Newsletter

Smithsonian Institution National Museum of Natural History

May 2021 https://naturalhistory.si.edu/research/anthropology/programs/arctic-studies-center Number 28

NOTES FROM THE DIRECTOR

By William W. Fitzhugh

The year 2020, I am sure, will remain etched in our 

memories even more clearly than other recent decadal 

anniversaries like Y2K and 2010, not because of 

astronomical calendrics, but for the pain, widespread 

suffering, and strangeness of the COVID-19 pandemic 

experience across the globe. The Smithsonian has been 

closed to staff and the public since March; office files, 

collections, and research materials have been unavailable 

to scholars, curators, and visitors; borders have been 

closed to fieldwork and conferencing; and we have lost 

direct contact with our friends and colleagues—some 

permanently. 

2020 is also likely to be remembered as a watershed 

for the changes it brought to our lives. Our explosive 

entry into the “zoom” era is revolutionizing how 

we work and interact with colleagues in both our 

professional and personal lives. While personally 

distant, we are electronically only a finger stroke away 

from multitudes, and we are more connected than ever 

to distant families and friends. Zoom meetings and 

webinars have crowded our calendars and competed 

with normal work and personal schedules. Physical 

isolating, the muffled voices of masked communicating, 

and the unending uncertainty of ‘where we go from 

here’ have left lives in limbo and futures uncertain. 

More broadly, COVID is forcing momentous changes 

in societies worldwide, with unknown outcomes. Gone 

is the future we expected. Change is everywhere. 

Despite ‘these strange times,’ life at the ASC, Museum, 

and Smithsonian moved forward. At the Natural 

History Museum we welcomed Dr. Rebecca Johnson

as NMNH Assistant Director for Science, bringing 

outstanding credentials in conservation biology and 

genetics from the Australian Museum. Ian Owens

announced his departure from Deputy Director to head 

the Ornithological Laboratory at Cornell University. At 

the SI Castle, SI Secretary Lonnie Bunch settled his 

leadership team and initiated a broad set of Smithsonian 

policies promoting social justice and reflection on how 

the Smithsonian can improve itself and strengthen its 

role as a morally tuned educational institution. With the 

rise of the ‘Black Lives Matter’ movement, the urgency 

to address the continuing inequity, social injustice, 

The ASC virtual meeting on April 9, 2021, left to right: Nanсy Shorey, Igor Chechushkov, John Cloud, Dawn Biddison, Fiona 

Steiwer, Bernadette Engelstad, Stephen Loring, Aron Crowell, William Fitzhugh, Igor Krupnik, and Schuyler Litten
2 ASC Newsletter

and racism in science and society has put these issues 

prominently on the Smithsonian and NMNH agenda. 

One thing is certain: the pandemic has shown that 

we must upgrade our digital and remote outreach 

capabilities. One has to ask: why have such a huge 

institution, such huge collections, if we can’t open our 

storerooms, cannot exhibit objects for lack of exhibit 

space, and cannot make collections available digitally? 

With truth, social justice, and democracy at stake, the 

Smithsonian mission is needed more than ever to reach 

the broad public audiences nationally and world-wide 

who cannot visit Washington?

At first, this newsletter seemed like it would be smaller 

than usual because of COVID restrictions on research 

and travel. So I decided to add a feature: “COVID-19 

and the Arctic”. What happened was unexpected; 

stories have rolled in from every direction—some 

that had been destined for delivery at our cancelled 

panel, “COVID-19: The Smithsonian Response” 

from Iceland’s Arctic Circle Forum in October. We 

are also featuring the talk given by our 2020 Ernest 

S. Burch Lecturer, Brendan Griebel, “The Language 

of Inuinnait Heritage Research” describing a renewed 

brand of collaboration being conducted by researchers, 

museums, and the community of Cambridge Bay, 

Nunavut, Canada. 

This year has brought other milestones. Igor 

Krupnik, navigating the Anthropology Department 

through troubled COVID waters, has, with Aron 

Crowell, seen publication of their 555p edited Arctic 

Crashes volume—a certain future prize-winner. 

He and Aron also completed editing, with the 

assistance of Kenn Harper, a set of papers from the 

special session in Nome, Alaska, in February 2019, 

commemorating the centennial of the Danish Fifth 

Thule Expedition (1921–24) led by Danish explorerfolklorist, Knud Rasmussen. Dawn Biddison has 

produced a new multi-media educational website 

with the Smithsonian’s Learning Lab/SCLDA that 

provides nationwide access to SI Arctic materials in 

collaboration with Indigenous scholars. The Alaska 

office is funded largely by grants and donations. Along 

with Anthropology’s Repatriation and Recovering 

Voices Programs, the Alaska office has been a model 

showing how Smithsonian resources can reach beyond 

D.C. masonry to communities regionally, nationally, 

and globally.

While Stephen Loring and I have not been able to 

pursue fieldwork, we have been active planning exhibits. 

Stephen assisted the NMNH “Dark Sky” exhibit, and 

he and I have helped develop “Visions of the Boreal 

Forest,” being produced by SITES, the Smithsonian’s 

Traveling Exhibit Service, which is now touring our 

former narwhal show. I continued work on Quebec, 

Labrador, and Mongolia manuscripts and saw my book 

co-authored with Harri Luukkanen, The Bark Canoes 

and Skin Boats of Northern Eurasia published by 

Smithsonian Books. With David Nordlander and Nana 

Naisbitt, I submitted a collaborative proposal to the 

National Science Foundation with Dartmouth College 

for “Polar Explorer: Connecting Science and People 

through an Arctic Digital Library,” requesting funds 

to test a prototype multi-institution digital network of 

Arctic research and educational materials. 

Our growing cadre of ASC Associates have also been 

busy. Amy Chan, Director of the Carrie McLean 

Museum in Nome, Alaska, put the finishing touches on 

her Alaska drill-bow book, Our Stories Etched in Ivory

/ Qulip’yugut Iksiaqtuumaruat Tuugaami, designed by 

Igor Chechushkov. Ann Fienup-Riordan published 

books on Yup’ik relations with animals and with 

fish; John Cloud submitted a paper for a Sorbonne 

publication analyzing the Chesapeake battles of the 

U.S. Revolutionary War; Kenneth Pratt wrote on 

oral history records of ecosystem change in the Yukon 

Delta; Bernadette Engelstad published articles and 

prepared exhibit proposals featuring Inuit clothing; 

and Theodore Timreck completed his magnum film 

opus, Ancient Sea Peoples of the North Atlantic that 

documents five decades of ASC collaboration.

While 2020 has been surprising in many ways, we have 

not been surprised by our many friends and supporters, 

whom we thank for their spirit and generosity. When 

earthquakes, fires, and upheavals struck we often heard 

from abroad. This year the pandemic brought kind 

communications from Koji Deriha, Elisa Palomino, 

and many others. When the January 6, 2021 uprising 

took place at the U.S. Capitol, Jean-Loup Rousselot 

wrote from Tallinn, Estonia: “We were almost crying, 

watching those pictures... [Europeans] go hand in hand 

[with the U.S.] in the same direction, even if we have 

arguments once in a while.” 

