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    Native Cultures in Alaska: Looking Forward, Looking Back
    Native Cultures in Alaska: Looking Forward, Looking Back
    Native Cultures in Alaska: Looking Forward, Looking Back
    Ebook285 pages2 hours

    Native Cultures in Alaska: Looking Forward, Looking Back

    By Alaska Geographic Association

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    About this ebook

    In the minds of most Americans, Native culture in Alaska amounts to Eskimos and igloos....The latest publication of the Alaska Geographic Society offers an accessible and attractive antidote to such misconceptions. Native Cultures in Alaska blends beautiful photographs with informative text to create a striking portrait of the state's diverse and dynamic indigenous population.
    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherAlaska Northwest Books
    Release dateNov 15, 2012
    ISBN9780882409023
    Native Cultures in Alaska: Looking Forward, Looking Back
    Author

    Alaska Geographic Association

    Alaska Geographic is a nonprofit publisher, educator, and supporter of Alaska's parks, forests, and refuges. A portion of every purchase at Alaska Geographic bookstores directly supports educational and interpretive programs at Alaska's public lands.

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      Native Cultures in Alaska - Alaska Geographic Association

      Looking Forward, Looking Back

      In the evenings after work in Sitka, a Tlingit woman heads for the beach to collect gumboots, or chitons, for her elderly aunt. In Barrow, an Iñupiaq broadcaster spends one afternoon a week at the radio station recording programs in her Native language. On Unalaska Island, a Unangaˆx (Aleut) Elder teaches others the art of making bentwood hunting visors. In the Athabascan village of Huslia, a woman speaks her ancestral language, Koyukon, in retelling stories she heard from her grandfather long ago. At Ted Stevens International Airport in Anchorage, a Yup’ik woman arrives from Bethel and greets her grown son, who can’t wait for Mom to make his favorite dessert: agutak, also known as Eskimo ice cream, made with whipped fat and berries. Like 24,000 other Natives living in Anchorage (nearly 8 percent of Alaska’s biggest village is Native), he feels good when he eats good traditional food.

      Subsistence fisherman and brothers Moses (left) and Larry Dirks use more modern methods than their ancestors. (Roy Corral)

      In Alaska’s farthest reaches and in its larges cities, people are carrying on their Native ways. They do so in thousands of variations of the old and new.

      They hunt, fish, and gather food to eat, connecting with the land as well as for nutritional and economic necessity. Those who do share with those who can’t. Even many with cash wage jobs find time to participate in this lifeline. Schools in many villages start early in fall so they can let out early in spring, when families go fishing.

      Subsistence is truly a way of life, from one season to the next, said Teri Rofkar, a Tlingit woman from Sitka. It’s not something you do separately. It’s a part of you. A kind of important part for me.

      Rofkar is an expert weaver, known for her basketry and robes. Likewise, many other Alaska Natives carve and weave, making tools, clothing, and artworks in the fashion of those before them. They congregate for feasts to honor the dead and celebrate the living, using ancient words held in the memory for those occasions. They sing old songs and write new ones. Sometimes their drums are still covered the old way with animal gut or skins, but today the heads are as likely to be made of nylon. In a pinch during a visit to Anchorage, a Yup’ik drummer accompanied himself on a plastic Frisbee with an old wooden kitchen spoon, for an impromptu session teaching dance and song to a friend’s child.

      An Iñupiaq woman from Nuiqsut fishes in the frozen Colville River. (Thomas Sbampato/ AlaskaStock.com)

      Foreign fur traders spread into the interior during the 1800s, bringing with them their special brand of music, which was adapted by the local people. Athabascan fiddlers went on to develop their own blend of music, and today Old-Time Fiddling Festivals are a seasonal attraction for musicians and dancers alike. A few Athabascan fiddlers have even recorded their own CDs. (Matt Hage/ AlaskaStock.com)

      Alaska Natives are not relics stuck in a time warp of the past. Their cultures are more than shards of pottery or shreds of basketry in museum cases. Alaska Native cultures are alive today in ways expected and unexpected. There are some common themes between culture groups, yet innumerable twists in the way circumstances and cultures combine. But as they have been throughout time, Alaska Natives are innovators, adapting old traditions and creating new ones, linking past with present in a continuum of their cultures. They are today’s version of Alaska’s original people.

      The Beginnings

      Alaska’s original people occupied the Northland many thousands of years ago. Some Native stories recall the distant past, when people and animals shared the same language and could transform into one another. In Yup’ik cosmology, beings moved between realms during a time when the earth was thin.

      Honored Haida leaders gather for a portrait in this historic image from Old Kasaan. (ASL-Kasaan-07 Old Kasaan Potlatch, Alaska State Library, Historical Collections.)

      In more recent times, Alaska’s people traveled across the land, along the coasts, and up the rivers. Stone tools found in some early campsites are believed to be 10,000 to 11,000 years old.

      Archaeologists believe that North America’s first people filtered from the landmass known today as Asia. They traveled in small bands at different times, as they hunted large mammals across the continent-sized land bridge connecting Siberia and Alaska. Ancient sites from this era have been found on the North Slope, in the Interior, in the Aleutian Islands, and in Southeast. The tools found in these places vary, indicating the existence of different cultures at similar times. Perhaps some of the early people boated along the coastlines. Archaeologists offer various scenarios about how these ancient people dispersed throughout Alaska and their relationships to each other and later arrivals.

      Language Affinities

      The early people included groups broadly defined as Paleoindian, Na-Dene, and Eskaleut by linguists looking at language links and archaeologists looking at tool traditions. A simplistic portrait of their connections to today’s Native cultures goes something like this: Paleoindians, who were some of the earliest people, filtered through Alaska in a southerly migration to the lower continent. Later came the Na-Dene Indians, who were ancestors to Alaska’s Athabascan, Eyak, and Tlingit people. The Eskaleut slowly filtered in along the coastlines even later, and in their movements developed into Alaska’s Unangaˆx (Aleut) culture and the Iñupiat, Yup’ik, and Siberian Yupik, as well as, say linguists, the Sugpiaq (Alutiiq). Ancient links to the Haida and Tsimshian Indians are more obscure.

      In 2005, Alaska’s population of Natives was about 106,000, roughly 16 percent of the statewide population, the highest percentage of Native Americans in any state. However, in 1930, slightly more than half the population was Native. The numbers declined for various reasons, from the devastating effects of tuberculosis on the Native population, to surges in non-Native settlement during and after World War II and the years surrounding the construction of the trans-Alaska

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