calista Heritage Foundation (established by Calista in 1980 to fund scholarships for Calista shareholders and shareholder descendants), and the combined organizations became Calista Education and Culture (the new CEC). Today, Calista Education and Culture is the major research organization for southwest Alaska and continues to be active in recording and sharing Yup’ik traditional knowledge.

Qanruyutet

Oral Instructions

Beginning in 2015, CEC set out to fill a critical gap in the documentation of Yup’ik understandings of the world in which humans and animals are viewed as persons mutually dependent on the actions and intentions of one another, as well as to integrate and compare this new knowledge with existing documentation of relations between humans, animals, and their environment. Like so much else, human and animal relations are best explored locally in a particular landscape and through a close look at individual animals and animal groups. In fact, the Yup’ik language has no one general word for animals as opposed to and fundamentally different from humans: instead they refer to specific groups including unguvalriit (sea mammals, from unguva, life, lit., living things), nunamiutat (land animals, from nuna, land), yaqulget (birds, lit., ones with wings), ciissit (insects), neqet (translated as both fishes and food), and qunguturat (pets, domesticated animals, such as dogs and reindeer) (Jacobson 2012:503, 583, 679).³ Today people often use the English word animals for pitarkat (things to be caught, prey, from pitaq, caught thing, quarry, gift acquired at a feast), and we have done the same in the following pages.

Our project simultaneously built on partnerships with Yup’ik communities already in place and sought to build new partnerships inland and upriver, both through community meetings and traveling on the land, followed by regional topic-specific gatherings to discuss some of the most important species—moose, seals, salmon, and birds—and how relations with them have both changed in recent decades and remained the same.

The following pages share the results of this project. The essays detail the nexus of human and animal relations as articulated in traditional qanruyutet (oral instructions, from qaner-, to speak). This culminates two decades of working with elders from throughout southwest Alaska. Beginning in 2000, CEC’s efforts were devoted to documenting the qanruyutet that guided interpersonal relations. Our first books—Wise Words of the Yup’ik People: We Talk to You because We Love You (Fienup-Riordan 2005a) and its bilingual companion volume, Yupiit Qanruyutait/Yup’ik Words of Wisdom (Rearden, Meade, and Fienup-Riordan 2005)—explore the relatively small number of memorable adages people use to communicate the basic tenets of Yup’ik moral instruction. In the past, elders used formal adages and metaphors to objectify complex and essential life lessons, and today they share these same adages to educate listeners of all walks of life, especially their young people.

Much has been written about the importance of observation and practice in learning the techniques necessary to thrive in the Subarctic. Less well known is the importance placed on verbal instruction. The narrative repertoire, including detailed rules for living, was vast, and children could only master it through constant listening. In fact, among Yup’ik people, a stated ideal was that elders speak and young people listen. Elders who did not speak publicly about what they knew, but only shared it privately with their own children, were considered stingy and jealous. Conversely, children who failed to pay attention to the speaker’s mouth or left the room before the speaker was done were admonished that they would someday be found dead in the wilderness, with their teeth gleaming at the end of a snowdrift.

The building blocks of Yup’ik moral and practical education were the qanruyutet (words of wisdom, teachings, or oral instructions). Elders explained every aspect of their lives with reference to these rules for right living. Many qanruyutet are stylized sayings, often including the phrases they say or they said. In Yup’ik this attribution to an ancestral voice is denoted with the enclitic -gguq, used to report what has been said by others if the speaker cannot claim complete authority for his or her statements (Jacobson 1984:621). For example, "Ciutek-gguq iinguuk" (Ears, they say, are eyes) is shorthand for the admonition that people follow the rules lest they be talked about in other villages and known by strangers for their misdeeds.