In this year of human rights and equity issues, I 

close with a note of thanks to our colleague, Noel 

Broadbent. Noel has been an ASC Research Associate 

for many years. He and I met in 1971 in Uppsala 

when he was ‘politically isolating’ in Sweden during 

the Vietnam conflict; later he became a professor and 

created an Arctic Center at Umeå University in Umeå, 

Sweden. In 1989 he moved back to the U.S. to become 

the first Arctic Social Science program director at NSF/

Polar Programs. Retiring 1997, he returned to Umeä, 

for a few years before returning to DC in 2004 to join 

the ASC. There he wrote Lapps and Labyrinths and 

became a cherished member of SI Anthropology. We 

begin this year’s NL with Noel’s brief account of his 

NSF tenure.
 ASC Newsletter 3

TABLE OF CONTENTS

NOTES FROM THE DIRECTOR........................ 1

DONORS and PARTNERS .................................... 4

Polar Dreams............................................................. 5

PANDEMICS 1918 AND TODAY ......................... 6

How is Alaska Leading the Nation in Vaccinating 

Residents? ................................................................. 6

A 1925 Epidemic in the Lower Yukon, Alaska......... 7

Pandemics in Labrador: 1918 and 2020–21............ 12

Greenland and COVID-19 ...................................... 13

Smithsonian Educators Respond in the Covid Era..... 14

Award for Fish Skin Tradition ................................ 17

ASC ALASKA OFFICE ....................................... 18

Smithsonian Learning Lab...................................... 18

Circumpolar Exchanges: Inuk Artist Glenn Gear... 19

Alaska Native Museum Fellowships ...................... 19

New Media: Weaving a Yup’ik Issran .................... 20

Centennial Publication on the Danish Fifth Thule 

Expedition (1921–1924)........................................... 21

Canadian Plans to Celebrate the Fifth Thule 

Expedition............................................................... 23

NEWS ..................................................................... 23

Oral History, Oral Present, Oral Future: The 

Language of Inuinnait Heritage Research............... 23

Celebrating Qaumajuq: Inuit Art Centre of The 

Winnipeg Art Gallery.............................................. 28

Burch Endowment Support for ASC Activities...... 29

The 2020 Ernest S. Burch Memorial Lecture 

Program................................................................... 30

Sounds from The North: Location Time Art........... 31

Illusuak Cultural Centre Opens in Nain, Labrador... 32

Pitul’ko Wins Research Excellence Award ........... 33

RESEARCH .......................................................... 34

“WUTE”: the Western Union Telegraph Expedition 

and Voyages of the Arctic Nightingale .................. 34

Searching for Basques on the Quebec Lower North 

Shore ....................................................................... 36

Analysis of Wind .................................................... 38

Children at the Norse ’Farm Beneath The Sand’.... 39

“Arctic Crashes” Sails to Publication ..................... 41

Archaeological Notes from Mongolia .................... 42

A View North from the Tibetan Plateau.................. 43

Nunamit Workshop Explored Quebec LNS Inuit 

Heritage................................................................... 46

A Bronze Age Logboat from the Starnberger See... 47

Reflections from Tallinn.......................................... 48

COLLECTIONS .................................................. 50

Polar Explorer: The Arctic Digital Library ............ 50

The Vega Collection Project Advances into 

COVID-19 ‘All-Electronic’ Era ............................. 50

“Nelson In The Cloud” ........................................... 55

Bering Sea Art from Nunivak Island: a Chronicle of 

Richard D. Takilnok (Cup’ig, 1928–2007)............. 58

The John Marr Collections from Nunavik at the 

University of Colorado-Boulder Museum .............. 60

OUTREACH ........................................................ 62

Filming Fifty Years of Smithsonian Archaeology ... 62

Narwhal Exhibition on the Road after COVID-19 

Breather................................................................... 64

PARTNERS, FELLOWS AND INTERNS 65

Cruising the ASC, Before and During COVID-19 ... 65

Building a Monograph ............................................ 65

Compiling Data for the Deer Stone Project ............ 65

“More than Meets the Eye”..................................... 66

BOOK REVIEWS ............................................... 67

Paying the Land ...................................................... 67

The Bark and Skin Boats of Northern Eurasia........ 67

New Publications from Calista Education and 

Culture..................................................................... 68

Applied Ethnology in Chukotka: Indigenous 

Knowledge, Museums, Community Heritage......... 69

Whale Snow. Iñupiat, Climate Change and 

Multispecies Resilience in Arctic Alaska................ 70

Art as a Mirror of Science—The Museum Cerny 

Inuit Collection ....................................................... 71

Arctic Culture and Climate ..................................... 72

Tibetan silver: Gold and Bronze Objects and the 

Aesthetics of Animals in the Era Before Empire .... 73

Besting the Best: Warriors and Warfare in the 

Cultural and Religious Traditions of Tibet.............. 73

An Exploration of Prehistoric Ontologies in The 

Bering Strait Region ............................................... 74

Books On Northeast Greenland .............................. 74

TRANSITIONS ................................................... 75

Dr. Stanislav Chládek.............................................. 75

Remembering Selma Huxley Barkham ................. 76

Memories of Chiapas and Robert M. Laughlin ...... 78

Byron Mallott.......................................................... 78

Dale Gerard Kennedy ............................................. 79

The S. A. Morse Diaries: Recollecting Lincoln 

Washburn ................................................................ 79

2020 ASC STAFF PUBLICATIONS ................... 82
4 ASC Newsletter

Ernest “Tiger” Burch Endowment

Alaska Anthropological Association 

Anchorage Museum Foundation

The Honorable Morgan Christen and Jim Torgerson

The CIRI Foundation

Perry and Louise Colbourne

Cook Inlet Tribal Council

Dartmouth Anthropology Goodman Fund 

Dartmouth Institute of Arctic Studies

Perry and Arden Eaton

Peggy and Greg Favretto

Richard and Janet Faulkner

Susan M. Ferguson

First National Bank Alaska

William W. and Lynne D. Fitzhugh

Heather Flynn

Government of Newfoundland-Labrador

Florence Hart

The Hintz Family Fund Inc.

Donald Holly

Inuit Art Foundation

Kenaitze Indian Tribe

Innu Nation

Betsy and David Lawer

Lynden Family of Companies

Memorial University of Newfoundland

Mid-Coast Marine*

University of Montreal

The Honorable Peter and Jo Michalski

Rika and John Mouw

National Science Foundation

National Park Service

National Resources Defense Council

Government of Newfoundland and Labrador*

Newfoundland Provincial Archaeology Office*

The Coralyn W. Whitney Science Education Ctr.

Robert and Diana Paulus

Qanirtuuq Incorporated 

Rasmuson Foundation

Rivendell School, Orford NH*

The Frances and David Rose Foundation

Sealaska Heritage Foundation*

Gail Sieberts

SI Office of the Provost for Education and Access 

Smithsonian Ctr for Learning and Digital Access 

Smithsonian Institution Traveling Exhibit Service 

Smithsonian Recovering Voices Program

Whiteley Museum

Francis Ulmer

James Vanstone Endowment

Douglas and Kathie Veltre

STAFF

William Fitzhugh, ASC Director, and N. America 

Arch. Curator: fitzhugh@si.edu

Aron Crowell, Alaska Director and Arctic 

Archaeologist: crowella@si.edu

Igor Krupnik, Curator and Ethnologist: 

krupniki@si.edu

Stephen Loring, Museum Anthropologist, and 

Arctic Archaeologist: lorings@si.edu

Dawn Biddison, ASC Alaska, Museum Specialist: 

biddisond@si.edu

Nancy Shorey, Program Specialist: shoreyn@si.edu

Fiona Steiwer, Research Assist.: fsteiwer@gmail.com

RESEARCH ASSOCIATES AND 

COLLABORATORS

Bruce Bradley, Cortez, CO: 

primtech@yahoo.com

Judith Varney Burch, Charlottesville,VA: 

judithvarneyburch@gmail.com

John Cloud, Washington, D.C.: cloudj@si.edu

Bernadette Driscoll Engelstad, Kensington, MD: 

bdengelstad@gmail.com

Ann Fienup-Riordan, Anchorage, AK:

riordan@alaska.net

Norman Hallendy, Carp, Ontario, Canada, 

tukilik@icloud.com

Scott Heyes, Australia: sheyes@hotmail.com

William Honeychurch, Yale University: 

william.honeychurch@yale.edu

Kenneth Pratt, BIA, Anchorage, AK:

kenneth.pratt@bia.gov

Wilfred E. Richard, Maine: 34pondroad@gmail.com

Ted Timreck, New York, NY: ttimreck@gmail.com

Cristopher B. Wolff, SUNY, Plattsburgh, NY:

cwolff@albany.edu

The Smithsonian Arctic Center (ASC) is sustained 

through a public-private partnership. Philanthropic 

donations provide funding for essential communitybased collaborations, impactful educational 

programming for the public, and continuous research in 

the ever-changing Arctic region.

To make a tax deductible contribution, please 

contact the NMNH Office of Development at 

202-633-0821 or NMNH-Advancement@si.edu

THANKS TO OUR 

2020/2021 DONORS AND PARTNERS*

We extend our sincerest gratitude to the donors and partners who support the Smithsonian Arctic Studies Center. 
 ASC Newsletter 5

POLAR DREAMS: THE BIRTH OF 

INTERDISCIPLINARY ARCTIC SOCIAL 

SCIENCE, RESEARCH ETHICS, AND ITS 

GLOBAL VISION. NOTES FROM THE 1990S

By Noel Broadbent

“Polar Dreams” is a homage to Arctic Dreams: 

Imagination and Desire in a Northern Landscape by 

the late Barry Lopez.

During the pandemic I found myself going through 

old files and notes relating to the first years of the 

Arctic Social Science Program at NSF, three program 

directors and 30 years ago. I want to revisit some of 

the issues I experienced during my tenure, 1989-1997, 

and some of the lessons learned from the program. I 

think it is important to remind people of these things. 

First, is the significance of the “Principles for the 

Conduct of Research in the Arctic” statement and its 

close connection with health issues that harken back to 

the Nuremburg war crime trials. Second, the continued 

significance of interdisciplinary science as it relates to 

global change. 

I was a northern (Nordic) archaeologist by training 

in Sweden and had been the director of the Center 

for Arctic Cultural Research in Umea for seven 

years before starting at NSF. I had been involved in 

circumpolar health issues through the International 

Union for Circumpolar Health (IUCH) and had also 

worked in Zimbabwe through the Swedish International 

Development Agency; my research perspective was 

decidedly international.

