Faith, Food, and Family in a Yupik Whaling Community

10. Conclusion: The Land, the People, the Future

310 chapter 10 Conclusion: The Land, the People, the Future A t the end of 1879, St. Lawrence Island was devastated. Its settlements were filled with dead bodies. The strangers whose seductive goods had led islanders to engage in foreign trade had brought diseases whose consequences were awesome. The island, inhabited for centuries , had been reduced to a few remaining families. It is now more than one hundred years since that time, and still there are fewer island residents than before that terrible year. While it might be tempting to dismiss faith, food, and family as obvious functional constructs or as sentimental concepts , these have been the driving forces in the rebuilding of the St. Lawrence Island community. It is not simply that residents who once lived scattered along the shore line in extended family home sites now thrive in two villages made up of those who regrouped in order to survive. It has something to do with the land itself. In spite of the hardship and the tragedy, apparently no one thought to leave. They stayed and they reestablished themselves. Land holds the stories that exemplify families. On St. Lawrence Island, each settlement is marked by a name that binds that place to families living in Gambell. These are places of the living and of the ancestors. A person ’s family history can be uncovered by learning the place names, the locations where that person and his ancestors have lived. A few places are no longer used much. For example, at Kukulek, unseen forces—perhaps spiritual, perhaps associated with disease—may still hover among the ruins, but only archaeologists and those interested in ivory or artifacts spend any time here. Northeast Cape, once the camp site of the Kulowiyi family and the Kulukhons, is now polluted, the result of misuse by a U.S. Army encampment, and unsafe to occupy. Such historical sites have much to tell but are hardly visited. At each site, the names of rocks, creeks, tent sites long abandoned, underground food caches, and sliding spots for children flavor the land and personalize each settlement, distinguishing its lived history from that of others. The landscape is filled with such names. Many were recorded by community historians in the 1980s (Walunga 1987). That effort revealed more than 348 names along the shore and another 147 in the interior. But the land is more than that. Several family groups draw names from the settlements , which have been used historically by their ancestors. The names of family members create a living link to the land. It is difficult to know how far back this practice of naming people for the land extends. Perhaps it is as recent as the end of the 1878 epidemic. Some names that people carry are referred to as “old” names, names whose literal meaning, but not their cultural or historical significance, is clouded or lost. Other names, while associated with the immediate past and with certain families, do not identify a person with the landscape, even though this kind of name, too, has cycled through the community for many generations. There are also new names, given sometimes to visitors and friends, sometimes to children born to islanders who have moved away. These names often have metaphoric qualities or give enhanced meaning to a person’s position in the family. Most people have more than one name, although just one is commonly used in everyday conversation. Commonly used names or the nicknames derived from them are usually recorded as “middle” names, although , as Iyaaka and Kepelgu have pointed out, it would be more accurate to say that islanders have several first names. My own name, that of an outsider, is one example. In 1987, toward the end of my first visit to Gambell, my hosts, Rhea, Marina, and Isaac, decided to give me a Yupik name. Choosing a name became the topic of conversation for the next several afternoons. These conversations were invariably in Yupik, which I was only just beginning to understand. Selecting a name seemed to involve settling on a single word whose content could be meaningfully associated with the person. The family took into consideration when I had come to visit, why I had come to visit, seasonal events that had coincided with my visit, and my own personality as they Conclusion: The Land, the People, the Future 311 Conclusion: The Land, the People, the Future 312 perceived it. Other...