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  • Yuungnaqpiallerput/The Way We Genuinely Live: Masterworks of Yup’ik Science and Survival
  • Rose Speranza
Yuungnaqpiallerput/The Way We Genuinely Live: Masterworks of Yup’ik Science and Survival. Text by Anne Fienup-Riordan; translations by Alice Rearden, Marie Meade, Freda Jimmie, Veronica Kaganak, David Chanar, Sr., and Noah Andrew, Sr. Seattle and London: University of Washington Press, 2007. 360 pp. Softbound, $46.00.

Anthropologist Anne Fienup-Riordan has been engaged in community-based collaborative research with the Yup’ik people of southwest Alaska for the past twenty-five years. She and Yup’ik elders have examined Yup’ik social, environmental, cultural, and religious relationships. Her books have been awarded a number of prizes over the years, and Yuungnaqpiallerput won honorary mention for the 2008 William Mills Prize for Non-Fiction Books.

Yuungnaqpiallerput focuses on the material culture of the Yup’ik Eskimo-speaking people of Southwest Alaska—tools, household equipment, hunting gear, and other technological implements. It gives a sense of their complexity and how they contribute to a sense of “Yup’ik-ness,” an identity and way of life many fear is in danger of disappearing. “We are losing our way of life, and like our elder here said, we need to help young people and others to better understand what they’ve lost. If the things that our ancestors used are shown, they will think, ‘So this is what our ancestors did, and I can do what my ancestors did.’ It’s like holding more tightly to the things that we Yup’ik people have lost” (Paul John 5). The loss of cultural knowledge and pride has real consequences, including suicide, alcohol abuse, poverty, and domestic violence. People are [End Page 318] looking to the elders for help, feeling that they can help shape lives as well as transfer skills and knowledge. From past projects, elders were familiar with Yup’ik objects in the museum. Gradually the idea developed to “visually repatriate” the objects—to show and explain traditional technology to contemporary young people (6).

Fienup-Riordan demonstrates that there is no way to separate Yup’ik technology, that is, science, from Yup’ik spirituality: “Long ago, our beliefs and our way of life weren’t seen as separate things. But nowadays, they look at these two as separate . . . . If our exhibit becomes a reality, it will be taught that their ways of life and their beliefs were one” (6).

Fienup-Riordan lays the groundwork in “The Moral Foundations of Yup’ik Science,” opening with the story of a couple who sends their only son to a shaman. The shaman sends him to live with and learn from the seals. From their vantage point under the sea, he observes the human world, watching the good hunters and the bad, seeing how they show respect or lack of it, exemplified in the humans’ behavior. He watches to see if they are behaving properly, shoveling doorways, clearing ice holes and in general “making a way” for the seals to enter the human world. The boy learns from the seals until it is time for him to return to his parents. He does so as the catch of one of the good hunters. Eventually he regains human form and because of what he has learned among the seal people, grows up to become a good hunter.

The story illustrates important relationships based on compassion—the close parallels between the world of humans and the world of animals, the relationship between the boy and his parents, between the boy and his seal mentor (who acts as an elder), and the boy and the community. Compassion is an important cultural value expressed in oral traditions. When elders instruct they often proclaim, “We talk to you because we love you,” a theme the book consistently expresses.

Subsequent chapters discuss the traditional seasonal round of subsistence and social activities, paying attention to the roles of men and women. Raw materials, making and using tools, kayaks, and clothing, and ceremonials (considered as important as technology to future success) comprise the final chapter. This chapter concludes with a section on contemporary Yup’ik lives, demonstrating how, although tools have changed, traditional harvesting activities are as...

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