The Global Perspective

Three events set the stage for the Arctic social 

sciences program: the Exxon Valdez oil spill in 

Alaska, the Chernobyl nuclear disaster in Ukraine and 

northwestern Europe, and the collapse of the Soviet 

Union. The Arctic Council was being put together at 

about the same time and, following the Arctic research 

conference in Leningrad (St Petersburg) in 1988, the 

international social sciences community came together 

to create the International Arctic Social Sciences 

Association (IASSA), whose bylaws were approved 

in Fairbanks in 1990. IASSA was directly inspired 

by the International Union for Circumpolar Health 

(IUCH). One element, the formulation of research 

ethics, would have lasting significance, not only 

concerning indigenous involvement in research, but the 

legal and moral significance of informed consent, the 

foundational concept at Nuremburg.

I was charged with initiating and operating the Arctic 

social sciences program at NSF starting in 1989. The 

guide was the PRB Report “Arctic Social Sciences: 

an Agenda for Action.” I had a small budget to work 

with, and I was to produce a program announcement, 

assemble a proposal review committee, and formulate 

an ethics statement for the Interagency Arctic Research 

Policy Committee. I was the only social scientist in 

the Division of Polar Programs, which was in the 

Geosciences Division at that time. 

The working environment at the Division of Polar 

Programs was far from unproblematic; there was a 

good deal of antagonism toward “social” scientists 

by some, and also between the Antarctic and Arctic 

(read Alaska) programs in general. My new program 

announcement was “welcomed” by having it torn in 

half and dropped at my feet by a senior executive of 

the Antarctic program. The antagonism decreased 

somewhat, however, when I found myself coordinating 

an archaeological clean-up of East Base, the first U.S. 

research station in Antarctica in 1939; published in 

National Geographic (March 1993). Although the later 

separation of the Arctic and Antarctic programs was 

understandable for political reasons I am not sure if this 

served global science. 

Joint Funding: a strategy to increase funds and also 

a stimulus for interdisciplinary research

Funding was still a problem although I managed to get 

more through joint funding with non-polar programs. 

I got extra money from other directorates, especially 

informal science education, archaeology, cultural 

anthropology, and linguistics programs, etc., and I 

established a dissertation improvement grant program 

in Polar Programs. I also put together a human factors 

program jointly with NASA and funded research at the 

Noel Broadbent. Photo by www.pbs.org
6 ASC Newsletter

South Pole looking into the effects of isolation, small 

group interactions, and gender. Active indigenous 

participation in science was enhanced when I made 

it possible for Native communities to receive grants 

directly, thus avoiding university overheads (up to 90%). 

The creation of an Alaska Native Science Commission 

was also intended to encourage Native science.

Ethics and the Picou et al. Case

Grants were going out and the program was doing well 

in 1991 when the director of geosciences passed along 

a letter from Exxon to the NSF Director demanding 

the termination of a university project involving 

“secondary disasters” (economic, social, psychological) 

of the Valdez oil spill. This was a peer-reviewed project 

that had conducted interviews and promised anonymity 

of respondents in accordance with our “Principles for 

the Conduct of Research in the Arctic.”

We wrote back, explained the peer review process, and 

suggested Exxon contact the principal investigators 

directly. I also provided an affidavit regarding the 

“Principles” statement and the ethical rules expected 

of the P.I. Exxon responded by suing the P.I.s, and 

demanding copies of all project data, including 

interviews, and the P.I.’s personal financial records. 

Exxon had previously won their legal challenges to 

social scientists in Alaska and had been given access 

to the respondents’ interviews. The Picou et al. case 

went on for a year. But for the first time in U.S. 

jurisprudence the case was won by social scientists. 

Their data and subjects were protected because of 

the “Principles” document which had been part of 

their contract. This was a monumental achievement, 

established a legal precedent under U.S. law, and has 

protected researchers and the public for three decades. 

IASSA later endorsed its own statement as did other 

organizations around the world.

Special thanks to Oran Young who was so influential 

in convincing the NSF to start the Arctic social sciences 

program, and to Jerry Brown, Peter Wilkniss, and 

Bob Corell at NSF for their wisdom and guidance 

through the first years of the program and, last but not 

least, Bill Fitzhugh at the Smithsonian, for 40 years of 

inspiration, opportunity and friendship. 

[Editor’s Note: As the first director of NSF’s social 

science program, Noel Broadbent pioneered a niche 

for social science that has continued to expand to this 

day. His promotion of research ethics and indigenous 

collaboration turned a hard science approach toward 

recognition of social responsibilities of science, 

provided funding for indigenous organizations, and 

paved the way for similar policy changes throughout 

the U.S. government.]

PANDEMICS 1918 AND TODAY

HOW IS ALASKA LEADING THE NATION IN 

VACCINATING RESIDENTS? WITH BOATS, 

FERRIES, PLANES AND SNOWBOBILES

By Cathy Free

With permission from The Washington Post 2 Feb, 2021

Alaska, the state with the largest land mass in the 

nation, is leading the country in a critical coronavirus 

measure: per capita vaccinations. About 13 percent of 

the people who live in Alaska have already gotten a 

shot. That’s higher than states such as West Virginia, 

which has received a lot of attention for a successful 

vaccine rollout and has inoculated 11 percent of its 

people. But the challenge for Alaska has been how to get 

vaccines to people across difficult, frigid terrain—often 

in remote slivers of the state? “Boats, ferries, planes, 

snowmobiles—Alaskans will find a way to get it there,” 

said the state’s chief medical officer, Anne Zink, 43.

Alaskans are being vaccinated on fishing boats, 

inside 10-seater planes and on frozen landing strips. 

Doctors and nurses are taking white-knuckle trips to 

towns and villages across the state to ensure residents 

are protected from the coronavirus. Contributing to 

Alaska’s quick speed in getting the vaccine to its 

residents is a federal partnership that allows the state, 

which has more than 200 indigenous tribes, to receive 

additional vaccines to distribute through the Indian 

Health Service.

Other reasons include the state’s small population 

of 732,000, as well as a high number of veterans, 

Zink said. The U.S. Department of Veterans Affairs 

is working with the Centers for Disease Control and 

Prevention to ensure that high-risk veterans receive 

priority for the vaccine. But one big reason is the state 

is practiced in delivering precious cargo by transport not 

often used in the Lower 48. Sometimes that even means 

adventures by sled. One all-female medical crew of four 

in December used a sled pulled by a snowmobile to 

deliver vaccine to the village of Shungnak in the state’s 

remote Northwest Arctic Borough. “It’s just an easier 

way to get around when you don’t have a lot of roads,” 

said Kelli Shroyer, public communications director for 

the Maniilaq Health Center in Kotzebue, Alaska, where 

the crew started their journey. Shroyer added that people 

sometimes get picked up from the airport in a sled, 

and high school sports teams will at times travel to one 

another’s gyms by sled, too.

Zink was so impressed by the sled crew’s delivery in 

December that she posted about it on her Facebook 

page. “I love the pictures of vaccination distribution in 
 ASC Newsletter 7

Alaska,” she wrote. “Recipients expressed how grateful 

they were that even though they are so remote, they are 

getting this vaccine. They are not forgotten.”

Elders from some tribes recall stories about the 1918 

flu pandemic, which decimated entire villages, she said. 

“The stories have lived on,” Zink said. “One chief told 

me how his grandmother took his mother out to the 

wilderness for a year so that she would be safe. When 

they returned, they learned that most of their village 

had died... We are stronger as a state because of that 

history... For me, the way that villages were able to 

recover from that trauma speaks to what we need to do 

to keep moving forward.” Thousands of Alaskans are 

playing a role in getting people vaccinated, Zink said.

Curt Jackson used to employ his water taxi, Orca, to 

shuttle tourists from the small city of Homer to villages 

across Kachemak Bay that aren’t accessible by roads. 

In late December, Jackson received a request to take 

three nurses across the bay to Seldovia, a town with 

about 450 residents, including members of the Seldovia 

Village Tribe. Planes couldn’t fly that morning because 

of weather, and the water was rough. When the women 

climbed aboard his 32-foot aluminum landing craft and 

took seats in the windy darkness, Jackson said, he noticed 

that the woman in the middle, Candace Kreger, was 

clutching a bright blue cooler. That was when he realized 

that the women were traveling with the precious doses.

“With a strict time frame [for the Pfizer vaccine], there 

was no option for us to postpone vaccinations,” said 

Kreger, 40, a licensed nurse care coordinator from 

Homer. “On any other day, the rough ride would not 

have been as nerve-racking if [the] vaccine hadn’t been 

involved,” she said.

For Ellen Hodges, a doctor from Bethel, Alaska, the 

coronavirus vaccination effort is the most rewarding 

project in which she has been involved, she said. 

Hodges, 46, has flown to several villages in a sixseater plane to vaccinate medical workers and elders, 

who meet her on the runway. “We land in the isolated 

tundra, and they’ll be lined up waiting,” she said. 

