Ellavut / Our Yup’ik World and Weather: Continuity and Change on the Bering Sea Coast by Anne Fienup-Riordan and Alice Rearden (review)

Yup’ik Elder John Eric observes that “the ocean cannot be learned,” one of many poignant reflections recalled and shared by Yup’ik Elders in this work (9). Ellavut—which translates in the Yup’ik language as “our world and its weather”—is an innovative and deeply engaging work that documents and explores Yup’ik oral narratives related to the environment, land, and cosmology. It reveals that Yup’ik Elders’ central concern is that young people “lack knowledge of ‘Ella’—translated variously as ‘weather,’ ‘world,’ or ‘universe’—which many continue to view as responsive to human thought and deed” (8).

This book is the ninth publication of oral narratives guided by the Calista Elders Council (CEC), the primary heritage organization in Southern Alaska representing the region’s 1300 Elders. Based primarily on Yup’ik oral narratives documented by Anne Fienup-Riordan and translator Alice Reardan in 2008, this work is stunning in its presentation and synthesis of Yup’ik perspectives on the land and how these narratives simultaneously inform and shape a Yup’ik ethos. The work provides readers with a comprehensive understanding of both the substantive cultural knowledge within Yup’ik oral narratives, which Yup’ik label oral histories, as well as the diverse cultural forms of their communication. Indigenous scholar Donald Fixico distinguishes Indigenous oral history as the content of the event told orally, while oral tradition describes the communicative process or vehicle for transmitting this same reality of past to present. He adds that the oral tradition of Native groups can exist in various forms, including “oratory, myths, legends, songs, parables and prophecy” (The Indian Mind in a Linear World [New York: Routledge, 2003], 32). As such, the content and form of spoken narratives are inextricably linked and subject to local cultural protocols for their transmission. Part of what makes Ellavut so unique and meaningful is that it equally emphasizes and presents both the content and the tradition that reflects cultural protocols and practices for its transmission. Beyond that, Rearden and Finnep-Riordan make evident their methods in which they, as scholars, undertake to work collaboratively with Elders to record Yup’ik oral histories. For example, they view CEC gatherings as “not merely tools for documentation but as contexts for cultural transmission” (5). The rugged landscape of southern Alaska and the Bering Sea comes alive to readers in the narratives themselves, supplemented by numerous depictions of Elders interacting with the landscape, including luscious color photographs with an ethereal quality.

Ellavut adds depth and breadth to the previous books published by the CEC chronicling aspects of Yup’ik oral history. A work of critically engaged scholarship that explores cultural definitions of how geographic places constitute social and cultural spaces, it also extends the current historiography of oral history research methods, cultural ecology, and ethnography. In this way, Ellavut is evocative of the seminal work of cultural linguist and ethnographer Keith Basso in Wisdom Sits in Places: Landscape and Language among the Western Apache (Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 1996). In Basso’s work, spanning twenty-five years with the White Mountain Apache, he posed a central question: What does place mean to the Apache? Similarly, Anne Fienup-Riordan and Alice Rearden frame the oral narratives in Ellavut to reflect the diverse forms of Yup’ik cultural knowledge and core principles of the relationship between man and the environment. Various types of oral narratives, such as Qanruyutait (wise words or instructions), inerquutet (prohibitions), and alerquutet (laws), are recorded with the intention of assisting community members to live a good life. As Yup’ik Elder Frank Andrew describes, “These instructions are especially important for our younger generation. A child who is not given instructions cannot grow healthy. A plant cannot grow if not watered. That is what people are like” (7).

Historiographically, this work has a meditative...