Ellavut / Our Yup'ik World and Weather


Book Description

Ellavut / Our Yup'ik World and Weather is a result of nearly ten years of gatherings among Yup'ik elders to document the qanruyutet (words of wisdom) that guide their interactions with the environment. In an effort to educate their own young people as well as people outside the community, the elders discussed the practical skills necessary to live in a harsh environment, stressing the ethical and philosophical aspects of the Yup'ik relationship with the land, ocean, snow, weather, and environmental change, among many other elements of the natural world. At every gathering, at least one elder repeated the Yup'ik adage, "The world is changing following its people." The Yup'ik see environmental change as directly related not just to human actions, such as overfishing or burning fossil fuels, but also to human interactions. The elders encourage young people to learn traditional rules and proper behavior--to act with compassion and restraint--in order to reverse negative impacts on their world. They speak not only to educate young people on the practical skills they need to survive but also on the knowing and responsive nature of the world in which they live.




The Big Thaw


Book Description

Explores the unprecedented and rapid climate changes occurring in the Arctic environment. Climate change, one of the drivers of global change, is controversial in political circles, but recognized in scientific ones as being of central importance today for the United States and the world. In The Big Thaw, the editors bring together experts, advocates, and academic professionals who address the serious issue of how climate change in the Circumpolar Arctic is affecting and will continue to affect environments, cultures, societies, and economies throughout the world. The contributors discuss a variety of topics, including anthropology, sociology, human geography, community economics, regional development and planning, and political science, as well as biogeophysical sciences such as ecology, human-environmental interactions, and climatology. “This book offers a valuable compendium on a broad spectrum of issues associated with climate change, its implications, and human adaptation in the Arctic.” — Andrey N. Petrov, coauthor of Arctic Sustainability Research: Past, Present, and Future




Wise Words of the Yup'ik People


Book Description

The Yup'ik people of southwest Alaska were among the last Arctic peoples to come into contact with non‑Natives, and as a result, Yup'ik language and many traditions remain vital into the twenty‑first century. Wise Words of the Yup'ik People documents their qanruyutait (adages, words of wisdom, and oral instructions) regarding the proper living of life. Throughout history these distinctive adages have guided the relations between men and women, parents and children, siblings and cousins, fellow villagers, visitors, strangers, and non‑Natives. Yup'ik elders have chosen to share these adages during Calista Elders Council gatherings and conventions since 1998 because of their continued relevance and power to change lives. The Calista Elders Council (now Calista Education and Culture) recently spearheaded efforts at cultural revitalization through gatherings with younger community members. By describing the content of traditional instruction as well as its central motivation--"We talk to you because we love you"--elders not only educate Yup'ik young people but also open a window into their view of the world for all of us. A new introduction explores this book's impact over the past decade. Wise Words of the Yup'ik People will continue to serve as a valuable resource for the Yup'ik people and those who wish to learn more about their lives and values.




Nunakun-gguq Ciutengqertut/They Say They Have Ears Through the Ground


Book Description

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 is presented in bilingual format, with facing-page translations, and will be hailed as a milestone work in the anthropological study of contemporary Alaska.




Qaluyaarmiuni Nunamtenek Qanemciput / Our Nelson Island Stories


Book Description

In this volume Nelson Island elders describe hundreds of traditionally important places in the landscape, from camp and village sites to tiny sloughs and deep ocean channels, contextualizing them through stories of how people interacted with them in the past and continue to know them today. The stories both provide a rich, descriptive historical record and detail the ways in which land use has changed over time. Nelson Islanders maintained a strongly Yup'ik worldview and subsistence lifestyle through the 1940s, living in small settlements and moving with the seasonal cycle of plant and animal abundances. The last sixty years have brought dramatic changes, including the concentration of people into five permanent, year-round villages. The elders have mapped significant places to help perpetuate an active relationship between the land and their people, who, despite the immobility of their villages, continue to rely on the fluctuating bounty of the Bering Sea coastal environment.




Mutuality


Book Description

Why do people do social-cultural anthropology? Beyond professional career motivations, what values underpin anthropologists' commitments to lengthy training, fieldwork, writing, and publication? Mutuality explores the values that anthropologists bring from their wider social worlds, including the value placed on relationships with the people they study, work with, write about and for, and communicate with more broadly. In this volume, seventeen distinguished anthropologists draw on personal and professional histories to describe avenues to mutuality through collaborative fieldwork, community-based projects and consultations, advocacy, and museum exhibits, including the American Anthropological Association's largest public outreach ever—the RACE: Are We So Different? project. Looking critically at obstacles to reciprocally beneficial engagement, the contributors trace the discipline's past and current relations with Native Americans, indigenous peoples exhibited in early twentieth-century world's fairs, and racialized populations. The chapters range widely—across the Punjabi craft caste, Filipino Igorot, and Somali Bantu global diasporas; to the Darfur crisis and conciliation efforts in Sudan and Qatar; to applied work in Panama, Micronesia, China, and Peru. In the United States, contributors discuss their work as academic, practicing, and public anthropologists in such diverse contexts as Alaskan Yup'ik communities, multiethnic New Mexico, San Francisco's Japan Town, Oakland's Intertribal Friendship House, Southern California's produce markets, a children's ward in a Los Angeles hospital, a New England nursing home, and Washington D.C.'s National Mall. Deeply personal as well as professionally astute, Mutuality sheds new light on the issues closest to the present and future of contemporary anthropology. Contributors: Rogaia Mustafa Abusharaf, Robert R. Alvarez, Garrick Bailey, Catherine Besteman, Parminder Bhachu, Ann Fienup-Riordan, Zibin Guo, Lane Ryo Hirabayashi, Lanita Jacobs, Susan Lobo, Yolanda T. Moses, Sylvia Rodríguez, Roger Sanjek, Renée R. Shield, Alaka Wali, Deana L. Weibel, Brett Williams.




Ciulirnerunak Yuuyaqunak/Do Not Live Without an Elder


Book Description

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.




Qanemcit Amllertut/Many Stories to Tell


Book Description

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. This is the first region-wide collection of traditional Yup’ik tales and stories from Southwest Alaska. 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.




Archaeologies of Us and Them


Book Description

Archaeologies of “Us” and “Them” explores the concept of indigeneity within the field of archaeology and heritage and in particular examines the shifts in power that occur when ‘we’ define ‘the other’ by categorizing ‘them’ as indigenous. Recognizing the complex and shifting distinctions between indigenous and non-indigenous pasts and presents, this volume gives a nuanced analysis of the underlying definitions, concepts and ethics associated with this field in order to explore Indigenous archaeology as a theoretical, ethical and political concept. Indigenous archaeology is an increasingly important topic discussed worldwide, and as such critical analyses must be applied to debates which are often surrounded by political correctness and consensus views. Drawing on an international range of global case studies, this timely and sensitive collection significantly contributes to the development of archaeological critical theory.




Akulmiut Neqait /


Book Description

"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.