“Some places have up to 30 people, and some have 

only one.” Even if there’s just one person, the trip is 

worth it. When the weather is especially cold, said 

Hodges, medical crews often upgrade to 10-seater 

planes so people can climb aboard and get inoculated 

inside. “If you turn around the last two seats in the 

plane, it works out perfectly,” she said. 

Tribal leaders say they are appreciative of the creative 

approach the state has taken—resorting to planes, 

sleds and snowmobiles. “You have to be resilient and 

self-sufficient to live in Alaska,” said Crystal Collier, 

president and CEO of the Seldovia Village Tribe. 

“We have a lot of multifamily households, so we’re 

extremely grateful to see these vaccines arrive.”

Collier, 61, was not at all surprised to learn that Jackson 

had piloted his boat through heavy seas to get the first 

vaccines to her village. “People here look out for each 

other,” she said. Jackson has a new nickname since his 

turbulent voyage across the bay, he said. Some of his 

friends are now calling him “Captain Balto.” Balto was 

a lead sled dog for a team in 1925 that made a heroic 

transport of diphtheria vaccine across nearly 700 miles 

of Alaska, from Nenana to Nome. The Iditarod Trail 

was the only accessible route at the time during winter. 

“I was glad I didn’t have to go that far,” Jackson said. 

“But when we made it across [the bay], I got a little 

choked up, happy that I helped play a part in it.”

A 1925 EPIDEMIC IN THE LOWER YUKON, 

ALASKA

By Kenneth L. Pratt

Over the past 45 years, research performed pursuant to 

Section 14(h)(1) of the Alaska Native Claims Settlement 

Act (ANCSA) has produced a massive, diverse and 

unparalleled collection of data about Alaska’s indigenous 

history (see Pratt 2009). Managed by the Bureau 

of Indian Affairs, Alaska Region, it is known as the 

“ANCSA 14(h)(1) Collection.” This article provides an 

example of its rich content by briefly discussing selected 

details about two sites in Alaska’s Lower Yukon region: 

Tupicuar and Putukulek. They occupy a flat, marshy and 

mostly treeless landscape—dominated by an intricate 

maze of rivers, sloughs, lakes and ponds—inland from 

the south bank of the Yukon River (Kuigpak). Neither 

site is described in the historical lliterature so the only 

source of data about them is indigenous oral history. 

Yup’ik elders Noel Polty (Kumkaq, 1919–1991) and 

Wassilie Evan (Anguyagpak, 1907–1993) provided the 

majority of ethnographic information summarized below 

(e.g., Polty and Evan 1985). Quotes in English from 

these elders were translated from Yup’ik by interpreter 

Ben Fitka (Ussukcaq, 1921–1993). 

Tupicuar and Putukulek were affiliated with the former 

winter village of Cuqartalek and, later, modern Pilot 

Station (Tuutalgaq) and Pitkas Point (Negeqliim 

Painga). Used primarily as spring, fall and winter 

camps for fishing (blackfish, whitefish, lush, pike) and 

hunting (mink, muskrat), both sites were described as 

“very old.” They were certainly in use prior to ca. 1900.

Tupicuar

Tupicuar is located at the confluence of the Kuiggaarluk 

and Tupicuar rivers, about 14 km northeast of 

Cuqartalek. One of Tupicuar’s former occupants was a 
8 ASC Newsletter

female shaman named Tut’angaq, who was originally 

from a site near Qagan, a large lake some 20 km west 

of Cuqartalek. Her power reportedly came from a parka 

made out of seal intestines: by shaking the parka a voice 

would speak to Tut’angaq and instruct her on how to 

cure a sick or injured person. It was also said that her 

bodily movements were similar to those of a river otter, 

evidently due to someone having placed an otter on her 

mother’s stomach before Tut’angaq was born. 

In the winter of ca. 1925 a “big flu” struck the Lower 

Yukon region and lasted for six or more months. 

When the flu first appeared, Tut’angaq was living at 

Tupicuar with her husband Aviraulqutaq (who also 

was from the Qagan area), son Uutuuk, sister Al’aller, 

brother-in-law Pistu’rluq and another man named 

Tan’gurralleq. All of these individuals had wintered at 

Putukulek before moving to Tupicuar (Polty and Evan 

1985). Not long after the flu appeared Aviraulqutaq 

and Pistu’rluq fell ill and died. Tut’angaq and Al’aller 

“buried” them by placing the bodies in kayaks, which 

were then folded in half. Uutuuk and Tan’gurralleq 

were also sick with the flu. The boy was capable of 

traveling but Tan’gurralleq was not; so the women and 

boy left Tupicuar, heading downriver to Putukulek 

to seek help for Tan’gurralleq. (Al’aller later moved 

to Kuigglualler, a site near the Kuigpak where her 

relatives lived [Polty and Evan 1985]). 

By late winter the flu had grown to epidemic 

proportions. Individuals who were uninfected and still 

capable of traveling were afraid of contracting the 

flu, so most stayed put in their villages. As a result, 

Tan’gurralleq was not seen again until spring, when 

a young man named Nung’aq passed Tupicuar on 

his way to the Kuigpak and found Tan’gurralleq alive 

Study area showing its complex geography and associated Yup'ik place names. Local people used the portage at Elqiitaq as a 

short-cut (via the Kuiggaarluk) to the Qissunaq, which was reached at Putukulek. Using that route to Putukulek saved miles 

of paddling compared to traveling to the site by way of the Qissunaq’s extremely sinuous, uppermost stretches. Map created 

by Robert Drozda (base satellite imagery courtesy of Earthstar Geographics and ESRI)
 ASC Newsletter 9

but seriously ill. When Nung’aq reached Neq’lek he 

told Tan’gurralleq’s nephew, Yugissaq, of his uncle’s 

condition. Yugissaq instructed Nung’aq to stay at 

Neq’lek because many people in the Kuigpak area were 

sick (Polty and Evan 1985). Yugissaq left for Tupicuar 

soon thereafter but he arrived too late: Tan’gurralleq 

was found lying dead inside a house with his head 

resting on a 50-pound sack of flour. His body could 

not be handled because it had begun to decompose, so 

Yugissaq buried Tan’gurralleq by collapsing the walls 

of the sod house on him. Tan’qurralleq had lost his 

wife, Qivcauq, to the flu the previous winter; she died 

at Elqiitaq and was either buried there or at Negeqliim

Painga, where her relatives lived (Polty 1985). 

Tupicuar fell out of regular use as a result of the 

epidemic. But Yugissaq’s son and daughter-in-law 

(Noel and Agnes Polty) subsequently spring camped 

at the site on numerous occasions into the 1970s. In 

1985, ANCSA researchers recorded the remains of four 

semisubterranean dwellings at Tupicuar—one of which 

was confirmed (Polty 1985) as the house in which 

Tan’gurralleq was buried. No physical evidence of 

other reported graves was found. Along with the three 

people who died at Tupicuar in ca. 1925-1926, two 

more individuals were known to have been buried 

at the site: Matvii and Kumkaq (another uncle of 

Yugissaq) (Polty 1985). 

Putukulek

Putukulek is located at the confluence of the Qissunaq

and Kuiggaarluk rivers, about 5 km downstream on 

the Kuiggaarluk from Tupicuar and 10 km northeast 

of Cuqartalek. Most people who camped at the site 

returned to Cuqartalek for the winter but some stayed 

at Putukulek from early fall until the arrival of summer 

(when they moved to the Kuigpak for salmon fishing). 

So, Putukulek can also accurately be called a former 

winter village. 

Elders knew of two graves (both marked with crosses) 

at the site, but its comparatively large size and antiquity 

suggest others probably exist. One grave was that of a 

man named Pugleralria who died of influenza (quseq

[Polty 1985]) in ca. 1925-1926 (Evan and Polty 1984); 

another was Sugcuq, who also died of influenza...

but in the spring of ca. 1939. At the time of his death, 

Sugcuq was staying in the cabin of the female shaman 

Tut’angaq, who had moved back to Putukulek with 

her son Uutuuk in ca. 1926 following the death of her 

husband at Tupicuar. After Sugcuq died Tut’angaq and 

Uutuuk “covered his body with a canoe, since they 

had nothing else [to use as a coffin]” and moved him 

to another part of the site (Polty 1985). When news of 

Sugcuq’s death reached Noel Polty and Selapaq (Dick 

Nick)—who were then living at Negeqliim Painga—

they traveled to Putukulek to bury the man. As Noel

explained:

[Tut’angaq and Uutuuk] left his body [on the 

ground] folded in a canoe. It was there all that 

summer. When I learned of how his body was 

placed I went to the site in the fall [with Selapaq] 

and the two of us buried him. [Even though] flies 

had laid eggs on his body (Polty 1985).

The body and canoe were covered with sod (Polty and 

Evan 1985) then a wooden fence was built around the 

grave (Polty 1985). 