The basic tenets of Yup’ik moral instruction comprise multiple memorable phrases, both elegant and picturesque. This was no accident, as elders wanted them spoken about and remembered from an early age by everyone. These adages include short, graphic phrases such as boys are like puppies, women are death, and a tongue hurts, even though small. All are considered qanruyutet or qaneryarat (teachings) like their lengthier counterparts. Nick Andrew (November 2000:124) of Marshall noted that elders tried to keep admonishments short: "When a person hears an inerquun [admonishment] that is not long, it sticks inside the head."⁴

Elders explained the general features of qanruyutet. Although the instructions might be stated somewhat differently from region to region and speaker to speaker, elders contend that teachings are similar for all Yup’ik people, past and present. At a Kasigluk elders conference, Joseph Tuluk (September 1998:72) of Chevak remarked: "Ever since we arrived here, I have heard our ancestors’ qanruyutet the same way. I understand all of them." Reinforcing this view of an unchanging moral code, elders stated that one could not add to the qanruyutet. This truth claim is significant, emphasizing the importance of speaking from experience, both what one has seen and heard. Theresa Moses (June 2001:13) of Toksook Bay observed: I am not lying, and this is not coming from myself but what I heard and what I used.

Traditional qanruyutet functioned as moral guideposts and were often aptly paralleled with Biblical teachings. Frank Andrew (September 2000:144) of Kwigillingok insisted: "The qanruyun that came from our ancestors is in our hearts, even though it is not written down. If we listen to it attentively, it is like the Bible. A person will not lose it while living. That is why it should not be hidden away from small children." Contemporary elders continue to view qanruyutet as truths to be recovered and an essential moral code for the properly lived life.

Our second book, Ellavut/Our Yup’ik World and Weather (Fienup-Riordan and Rearden 2012), describes the rules surrounding human interactions with their environment with chapters on the land, rivers, lakes, weather, snow, the ocean, and sea ice. Elders talked at length about these qanruyutet to teach their youth not merely the physical features of land and sea but ways in which one’s actions elicit reactions in a knowing world. Among the richest, most evocative words in the Yup’ik language, ella can be translated as weather, world, universe, or awareness, depending on context. Contemporary Yupiit may use ella to denote atmosphere, environment, and climate. Clearly the Western concept of an ecosystem as an integrated system is not new to Yup’ik people.⁵ Here it is not simply that the universe is aware but that universe and awareness are synonymous.

For the last four years, we have worked to document the qanruyutet guiding human and animal relations for the third and final volume in this series on Yup’ik oral instructions. The general contours of these reciprocal relations between humans and animals are well documented (Fienup-Riordan 1994, 1999). Many species-specific qanruyutet have also been recorded, for example, instructions on greeting sea mammals with fresh water and land animals with seal oil to promote their future return (Rearden and Fienup-Riordan 2014:170–202). Yet the specifics of many past instructions as well as present practices are not well known.

Residents express an urgent need to document the oral instructions guiding human and animal relations for two reasons. First, many Yup’ik people increasingly recognize that documentation of unique aspects of their history and oral traditions must happen in the near future or not at all. Although there will always be elders, contemporary elder experts—like John Phillip and Albertina Dull—are the last to have been educated in the qasgiq (communal men’s house) and home before the advent of organized religion and formal education. Elders were the primary teachers in the past. Venues to share their knowledge have drastically declined, and contemporary elders actively seek new arenas to share their knowledge (Fienup-Riordan 2005a).

Second, community members are deeply concerned by the unprecedented environmental changes they are witnessing. Everything—plants, animals, wind, waves, snow, ice, and weather in every season—is changing in southwest Alaska, as in other parts of the Arctic.⁶ Old indicators relied on for centuries to predict future weather conditions are no longer accurate—The weather, they say, is becoming a liar. These changes, and the general climate shifts that cause them, are transforming the interrelationships that sustain life in the Arctic.⁷ Community members, as well as the scientists CEC has collaborated with, feel strongly that elders’ perspectives on past periods of resource scarcity and unusual weather conditions, as well as on ongoing changes in the Bering Sea ecosystem, will be invaluable in preparing them for the future.

