The Iñupiat people of the High Arctic live half the year or more under dark and frigid conditions, yet have evolved a hunting and whaling culture suited to their daunting environment. The Yup’ik Eskimos live in a less severe, subarctic setting, rich in sea mammals, salmon, waterfowl, and herds of inland caribou.
The early Eskimos’ weapons and hunting kit, fashioned from bone, ivory, and driftwood and engraved with magic images, reflected their belief that animals wish to be killed by beautiful tools. Despite the stark appearance of their world—the treeless landscape and icy waters—resources were plentiful to the practiced eye. Roaming inland—also home to Athabascan Indians with whom they traded and often warred—they took caribou, bear, and other land animals. In the Yukon-Kuskokwim Delta, the Yup’ik established many inland settlements.
Men fished, hunted waterfowl, and harpooned seals from slender kayaks. Wider beamed umiaks—open-hulled vessels covered in walrus hide—carried hunting parties in pursuit of whales and ivory-tusked walrus. An Eskimo specialty, especially among the Iñupiat, whale hunting required high levels of community planning and sharing. Membership in a whaling crew brought special honor and, following a successful hunt, the meat was divided among all members of the community.
Winter’s enforced leisure produced a rich ceremonial life, centered in the qasgiq (men’s house), an earthen and driftwood bath-house and hunter’s lodge that doubled as a meeting place for community rituals. In the Eskimo world, humans, animals, and even stones have an inner soul, or inua, with the power to transform into other life forms. A man might become a seal, or a walrus a man. A dead creature’s spirit remained alive in the bladder, carefully preserved by the hunter until—in the bladder festival—it was returned to the sea to be reborn in another animal.
Whalers invaded west Alaskan waters in the 1840s; traders brought firearms, liquor, illness, and the cash economy; and gold was found at Nome in 1898. By the turn of the century, each sizable settlement included a modern school and white schoolmaster. Today, the old ways survive, but the modern hunter prefers the snowmobile and outboard engine to the sled or kayak. Yet the spirit world remains a powerful force for traditional Eskimos, and endures in their graceful bone and ivory carvings, wooden masks, and other Native arts.
ALASKA’S ATHABASCAN PEOPLE
Athabascan man of Fort Yukon. Photo by E.W. Nelson, about 1877.
Alaska’s Athabascan Natives, scattered mainly across the Interior, occupy a vast homeland that also extends south to Cook Inlet’s shores, part of the Kenai Peninsula, and eastward to the Copper River basin and Canada. Bows and arrows for hunting, snowshoes, fringed and beaded moose and caribou hide clothing, and canoes and utensils made of birch bark were hallmarks of their traditional culture. Athabascans are divided into various regional groups—the Tanaina of Cook Inlet, the Tanana and Koyukon of the central Interior, and the Ahtna of the Copper River country, for instance. (The Eyak, a small group related to Athabascans but influenced by Tlingit culture, live in the Copper River delta.) Their diverse languages, part of the same broad Na-Dene speech group, belong to the same language family as the Southwest’s Navajo and Apache. Mainly nomadic, Athabascan hunters and trappers followed moose, caribou, and other mammals of the taiga steppe, muskeg flats, and conifer and birch forests lying north of the coastal mountains. Along major rivers and tributaries, they lived a seminomadic life, setting up summer fish camps to harvest the rich salmon runs swimming upriver from the sea.
Spartan survivalists habituated to Alaska’s severe Interior winters, Athabascan peoples were known for exceptional strength, resourcefulness, and stamina. They traveled light in small groups, on a moment’s notice, following the migration paths of their game. Their caches, elevated log boxes to store food and gear, are icons of wild Alaska. In summer they lived in easily collapsible bark houses, and in winter built semi-underground dwellings or used domed lodges of moose or caribou hide. Caribou were as important to Alaska’s Athabascans as bison were to southern Plains Indians, and their hunting methods were highly efficient. In autumn, herds were driven into staked barriers equipped with snares, or funneled into corrals where 20 hunters could kill hundreds of animals—several months’ supply of food, skins, horn, and bones.
When Russian agents established an Interior fur trade in southwest Alaska in the 1820s and 1830s, many Athabascans of the region became contract trappers employed by the Russian-American Company. It was an entrepreneurial way of life for which their traditions of mobility and solitary hardiness prepared them well.
In the enforced leisure of winter, they held potlatches—ceremonial feasts to mark important events such as deaths, births, and marriages.
For Athabascans, as for other Alaska Natives, all creation was a spirit realm in which the human and non-human were one. Elaborate rituals and taboos governed the use of nature’s resources. There was a formalized reverence for the earth and its life forms. Nature in the Interior was less generous than along the coast; resources were scarce, starvation was possible in lean years, and the spirit of every animal killed demanded its due of gratitude and honor. Tradition required, for instance, that each animal be ritually fed after being killed. Despite Russian Orthodox, Protestant, and Catholic missionary activity, ancient beliefs survive even today among many villagers. “They believe everything has spirits,” writes a contemporary Eskimo neighbor. “The land, the leaves, water, everything… [Their] view is that this is a watchful world, and the world knows human action. So you have to be really careful what you do, or else there will be consequences.”
PEOPLE OF THE RAIN FOREST: TLINGIT, HAIDA, AND TSIMSHIAN
Cape Fox village near Wrangell. Photo by Edward Curtis, 1899.
The gray-green islands, misty fjords, and spruce and cedar rainforests of Alaska’s Southeast are home to three Indian groups: the Tlingit, Haida, and Tsimshian. At the time of Russian contact (and today), the Tlingit were most numerous of these Native people, their villages and fishing camps strewn among the islands and along the narrow shore from Yakutat Bay south to today’s Prince of Wales Island. The Haida, renowned builders of seagoing dugout canoes, were clustered on the (now Canadian) Queen Charlotte Islands—today called Haida Gwaii—and the south end of Prince of Wales Island. The Tsimshian were last to arrive in Alaska. Seeking better living conditions, 823 Tsimshian moved from British Columbia to Alaska’s Annette Island near Ketchikan in 1887, led by Anglican lay minister William Duncan. Today about 1,000 Alaska Tsimshian live there in the village of Metlakatla, which is Alaska’s only Indian reservation.
Alaska’s linguistically and ethnically distinct but culturally similar Southeast Indian peoples lived in an area blessed with a mild, maritime climate and plentiful food. The abundant salmon made possible a life of relative wealth and leisure. They evolved elaborate rituals and kinship systems, and the arts flourished, creating the most complex Native American cultures and societies north of Mexico’s Mayan and Aztec civilizations. This sophistication was amply reflected in their richly carved cedar artifacts, such as ceremonial masks, house posts, colorful totem poles, and canoes, and their striking woven hats, baskets, and the celebrated blankets of the Chilkat Tlingit.
A defining tradition of the Southeast peoples was the potlatch, an elaborate ceremonial feast involving dancing, storytelling, and gift-giving by the hosts. Potlatches were held to celebrate major life events and to validate the social status of the hosts. Occasionally slaves, commercially valuable commodities, were sacrificed or set free as ultimate proof of the host’s wealth, or highly valued “coppers”—shield-like sheets of pounded copper—might be broken or destroyed.
Outsiders considered the potlatch, like masks and totems, evidence of heathenism—something to be eradicated. In fact, the potlatch tradition embodied an important logic, for it reinforced the vital fabric of social roles and authority patterns that held Southeast Coast