Elder Wassillie Tinker (Uass’uk) recalled that he 

and his father had formerly hunted mink at Putukulek

during the fall and winter months (Tinker 1985). They 

also netted whitefish in the fall and, after freeze-up, 

set blackfish traps in the Qissunaq. He stated that 

Putukulek is haunted by its many dead and he stopped 

using the site for that reason. Putukulek’s ghosts 

reportedly made many strange noises. Sometimes in 

winter the loud sounds of someone approaching by 

dogsled were heard, but the ever-approaching person 

never arrived (Tinker 1985). The site apparently was 

not used after ca. 1959 because people had become too 

frightened to live there.

In 1985, ANCSA researchers recorded the remains 

of up to 18 semisubterranean dwellings at Putukulek, 

along with physical evidence of one grave, a fallen 

cross. It is unknown if the grave was that of Sugcuq 

because the fence that once surrounded it had 

disappeared by 1985, most likely carried away by 

floodwaters (Polty 1985).

Closing Remarks

In a nod to the current COVID-19 pandemic, this 

discussion about Tupicuar and Putukulek was framed 

around the impacts of epidemics that struck residents 

of those two sites nearly a century ago. The objective 

was to show how indigenous people in one part of 

the Lower Yukon region dealt with such events; but 

the approach also highlights the traditional, kin-based 

composition of site populations.

Another point worth making is that little, if any, 

information about the 1925–1926 epidemic discussed 

here exists in the published literature concerning the 

epidemiology of Alaska (e.g., see Fortuine 1989): this 

makes the related oral history accounts Yup’ik elders 

provided to ANCSA researchers even more important. 

Noel Polty and Wassilie Evan both lost family members 

to the epidemic; they dated the event by estimating 

their respective ages at the time it occurred. During 

the epidemic, Wassilie was living with his parents at 

Cuqartulek; his father died there from the flu. Noel was 
10 ASC Newsletter

living at Neq’lek with his parents and siblings, as well as 

his father’s younger sister and her husband. The husband 

began to get sick soon after the epidemic appeared, so 

he and Noel’s aunt were taken to Negeqliim Painga (the 

husband’s family home), where he then died (Polty and 

Evan 1985). The Polty family also lost Yugissaq’s uncle, 

aunt and brother-in-law to the epidemic.

Noel concluded his remarks about the epidemic as 

follows:

They say not many people hunted that spring 

[ca. 1926] because people were sick all over the 

[region]...Very many, many people had died (Polty 

and Evan 1985). 

The relative method used to date the event, together 

with the remoteness of the study area and consequent 

lack of medical services available to its residents, raises 

the possibility that the 1925–1926 epidemic may have 

been a continuation of the 1918–1919 Spanish flu.

Finally, two tables were created to further emphasize 

the value of the information contained in the ANCSA 

14(h)(1) Collection. Table 1 correlates Yup’ik place 

names mentioned in elders’ accounts about Tupicuar 

and Putukulek with any known variants. The study 

area map accurately identifies the locations of the 

named features with their Yup’ik names (e.g., Kuigpak 

rather than “Yukon River”). Table 2 correlates the 

Yup’ik names of individuals mentioned in those same 

accounts with any variant Yup’ik and/or English names; 

it also indicates known kin relationships between 

the individuals. As such, the table could be useful to 

contemporary Lower Yukon region residents who are 

interested in family genealogical research. 

Table 1: Place Names

Feature 

Type

Yup’ik Name Variant 

Name

ANCSA 

14(h)(1) 

Serial 

Number(s)

Lake Arulaikeq

Oxbow Lake Aassaqvik

Old Channel Canimaar

River Cuqartalek Chakaktolik 

Creek

Site Cuqartalek Chakaktolik

Site Elqiitaq AA-9749

River Kuiga

Site Emainerpak AA-9748

Slough Igcenaq

Site Igcenaq AA-9757

Feature 

Type

Yup’ik Name Variant 

Name

ANCSA 

14(h)(1) 

Serial 

Number(s)

River Kialiq

Site Kialiq AA-10079

River Kuiggaarluk Big River

Site Kuigglualler* Kwikloaklok AA-10044

River Kuigpak Yukon River

River Kuigpalleq Driftwood 

Slough; 

Kashunuk 

River; 

Kashunuk 

Slough; 

Deadwood 

River 

Site Kuigpalleq

River Nangtuq Nantok 

River

Site Nangtuq AA-10077

Site Negeqliim 

Painga*

Pikas Point

River Neqelget

Site Neq’lek Old Man 

Polty’s 

Camp 

AA-9427

River Petmik Pitmik

Site Putukulek Kwigorlak AA-9428, 

AA-9752, 

AA-11237

Lake Qagan* Kgun Lake

Site Qanagpak Kanapak AA-9755

River Qissunaq Kashunuk 

River; 

Driftwood 

Slough

River Tupicuar

Site Tupicuar AA-9750, 

AA-10078, 

AA-11287

Site Tuutalgaq* Pilot Station

Note: An asterisk (*) next to a Yup’ik place name 

means the associated feature is not shown on Figure 1 

because it lies outside the boundaries of the map.
 ASC Newsletter 11

Table 2: Personal Names

Yup’ik Name Other Names Key Kin 

Relationships

Al’aller Al’airtell’er Sister of 

Tut’angaq; wife of 

Pistu’rluq

Anguyagpak Wassilie Evan

Apa’liq Agnes Polty Wife of Kumkaq 

(Noel Polty)

Aviraulqutaq Husband of 

Tut’angaq; father 

of Uutuuk; 

brother-in-law of 

Yugissaq

Kumkaq Uncle of Yugissaq; 

person Noel Polty 

is named after

Kumkaq Noel Polty Son of Yugissaq; 

husband of 

Apa’liq 

Matvii

Nung’aq Nick Elia Step-father of 

Ussukcaq

Pistu’rluq Husband of 

Al’aller; brotherin-law of 

Tut’angaq

Pugleralria Pavila

Qivcuaq Wife of 

Tan’gurralleq; 

aunt of Yugissaq

Selapaq Dick Nick

Sugcuq Elluqcuk; 

Maqiyunqeggli

Tan’gurralleq Husband of 

Qivcuaq; uncle of 

Yugissaq

Tut’angaq Wife of 

Aviraulqutaq; 

sister-in-law of 

Yugissaq; sister of 

Al’aller; mother of 

Uutuuk

Uass’uk Wassuuk; 

Wassillie Tinker

Ussukcaq Ben Fitka Step-son of 

Nung’aq

Uutuuk Son of Tut’angaq 

and Aviraulqutaq

Yup’ik Name Other Names Key Kin 

Relationships

Yugissaq Jacob Tunucuq/

Polty

Nephew of 

Tan’gurralleq, 

Qivcuaq and 

Kumkaq; cousin 

of Aviraulqutaq; 

father of Noel 

Polty (Kumkaq)

References

Evan, Wassilie, and Noel Polty. 1984. Oral history 

interview. Jim Kurtz, interviewer; William Friday, 

interpreter. 28 August, Pilot Station, AK. Translated 

and transcribed by Sophie Manutoli Shield, Dora David 

and Irene Reed, December 1985—February 1986. Tape 

84VAK086. Bureau of Indian Affairs, ANCSA Office, 

Anchorage.

Fortuine, Robert.1989. Chills and Fever: Health and 

Disease in the Early History of Alaska. University of 

Alaska Press, Fairbanks.

Polty, Noel. 1985. Oral history interview. Ken Pratt, 

interviewer; Ben Fitka, interpreter; Agnes Polty also 

present. 28 June, Pilot Station, AK. Translated and 

transcribed by Alice Fredson and Monica Shelden, 

May 2010. Tape 85STM006. Bureau of Indian Affairs, 

ANCSA Office, Anchorage.

Polty, Noel, and Wassilie Evan. 1985. Oral history 

interview. Ken Pratt and Michael Elder, interviewers; 

Ben Fitka, interpreter. 23 August, Pilot Station, AK. 

Translated and transcribed by Sophie Manutoli Shield 

and Irene Reed, December 1985—January 1986. Tape 

85STM048. Bureau of Indian Affairs, ANCSA Office, 

Anchorage. 

Pratt, Kenneth L. (ed.). 2009. Chasing the Dark: 

Perspectives on Place, History and Alaska Native 

Land Claims. Bureau of Indian Affairs, ANCSA Office, 

Anchorage.

Pratt, Kenneth L., and Scott A. Heyes (eds.). n.d. 

Memory and Landscape: Indigenous Responses 

to a Changing North. Athabasca University Press, 

Edmonton. 

Tinker, Wassillie. 1985. Oral history interview. Michael 

Elder, interviewer; John Tinker, interpreter. Pitkas 

Point, AK. Translated and transcribed by Barbara Nick, 

September 1985. Tape 85STM064. Bureau of Indian 

Affairs, ANCSA Office, Anchorage.