Elders and other community members are deeply concerned with maintaining their traditional knowledge base, which many feel is at the heart of their survival. CEC gatherings and our resulting publications are viewed as important steps in ensuring that Yup’ik cultural perspectives are not only broadly shared but preserved for future generations. If we really want to understand Yup’ik community vulnerability and sustainability today, it is not sufficient to say that changes are taking place, even rapid change. We need to understand how community members interpret these changes—not just what is occurring but why people believe it to be so, not just what social and economic circumstances are in flux, but how these situations are perceived. Local knowledge taken out of context cannot provide such an understanding. Long-term collaborations with communities, combining insights and observations, can help us move in that direction.

How These Essays Were Written

The essays that fill this book came about in three ways and, to highlight these differences, have been divided into three parts. As noted in the acknowledgments, the first three essays were solicited as conference presentations, where I was invited to share a Yup’ik perspective on particular animals with a largely non-Yup’ik audience. To do so, I drew on CEC’s current work with elders. I also reached back in time and drew from work I had carried out years earlier. In writing these essays, I was thinking on the page, using the written word to organize and better understand what I had learned.⁸ For example, in the essay on insects, I not only consulted field notes and transcripts but used the indexes in my own books to locate references to bees, worms, spiders, and flies buried in thirty years of book making. As is often the case, I was amazed by what elders had shared. They had taught me a great deal about insects, without me asking a single question.

The first essay, "Uqlautekevkenaku/They Didn’t Make a Mess of It," explores an essential qanruyun (oral instruction) pertaining to the treatment of animals. Just as qanruyutet guide relations among humans and between humans and animals, they guide human relations with the world around them. Animal-human-environmental relations form a critical nexus all across the Arctic and are increasingly the focus of inquiry.⁹ These relations remain especially significant in southwest Alaska where subsistence hunting and fishing are everyday activities during which animals are not viewed as resources but as co-inhabitants of a sentient world and as nonhuman persons who, like the environment, are responsive to human thought, word, and deed. Hunters are advised that if they are overconfident they will not catch. Conversely, what one gives away, will be replaced. Compassionate human behavior results in the powerful minds of elders wishing for one’s future success. These values are still very much in evidence in the region today.

Andy Kinzy (February 1993:15–20) of St. Mary’s gave an example of how compassionate human relations impacted his relations with animals. Once, while traveling, he was weathered over in the village of Qissunaq. While there he shared his provisions of tea with an old man who visited him daily. Just before he left for home, the man asked him for three bullets, as he had none. Andy gave him a box full, and with tears in his eyes the poor man said, It’s okay. When you go it will be replaced. Indeed, as he traveled north in cloudy weather, Andy killed a white fox sitting beside the trail: later he found seven mink inside his fish trap: Then all during spring an animal would be available for me to catch every time I went out hunting. And all the animals I saw were always accessible and ready to be caught. Perhaps the old man’s mind was very strong at that time when he said that [the box of shells] would be replaced with something else.¹⁰

Modernity has brought enormous changes to southwest Alaska, including organized religion, formal education (usually in English), population growth, and concentration in rural communities with limited economic opportunities. Yet the Yup’ik understanding of animals as ethical beings remains. Speaking during an elders’ gathering at Quinhagak, John Fox (August 2014:296) observed: Some want to become Westernized, but these small animals, since they haven’t become Western, they are aware of things. When someone who should be following abstinence practices is in the wilderness, these fish and animals will know about that person for sure.

The second essay, How Raven Marked the Land When the Earth Was New, is another good example of how elders can teach and younger people—even kass’at (white people)—can learn. Over the years I had heard many stories about Raven the Creator and Raven the mischief maker. Then during summer 2016 I had two experiences traveling out on the land. In late May, while boating down the Yukon River with Father Max Isaac between Russian Mission and his home in Marshall, Father Max pointed out a rocky outcrop on river right where Raven had lived and a hole in a cliff face where Raven had buried his daughter. Two months later I traveled from Chevak down the Qissunaq River to Nunaurluq (the old village of Qissunaq) and, for the first time, heard the story of how Raven had used his paddle to create the smaller rivers and sloughs in that flat, coastal landscape. Both experiences inspired me to come home and pull together all I had been taught about Raven and his exploits.

