By Carol Zane Jolles
For greater than fifteen hundred years Yupik and proto-Yupik Eskimo peoples have lived on the web site of the Alaskan village of Gambell on St. Lawrence Island. Their background is a list of family members and kinfolk, and of the interrelationship among those that reside in Gambell and the non secular global on which they count; it's a heritage ruled by means of an abiding wish for group survival. hoping on oral heritage mixed with ethnography and ethnohistory, Carol Zane Jolles perspectives the modern Yupik humans by way of the iconic ideals and values that experience contributed to the community's survival and suppleness. She attracts on wide interviews with villagers, archival files, and scholarly reviews, in addition to on her personal ten years of fieldwork in Gambell and the knowledge of Yupik elder consultant Elinor Mikaghaq Oozeva, to illustrate the critical significance of 3 elements of Yupik lifestyles: non secular ideals, devotion to a subsistence lifestyles means, and kin and extended family ties. Jolles records the lifestyles and livelihood of this contemporary neighborhood of marine mammal hunters and explores the ways that faith is woven into the lives of neighborhood participants, paying specific cognizance to the jobs of ladies. Her account conveys a strong feel of the lasting bonds among those that reside in Gambell and their non secular global, either earlier and current.
Read or Download Faith, Food, and Family in a Yupik Whaling Community PDF
Similar native american studies books
The Chumash World at European Contact: Power, Trade, and Feasting Among Complex Hunter-Gatherers
Whilst Spanish explorers and missionaries got here onto Southern California's shorelines in 1769, they encountered the massive cities and villages of the Chumash, a those who at the moment have been one of the such a lot complex hunter-gatherer societies on this planet. The Spanish have been entertained and fed at lavish feasts hosted by means of chiefs who governed over the settlements and who participated in vast social and financial networks.
In nineteen interrelated chapters, Weaver offers quite a number stories shared via local peoples within the Americas, from the far away previous to the doubtful destiny. He examines Indian artistic output, from oral culture to the postmodern wordplay of Gerald Vizenor, and brings to gentle formerly ignored texts.
Toward a Native American Critical Theory
Towards a local American severe idea articulates the rules and bounds of a particular local American serious thought during this postcolonial period. within the first book-length examine dedicated to this topic, Elvira Pulitano deals a survey of the theoretical underpinnings of works via famous local writers Paula Gunn Allen, Robert Warrior, Craig Womack, Greg Sarris, Louis Owens, and Gerald Vizenor.
In Plateau Indian methods with phrases, Barbara Monroe makes obvious the humanities of persuasion of the Plateau Indians, whose ancestral grounds stretch from the Cascades to the Rockies, revealing a sequence of cultural id that predates the colonial interval and maintains to at the present time. Culling from 1000s of pupil writings from grades 7-12 in reservation faculties, Monroe reveals that scholars hire an analogous persuasive thoughts as their forebears, as evidenced in dozens of post-conquest speech transcriptions and old writings.
Extra resources for Faith, Food, and Family in a Yupik Whaling Community
Sample text
It is one of the oldest villages in rural Alaska and compares in age with Point Hope and certain sites in the Aleutians. Studies conducted in the 1980s indicated that household incomes were not large, and the community is, in general, lowincome (Williams 1977; Little and Robbins 1986). The 1990 census figures confirmed this pattern. Low income, however, did not mean that anyone went hungry, unclothed, or without shelter. As I helped some residents to prepare their income tax forms in 1988, I realized that the communitywide tradition of caring for family meant that many financial burdens were shared among several different related families.
One used to be open in the evening and was popular with “night folks,” those who stay up most of the night playing cards and listening to music. For several years now, the Deli, mentioned above, has sold sweet rolls, coffee, hamburgers, hot dogs, chicken, spaghetti, pizza, and home-baked desserts. It is successful and seems likely to become a permanent fixture. The local IRA Council, like many church organizations in the lower 48, sponsors community bingo games (four to six nights per week) and sometimes advertises stakes as high as $1,000.
It seemed to me that dipping one’s walrus or seal meat into ketchup, or, as I witnessed later, making spaghetti sauce from bowhead whale meat, was the essence of adaptability! Families either sat around the tray on the floor, often on large sections of cardboard which helped to insulate the sitter from the cold drafts along the floor, or they ate around a tray placed on a low coffee table. In the past, walrus hide floors were insulated with moss or grass to protect the sitter from the cold. Each person took what he needed from the tray, one piece at a time, dipping pieces of meat into the seasonings and sauces.