Postscript: Readers interested in learning more about 

the content of the ANCSA 14(h)(1) Collection are 

encouraged to watch for a forthcoming book (Pratt 

and Heyes n.d.) scheduled for publication in 2021 by 

Athabasca University Press. Three of its chapters are 

based on records from the collection.
12 ASC Newsletter

PANDEMICS IN LABRADOR: 1918 AND 2020–21

By Ann Budgell

For the past year, I’ve been comparing our world 

now with COVID-19 to events during the influenza 

pandemic in 1918 in Labrador, Canada where 70% of 

the Inuit inhabitants died in two communities, Okak 

and Hebron. I have spent considerable time researching 

the 1918 flu. Nigel Markham and I interviewed 

survivors for a documentary film, The Last Days 

of Okak, (National Film Board of Canada, 1985). I 

knew there was much more to the story, and in 2018 

my book, We All Expected To Die, Spanish Influenza 

in Labrador, 1918–1919, was 

published. The title comes from 

an interview with survivor John 

Pardy of Sandwich Bay. He said, 

“It was wonderful frightening 

because we all expected to die, 

you know.”

Influenza arrived in north 

Labrador in October 1918, the 

second wave worldwide. The first 

wave of flu in winter caused some 

deaths but was an unremarkable 

occurrence. Researchers believe 

exposure to the first wave likely 

prevented deaths from the more 

deadly second wave. On the icelocked north coast, however, no 

ships arrived until July, between 

the first and second waves. 

The first wave missed them 

completely.

On October 20, the Moravian 

mission ship Harmony sailed 

directly north to Hebron 

from flu-infested St. John’s, 

Newfoundland. The ship received 

a warm welcome on Sunday, 27 October. People rushed 

out of church to help unload freight. Harmony stayed 

until 4 November, then sailed south for Okak. The first 

deaths in Hebron were recorded on 7 November, and 

thereafter it was a waking nightmare. The few adults 

who were not sick struggled to keep houses warm and 

at least supply water for sufferers. Neglected sled dogs 

rampaged, attacking the sick and the dead. Moravian 

records show that 140 people died from a population of 

222 on that part of the coast.

Harmony arrived in Okak hours after leaving Hebron 

and stayed until November 8. Accounts say people began 

to be sick on the 10th and 11th, and in two weeks, 184 

people died. When it was all over, the death toll was 207 

from a population of 263. Everyone was sick. People 

died not only from influenza, but also from exposure and 

dehydration. Some sick people were killed by dogs. In 

Okak, bodies were buried in early January in a common 

grave that took a month to dig. In Hebron, shrouded 

bodies were slipped through a hole in the ocean ice. 

It happened a hundred years ago, but these stories are 

known in Labrador and also by those responsible for 

pandemic preparedness. Dr. Theresa Tam, Canada’s 

Chief Public Health Officer, recalled viewing The Last 

Days of Okak. At an event in Ottawa in September 

2018, she said, “One of my most striking memories 

was watching the film on the last days of Okak, and 

that stayed with me for the rest 

of my life, and my career really, 

and partly inspired me to work 

in this area...Public health in its 

most holistic terms has to take into 

account the underlying factors... 

the poverty, the overcrowding, 

the impact of culture, history, 

trauma on a population that 

can differentially strike those 

populations.” On the federal 

government website Tam writes, 

“I will champion the reduction 

of health disparities in key 

populations in Canada so that the 

poorest and most marginalized 

among us have a chance to lead 

healthy lives, both physically and 

mentally.”

The north coast of Labrador 

is now administered by the 

Nunatsiavut Government (NG), 

an Inuit regional government 

with authority over health. In 

November 2018, special events 

commemorated those who died 

in 1918. When my book was launched in Labrador, the 

Minister of Health, Gerald Asivak, a descendant of flu 

survivors, was one of the speakers. I was welcomed into 

schools and public meetings in Nain, Hopedale, and 

Makkovik, and met others with family stories of the flu.

Awareness of the earlier pandemic has influenced 

actions taken since COVID-19 emerged. NG President 

Johannes Lampe knows keeping the virus out is the 

best strategy for fly-in communities with limited health 

care. The nearest hospital is an hour away by air. On 

March 27, NG required people who planned to fly 

north to first isolate for 14 days. Special programs have 

been established to assist people with food and heating 

subsidies. Only one COVID-19 case has occurred in the 

Nunatsiavut area and that person recovered months ago.

Ann Budgell’s book, published in 2018
 ASC Newsletter 13

Labrador Inuit have been among the first Canadians to 

receive vaccinations. The Newfoundland government 

designated remote or isolated Indigenous communities 

as a priority. As of January 21, public health nurses 

have inoculated 71% of the residents over age 18 in 

Nain, Makkovik, Hopedale, Postville, and Rigolet. An 

unexpected, but welcome outcome of these precautions 

has been a near complete absence of influenza, as 

people are social distancing and masked.

Dr. Theresa Tam interview: Public Record, www.cpac.

ca/en/cpac-in-focus/unmasking-influenza

[Editor’s note: Ann Budgell is a former CBC journalist 

living in St. John’s Newfoundland] 

GREENLAND AND COVID-19

By René Kristensen 

Greenland, like the rest of the world, has been 

experiencing difficulties and challenges caused by the 

COVID-19 pandemic. Being an island state in the Arctic 

with a population of only 56,000 and few connections 

to the rest of the world, has made it possible to isolate 

Greenland from the COVID-19 pandemic.

In the early spring of 2020 when the first cases of 

COVID-19 were spreading in Iceland and Denmark, the 

Government of Greenland applied strict regulations on 

flights from Copenhagen and Iceland. For a period, all 

flights, both international and domestic, were grounded—

international flights to keep the virus out and domestic 

flights to prevent the virus from spreading within 

Greenland if it already had slipped into the country. 

Domestic flights were grounded for about a month and 

international flights for about two months. International 

flights were reopened in late spring when the pandemic 

in Europe was declining. Greenland established strict 

rules of quarantine and testing for all passengers entering 

Greenland, and those rules are still in place.

Before leaving Denmark, all passengers must submit 

information on their travels and destinations to the 

COVID-19 task force to have their travel plan approved. 

A negative test result is needed for boarding the flight in 

Copenhagen. Upon arrival in Greenland, all passengers 

are quarantined for a minimum five days before a re-test 

can be conducted. No passengers traveling to Greenland 

may leave the quarantine site until a re-test is negative. 

The Greenland Government advises that all unnecessary 

travel be avoided. If travelers choose to circumvent 

COVID-19 directives, they will be held personally 

accountable for any additional cost to their travels. The 

number of passengers on international flights are limited 

to about half the capacity of the plane. 

Since December 2020, it has not been possible to 

purchase a ticket for flights to Greenland. Since 

the beginning of 2021, all international flights are 

controlled by the Government. This situation will 

continue until at least the beginning of March 2021. 

Only travelers, such as police, doctors, and specialists 

with special exemption are allowed to enter Greenland. 

These procedures limiting the number of people 

traveling to Greenland, along with the rules for testing 

and quarantine, have prevented the spread of COVID-19 

in Greenland. Only 30 people have tested positive in the 

re-tests after their quarantine. So far there has been no 

spread of the virus within Greenland, and at this moment 

Greenland is COVID-19 free. We continue to live our 

daily lives almost as we did before the epidemic spread 

around the globe. We have experienced few limitations. 

Schools were closed during the first month of global 

spread, but since April, all educational facilities are open 

and operate near normal. 

But the downside of isolation has been no tourism, 

which is the second largest industry in Greenland and 

has suffered immensely during the past year. Many 

tourist operators have been forced to either close or 

shut down. In addition, restaurants and other businesses 

associated with tourism have suffered. And the fishing 

industry, which is the most important source of income 

in Greenland, has experienced difficulties. The closure 

of restaurants in most of the world has decreased 

seafood demand. Large stocks of fish and shrimp are 

piling up in Greenland’s industrial freezers, and the 

price of fish products has declined. 

Still, Greenland remains extremely vulnerable to a 

pandemic like COVID-19 because of its limited medical 

Group photo in Okak, Labrador, in 1908. Most of these 

people would have died in 1918. Moravian missionary 

Berthold Lenz is in front left, with Harmony Captain J.C. 

Jackson behind with dark mustache and pipe. Photo courtesy 

of Them Days from the Alice Perrault collection
14 ASC Newsletter

facilities. Most hospitals do not have the equipment or 

staff to handle and treat the virus. Denmark initially 

offered to assist, but the recent pandemic surge in 

Denmark in November and December, it could no longer 

guarantee support for Greenland.

The vaccination program in Greenland began in early 

2021, with the first batch of vaccines administered in 

Nuuk and Ilulissat for health care staff. So far, only a 

few Greenlanders have received the vaccine. The latest 

news is that the smaller communities should not expect 

the vaccine to be available for another three or four 

months. Therefore, the best option for Greenland is 

keep the country isolated, to ride it out, and to get the 

general population vaccinated as soon as possible.

