Faith, Food, and Family in a Yupik Whaling Community

3. Early History

50 chapter 3 Early History I n the warm days of late spring, when Gambell turns from whaling to walrus hunting, men and women trek to the archaeological sites that cover most of the town. It is a joy to go outside without heavy winter clothes to dig in the ground and to contemplate the past. The community is so old and so rich in ancient resources that even twelve- and thirteenyear -olds may spend the afternoon digging for ancestral treasure. The landscape around Gambell is littered with dozens, even hundreds , of excavated holes, mini-archaeological sites that have already been explored or await further exploration. During the spring thaw, some holes fill with icy meltwater, and parents warn young children to stay away from the array of ancient house sites, grave sites, and abandoned siqluwat (underground food storage) sites. Occasionally, a new building, inadvertently placed on an old grave site, disturbs the spirits of the deceased that linger here. The sounds of formless spirits in the modern prefab structures remind the listener of Gambell’s antiquity. This interplay of ancient and present is a conversation that embraces both resident and visitor. Walking the village, the gravel, and intermittent tundra, decorated with dozens of pockmarked digging holes, overwhelms the senses. From June to August, the depressions often hold diggers eager to find the few marketable resources that the island now furnishes its residents . Inhabitants use the same methods and techniques that their grandparents first learned from the archaeologists and collectors who searched these sites from 1912 onward. In the spring of 1992, for example, I saw evidence of the sophistication of the would-be discoverers as two women passed by me on the road that runs behind the high school and along the flanks of Sivuqaq Mountain before it heads up and over the edge and across the tundra. As they ambled past Mayughaaq, once excavated by archaeologists Hans-Georg Bandi, Henry Collins, and James Giddings, they paused beside a family digging diligently into a small embankment . One woman unfolded an ivory harpoon fragment from a cloth in which she had wrapped it, remarking that it was probably an Old Bering Sea piece. She mused aloud that finding an Okvik1 piece would have been better, because it would bring a better price from art dealers.2 Occasionally, an ulaaq (woman’s knife) appears, complete with a finely shaped slate blade and a carved ivory handle representing a polar bear or whale. More often, the digger fills a sack with the cast-off teeth of walruses consumed long ago. These and fossilized ivory walrus tusks can be sold to the community Ivory Co-op and will eventually be used by Native artists all along the northwest Alaskan coast. St. Lawrence Island is a major walrus ivory supplier. By 1997, the Gambell IRA had begun meetings with Savoonga and Shishmareff to discuss ways to preserve their unique bone resources and artifact heritage, and village leaders wrestled with the difficult problem of managing these resources, which are both a source of income and a record of their past. Sivuqaq history includes much more than these ancient sites. Island history is constructed of the interwoven voices of many people, past and present: islanders, Siberian immigrants, explorers, U.S. revenue officers, sailors, ships’ captains, missionaries, church workers, schoolteachers, and early and contemporary archaeologists and anthropologists (myself among them). Their voices speak from letters, diaries, journals, and personal narratives, and from them it is possible to construct a portrait of island life. Sivuqaq is an old, old landscape. Evidence of its earliest inhabitants dates to approximately 500 a.d. or before (see Dumond 1998). The stories of its beginnings are numerous. The first stories are those of the elder storytellers from the island and from the shores of Chukotka on the RussEarly History 51 1. Bandi claimed that “Okvik” was a clumsy English rendering of a Yupik term meaning “place where walrus are found” and was used originally by island men who worked with Geist in the 1920s. 2. Morningstar Gallery in Santa Fe, New Mexico, showed an “Okvik Ivory Harpoon Thumb Rest,” c. 100 b.c. to 100 a.d., for $450, in its spring 1999 catalog. Some early pieces have sold for $35,000 to $50,000 to private collectors. Early History 52 ian side of Bering Strait. Their stories put the island on the map, situating it in mythic time and...