Narrative Technology and Eskimo History

The Inupiaq Eskimo Nations of Northwest Alaska. By Ernest S. Burch Jr. (Fairbanks: University of Alaska Press, 1998. xviii + 473 pp., preface, introduction, figures, illustrations, appendixes, bibliography, index. $49.95 cloth, $31.95 paper.)

The Eskimo Storyteller: Folktales from Noatak, Alaska. By Edwin S. Hall Jr. Drawings by Claire Fejes. (Fairbanks: University of Alaska Press, 1999 [1975 edition, University of Tennessee Press]. xi + 491 pp., preface, maps, tables, bibliography, index. $24.95 paper.)

Across Arctic America: Narrative of the Fifth Thule Expedition. By Knud Rasmussen. Introduction by Terrence Cole. (Fairbanks: University of Alaska Press, 1999. [1927 edition, G. P. Putnam’s Sons]. xl + 415 pp., introduction to 1999 edition with notes and references, introduction to 1927 edition, maps, illustrations, index. $24.95 paper.)

The University of Alaska Press is to be congratulated for its ambitious program of publishing both original works about the state’s native peoples and reprints of classics long out of print. For many years I taught a survey course on native peoples of North America. Each year I would go to the library and take out the increasingly well-worn 1927 edition of Knud Rasmussen’s Across Arctic America. The book and the people it portrays became like old friends. Each year I would tell my students, “Somebody should really reprint this wonderful book.” I thank the University of Alaska Press for bringing Rasmussen’s narrative back into circulation.

All three books reviewed in this essay reflect the work of people who have devoted their lives to Arctic research. I begin with Ernest S. Burch Jr.’s ambitious and encyclopedic reconstruction of mid-nineteenth-century Inupiaq society in its ecological and historical context, in The Inupiaq Eskimo Nations of Northwest Alaska. Burch began his systematic research into Inupiaq history in 1969. “It soon dawned on me,” he writes, “that my study was being conducted during the senior years of the last generation of Inupiat to be raised during the era when oral history was still a highly developed enterprise” (15). Although his informants had not directly experienced the social history they described, they were masters of uqaluktuat, historical chronicles about “authentic incidents” going back two or three generations. The ability to remember, tell, and organize this information is a key to what I have called the “narrative technology” of hunting and gathering peoples (Ridington 1999). Burch quickly realized that the elders constituted an invaluable resource for reconstructing Inupiaq social history. The work was substantially completed in 1986, by which time most of Burch’s informants had passed away. The present publication is Burch’s systematic presentation of the data he recorded during these years of fieldwork.

At the time Burch recorded his narratives (and to some extent even today), anthropologists divided the Inupiat into two groups, the coastal Tagiugmiut and the inland Nunamiut. By contrast, contemporary Inupiat view themselves as “one people who happened to be spread out among different villages” (8). Burch’s informants reveal that quite a different situation from either of these models existed in the nineteenth century. Burch found that their information supported the “cellular” model originally proposed by Dorothy Jean Ray. In this model the Inupiat constituted a series of distinct nations whose territories were analogous to those of European nations, in that residents of each nation were aware of and honored their respective borders, even when the ranges of their territories overlapped.

Each chapter documents the geographic, social, and ecological particulars of one of these Inupiaq nations. Burch runs through information on landscape, climate, plant and animal resources, human history and population, and annual cycles. The story often ends with the nation’s dissolution late in the nineteenth century because of famine, disease, and migration. While Burch mentions the “crash” of the western Arctic caribou herd as a cause of famine, he does not address the question of whether changes in hunting practices may have contributed to that crash. The book is best read as a definitive compendium of information on Northwest Alaskan...