SMITHSONIAN EDUCATORS RESPOND IN 

THE COVID ERA

By Tracie Spinale

When the majority of schools across America closed 

their physical buildings in March 2020 and moved 

to virtual instruction due to COVID-19 threats, the 

Smithsonian convened the Smithsonian Education 

Response Team. Led by the Smithsonian Office of the 

Undersecretary for Education (OUSE), and supported 

by the Smithsonian Center for Learning and Digital 

Access (SCLDA), a dozen educators representing 

Smithsonian museums, the zoo, and offices, assisted 

schools facing the immense challenge to shift 

curriculum to digital delivery. The Smithsonian’s 

decades-long investment in digitization and the web 

allowed the team to adapt and add a Distance Learning 

page to the Smithsonian’s existing digital education 

portal, Smithsonian Learning Lab.

Smithsonian digital resources for grades PreK12 covering core curriculum areas—English 

Language Arts, Social Studies/History, Science, and 

Spanish Language—populated a series of Google 

spreadsheets easily accessible and shared by national 

educators, caregivers, teens, and lifelong learners. 

Currently, the Distant Learning page provides links 

to over 1,200 high-quality Smithsonian Education 

(#SmithsonianEdu) resources.

Locally in Washington, D.C., OUSE and the Learning 

Lab team responded to a request from the District 

of Columbia Public Schools (DCPS) Chancellor to 

provide digital education resources which aligned to 

DCPS K-8 curriculum for the first semester of the 

pandemic; and later to support the DCPS Cornerstones 

curriculum, Living Through History—addressing the 

dual pandemics of COVID-19 and social justice; and 

DCPS Family Cornerstones curriculum. These initial 

successes evolved into a new initiative called Learn 

with Smithsonian DC—with increased collaboration to 

follow into 2021 and beyond.

Early in conversations, Smithsonian educators 

understood the need not only to provide high-quality, 

hi-tech resources for schools to supplement and 

address digital content, but also the need for low-tech 

resources that do not require computers for learning. 

OUSE partnered with nationally syndicated USA Today

to provide educational inserts for the newspaper’s 

weekend circulation that subscribers across urban and 

rural America received—Summer Road Trip, and most 

recently—Winter at Home. Packed with word puzzles 

and games, DIY activities, and a focus on Smithsonian 

objects that spark creativity and exploration, the guides 

reach people without having to access the internet and 

are bilingual (English/Spanish).

With all Smithsonian museums currently closed, 

educators across the Smithsonian radically shifted how 

they deliver content. Before the pandemic, Smithsonian 

museums like the National Museum of Natural History, 

National Air and Space Museum, National Museum 

of American History, and Smithsonian American Art 

Museum collaborated with teachers to educate students 

through distance learning webcasts and online content; 

Award-winning programs like Smithsonian Science 

How, STEM in 30, Smithsonian's History Explorer, and 

classroom video conferences. 

However, museums and offices which formally relied 

upon in-person workshops were challenged to reimagine 

how their content might shift online, have greater 

relevance, or meet people where they are. The American 

History Museum expanded their social studies training 

to include live webinar programs—Social Studies 

Online with the Smithsonian and Smithsonian Estudios 

Sociales en Línea (in Spanish)—which can be viewed on 

YouTube. The National Museum of African American 

History and Culture developed outreach programs 

Ann Andreasen (right), Will Richard (left), René Kristensen 

(2nd from left), and residents of Uummannaq Children’s 

Home. Photo by Will Richard
 ASC Newsletter 15

using the Zoom platform, including Artists at Home: 

School Outreach—which educators adapted from an 

in-person interactive summer arts program for teachers 

and students in grades 3-8. The National Museum of the 

American Indian developed virtual fieldtrips through 

Microsoft Teams and Zoom and developed a Youth in 

Action series on YouTube which addresses social justice. 

The Smithsonian Science Education Center created 

education materials in multiple languages, COVID-19! 

How can I protect myself and others? with the World 

Health Organization. To further teacher professional 

development, the Smithsonian Center for Learning 

and Digital Access and its education network created 

a webinar series and supporting materials called EasyPZ with the Smithsonian which presents thinking 

routines and strategies for teachers to use digitized 

museum objects in the online classroom. These are just 

some of the highlights of the digital programs which 

the Smithsonian reimagined or created during the 

pandemic; the schedule for real-time events is posted 

on the Distance Learning page calendar.

As educators and students shift back to the in-person 

classroom, the Smithsonian education community is 

forever changed by the impact of the pandemic and 

distance learning during the COVID Era. Smithsonian 

education programs recorded an increase in the number 

of pageviews and visitors accessing online content. 

This impact indicator will drive the type of programs 

the Smithsonian delivers in the future. Smithsonian 

educators anticipate the day when students can safely 

return to museums. 

While nothing virtual can replace the experience of 

physical proximity to collections and exhibitions, or 

live attendance at a workshop, pandemics revealed that 

Smithsonian educators can reach a virtual audience 

using Smithsonian web education platforms and 

through webinar outreach to teachers and students 

using media platforms like YouTube, Zoom, and 

Teams. Whether in-person, virtually, or a hybrid-mix, 

Smithsonian educators learned that we can impact 

a far greater audience as a knowledge partner if we 

are responsive to the needs of the national and local 

PreK-12 ecosystem. By collaborating with educators 

to help students make sense of the world we live in, 

Smithsonian Education strives to become a household 

name associated with learning and inquiry during the 

COVID Era and beyond.

The list of web-sites in the same order as they are 

mentioned in the text: 

Smithsonian Education Response Team: www.si.edu/

newsdesk/releases/smithsonian-offers-distancelearning-resources-during-school-closures

Distance Learning page: learninglab.si.edu/

distancelearning

Smithsonian Learning Lab: learninglab.si.edu

English Language Arts: s.si.edu/national-ela

Social Studies/History: s.si.edu/nationalsocialstudieshistory

Science: s.si.edu/national-science

Spanish Language: s.si.edu/national-spanishlanguage

Caregivers: s.si.edu/national-caregivers

Teens: s.si.edu/national-tweensteens

Lifelong learners: s.si.edu/national-lifelonglearners

DCPS K-8 curriculum: s.si.edu/dcps-kindergarten

DCPS Cornerstones curriculum: learninglab.si.edu/dcps

Living Through History: docs.google.com/

spreadsheets/d/1a_snAWsi37qP8bL4u6FklIaMcLtFMUZkAiqsnt7jrU/edit#gid=0

DCPS Family Cornerstones curriculum: dcps.dc.gov/

page/family-cornerstones-dcps-family-activity-tool

Summer Road Trip: s.si.edu/SummerRoadtrip

Winter at Home: s.si.edu/WinterAtHome

Smithsonian Educators: www.si.edu/educators

Smithsonian Science How: naturalhistory.si.edu/

education/distance-learning/smithsonian-sciencehow-webcast-archives 

STEM in 30: airandspace.si.edu/node/71551/

Smithsonian’s History Explorer: historyexplorer.si.edu

Classroom video conferences: americanart.si.edu/

education/k-12/videoconferences

Social Studies Online with the Smithsonian: www.

youtube.com/playlist?list=PLFGZwzyPnxTs4p0Tw

Y4FtqmRLIk1eAM1y

Smithsonian Estudios Sociales en Línea: www.

youtube.com/playlist?list=PLFGZwzyPnxTu7E4NF

nqBAgAZBNg59T0uc

Artists at Home: School Outreach: nmaahc.si.edu/

learn/educators/artists-home-school-outreach

Youth in Action: www.youtube.com/watch?v=29Ym

T1NIflk&list=PLS6nSmuURFJCsZkMblYU0IKyX

LL67fhtF 

COVID-19! How can I protect myself and others?:

ssec.si.edu/covid-19

Easy-PZ: learninglab.si.edu/org/sclda

Distance Learning page calendar: learninglab.si.edu/

distancelearning

(See also links in D. Biddison Learning Lab piece in 

the Alaska section, and in the Griebel-Burch report.)
16 ASC Newsletter

A VIRTUAL ALUTIIQ FISH SKIN 

WORKSHOP DURING COVID-19 TIMES

By Elisa Palomino and June Pardue

With a subsistence economy largely dependent on the 

marine environment and its animal resources, the island 

and coastal regions of southwest Alaska provide access 

to a broad range of fish used in the past for clothing 

production. The traditional Alutiiq wardrobe includes 

garments made from animal skins, including fish. These 

garments were expertly sewn by women from Kodiak 

Island. Traditionally, Alutiiq education consisted of 

acquiring survival skills: how to navigate the seas in 

all weathers; hunting and fishing skills; tanning animal 

skins; and how to repair your fish skin 

parka while out in the Arctic wilderness. 

Today, many Alutiiq people continue to 

provide for their families by subsistence 

hunting, fishing and plant gathering. They 

continue to live in the same territories, 

using the same resources as they did 

centuries ago, living in harmony with 

each other, honoring the ocean and all 

of its bounties. Through their traditional 

Indigenous 

practices and 

respect for nature 

and the animal 

kingdom, they 

live in harmony 

with nature and 

with each other 

to navigate the 

hardest of times by 

listening to their 

collective wisdom.