In southwest Alaska, as elsewhere, Raven is paradoxically both a lazy ne’er-do-well and the Creator of light and life. Raven in southwest Alaska is also known as the creator of many landforms, including mountains, rivers, and islands. Although Raven stories are told throughout the eastern Arctic as well as interior Alaska, specific places are rarely named in these tales. In contrast, Yup’ik narrators continue to point to particular places, all across southwest Alaska, where Raven left his mark on the land, while recalling his activities in the distant past.

The third essay, "Ciissit: Insects in Yup’ik Oral Tradition," describes the significant role these small creatures play in southwest Alaska. While considered undesirable pests in some contexts, these tiny beings both possess and can bestow great power. Some were said to have been in existence from the beginning, while Raven created others when the world was new. No animal is more strongly associated with healing than the caterpillar, and none so directly tied to the consumption and destruction of the body—whether animal or human—-than the maggot or worm. All insects possess minds, and like other animals their treatment of people depends on how people treat them. To this day, both furry and hairless caterpillars may present themselves to those they consider pure, and then bestow the power to heal on people wise enough to overcome their apparently creepy presence and welcome them.

The fourth essay on the power of bodily fluids was inspired by work Marie Meade and I did together documenting whitefish in the Akulmiut region (Fienup-Riordan, Meade, and Rearden 2019). Helping cut and clean fish during summer 2016, women repeatedly pointed out the dangers of fish slime and slime generally, surprising both Marie and me with their detailed instructions. These conversations left me with questions about human and animal bodily fluids generally, and I wrote the essay Urine, Blood, Saliva, and Slime to address this topic.

Over the years, elders have described the uses of bodily fluids in considerable detail. Some have practical applications because of their chemical composition, such as ammonia-rich aged urine used to degrease skins. Some applications—such as covering a child with human saliva at birth, or rubbing a young hunter with bear saliva after a successful hunt—employed bodily fluids as protective covers to create boundaries between those in a vulnerable state and the dangers they would face in their futures. Here urine and saliva had primarily positive associations, while a woman’s menstrual blood and fish slime were viewed as dangerous substances to be avoided in most contexts. The rigorous separation of men and women before marriage was expressed in terms of the dangerous consequences of contact with a woman’s bodily fluids. While this separation of men and women is a thing of the past, and urine is no longer the cleansing agent of choice, other admonitions surrounding the use of bodily fluids—including the avoidance of slime—are still observed. What elders shared not only helps us understand this rich and complex history but gives us insight into attitudes and actions that continue to inform Yup’ik lives.

The fifth essay is a brief account of the annual harvest of nemeryat (lampreys), known locally as eels, along the Yukon River. Like the essay on Raven, it was inspired by travel on the land and by hearing elders speak with anticipation about the impending arrival of nemeryat. These small, oily fish run upriver each fall, and great care is taken not to startle them. Though they travel in large groups, nemeryat are sensitive and can quickly disappear if not treated with respect. People who have recently experienced death in the family or girls who have just menstruated for the first time can cause them to dive deep and pass by. Moreover, nemeryat are said to know a person’s situation and will avoid those with misfortune in their future. If a person boldly speaks of harvesting eels, nemeryat will know and avoid him. Yet a person can talk to nemeryat, and they may answer using a northern accent. Like insects, their small size belies the large place they hold in Yukon oral tradition.

Part 2 includes four chapters telling stories about specific animal groups—king salmon, big animals (moose and bear), sea mammals, and birds. Each essay was written following a single three-day, topic-specific gathering, including elders from different villages as well as different regional