In the midst of 

the COVID-19 

isolation, June 

Pardue, an Alutiiq 

and Inupiaq artist 

from Kodiak Island, Alaska, and I conducted a virtual 

fish skin tanning workshop from her kitchen table in 

Anchorage in April 2020. June passed down not only 

the endangered Arctic fish skin craft, but also how her 

people were coping with the crisis by tapping into their 

knowledge of the natural world, its resourcefulness, 

story-telling abilities and creative skills. The workshop 

taught, through an online platform, new fish skin 

tanning technologies and skills, giving students the 

opportunity to engage with remote Arctic communities, 

bringing an awareness of indigenous traditions and 

traditional knowledge addressing and responding 

to health crises such the COVID pandemic through 

collaboration and connection with nature.

Since then, June conducted nearly twenty virtual fish 

skin workshops among different Alaska Village Tribes 

and communities. The workshops focused on what 

fish skin heritage means to different Arctic Indigenous 

groups and how they value fish skin heritage differently. 

The workshops engaged cultural diversity and audiences 

with different abilities, from museum curators to amateur 

tanners and young Indigenous students. Fish skin craft 

practices have the potential to offer opportunities for 

greater access to cultural heritage. In particular, it 

provides new opportunities for re-connecting Arctic 

communities with common cultural heritage. In the 

digital age, workshops can make new and sustainable 

connections between the virtual world and craftspeople.

To navigate 

perilous times, 

ancient shamans 

drew inspiration 

from nature, 

harmonising the 

fire, water, earth, 

and air elements. 

In times of 

disorientation, 

distress, and 

challenge like 

the COVID 

pandemic, it 

is crucial for 

reinstituting 

balance to 

reconnect with 

nature. The fish 

skin tanning 

workshops 

have offered a way to help us through 

these challenging times, strengthening 

our connection with nature while also 

benefiting the wider community. The 

increase of communication and availability 

of different individuals across the planet 

during the COVID lockdown has provided 

a closer relationship with each other and with nature. 

The crisis has brought a shift in perception of nature 

and the role of humanity towards nature as keeper. The 

idea of traditional Indigenous knowledge and resilience 

comes from paying attention and being a part of your 

environment and having experience and learning from it 

collectively (Clement 2020). 

The Alutiiq Indigenous fish skin tanning workshops 

have challenged and merged the digital environment 

with that of crafts during the pandemic. Reintroducing 

knowledge of ancestral tanning practices has involved 

participation of multigenerational community 

members. The activities around the tanning workshops, 

Linda Hobson (left) and 

Seth Hobson preparing 

willow bark. Photo by 

Renae Zackar

From left: Seth Hobson, Sea Hobson, and Renae 

Zackar scraping fish skins. Photo by Ida Nelson
 ASC Newsletter 17

such as storytelling and people gathering together, have 

created opportunities for young people to learn from 

elders, the backbone of Native communities. 

Traditional education involving survival skills was 

and still is necessary for cultural continuity in the 

Arctic. Young generations must be equipped both 

with traditional skills to thrive culturally and with 

digitalization skills needed for success in the modern 

world. The workshop has proposed taking the best 

both worlds have to offer but remembering always the 

values taught by the ancestors. 

Through these virtual workshops, students have built 

on the knowledge, skills and traditions of Fish skin 

tanning technology, engaged in learning activities 

based on traditional ways of knowing and learning, 

demonstrated awareness and appreciation of natural 

resources, and understood how humans and nature 

interact. The workshops follow 

the methods of the Sharing 

Knowledge project at the Arctic 

Studies Center’s Anchorage 

Office, where discussions with 

Alaska Native fish skin makers 

have been previously recorded. 

Our fish skin project hopes to 

expand in the future by creating 

a fish skin digital platform based 

on Arctic Indigenous people's 

knowledge, documenting 

traditional Alaskan fish skin 

processing technologies. 

Our gratitude goes to William 

Fitzhugh, director of the Arctic 

Studies Center, and his team: 

Stephen Loring, John Cloud, Nancy Shorey, 

Bernadette Driscoll, Dawn Biddison and Aron 

Crowell. We are grateful to the Alaska Native heritage 

programs, student participants in the workshops, 

museum curators, fish skin tanners, and elders and 

youths of Alaska Native tribes and communities.

References

Clement, M. 2020. How Indigenous communities 

respond to disasters. Retrieved 8-09-2020 from www.

thenewhumanitarian.org/feature/2020/08/18/

Indigenous-communities-disaster-humanitarianresponse-coronavirus 

Palomino, E., Rahme, L. (2021) Indigenous Arctic Fish 

Skin: A study of different traditional skin processing 

technology. Society of Leather Technologists and 

Chemists Journal. Vol. 105. Issue 1. 

AWARD FOR FISH SKIN TRADITION

By Elisa Palomino

The film, Preservation of Hezhen Fish Skin Tradition 

through Fashion Higher Education has won the Best 

Green Fashion Film award at the Milan Fashion Film 

Festival. The film identifies the historical, cultural, 

environmental, and socio-economic importance of fish 

skin as an innovative sustainable material. Secondarily, it 

proposes a vision of sustainability as an anthropological 

study of the resourcefulness and resilience of the 

Hezhen indigenous peoples, their lifestyles and fish skin 

practices; and third, it can help to preserve them. The 

application of the craft to fashion has been tested through 

a participatory workshop with fashion students from 

Central Saint Martins taught by Hezhen craftspeople to 

investigate how this material and the transmission of fish 

skin skills can contribute to sustainability practices in 

fashion. The Hezhen are one of China’s smallest ethnic 

minorities, living in northeastern 

China in the Amur river basin with 

a traditional economy based on 

hunting and fishing. In 2006, the 

Hezhen method of making clothes 

with fish skin was listed as intangible 

cultural heritage, and Wenfeng 

You—our main craftsperson during 

the workshop—was appointed its 

principal guardian.

Foning Bao participated in the 

Hezhen fish skin workshop. The 

experience of working with the 

Hezhen ethnic minority was 

invaluable for her. She collaborated 

with the Hezhen community to 

source the fish skin raw material, 

learned from their ancestral 

techniques and was inspired by their resourcefulness 

to create in her final year the CSM BA Knitwear 

collection. As a sustainable knitwear designer, she 

restricted herself to the use fish skin and ‘full fashion’ 

knit skills to build her entire final collection. Zero 

fabric, zero cut, and zero waste were the key points of 

her work. She used the fish skins in combination with 

crochet both in garments and accessories. The very 

humble material became fun, playful, and full of color.

The film, accessed at https://

fashionfilmfestivalmilano.com/project/preservationof-hezhen-fish-skin-tradition-through-fashionhigher-education/ features Wenfeng You and Sun 

Yulin (Hezhen Indigenous fish skin craft inheritors) 

and Foning Bao (CSM BA Fashion Knit graduate). Art 

Directors are Elisa Palomino, Zhongjin Zhang (CSM 

BA Performance Design and Practice), and Joseph 

Boon (CSM BA Womenswear).

Film Title: Preservation of Hezhen Fish 

Skin Tradition
18 ASC Newsletter

ASC ALASKA OFFICE

SMITHSONIAN LEARNING LAB: NEW ASC 

SITE COMPLETED

By Dawn Biddison

In the fall of 2019, the Alaska office of the Arctic 

Studies Center (ASC), in partnership with the 

Smithsonian Center for Learning and Digital Access 

(SCLDA), received internal Smithsonian Institution 

funds from the Youth Access Grant Program for the 

project “Digital Access to Community Knowledge and 

Smithsonian Collections for Alaska Native Education.” 

This funding was matched, as required for the award, 

by The CIRI Foundation and generous private donors 

in Alaska. To learn more about the development of the 

project, see Smithsonian Funds ASC Learning Lab Site 

for Alaska Schools, ASC Newsletter 26: 12-13, 2019. 

The project’s goal was to build a site on the SCLDA 

platform Learning Lab with educational resources 

created by ASC Alaska staff in collaboration with 

Alaska Native partners over nearly twenty years of 

work and through new work. ASC Museum Specialist 

Dawn Biddison, completed the project in December, 

with assistance from Tracie Spinale at SCLDA. The 

goal of creating a single location for ASC Alaska 

exhibition related resources and ongoing public 

programs was met, and the project exceeded its goals 

by creating three new educational units in addition to 

the six educational units built from five existing and 

one new set of resources. The new site was extensively 

promoted to educators, and a new section of content is 

already underdevelopment.

The ASC-AK Learning Lab site “Smithsonian Arctic 

Studies Center in Alaska” (https://learninglab.si.edu/

org/sasc-ak) features three categories of content—plus 

one work in progress section—all with connections 

to objects from the Smithsonian collections. The first 

section presents information about the Native cultures 

of Alaska, with content edited and expanded from 

the Sharing Knowledge website and the Living Our 

Cultures exhibition, as well as new content and writing. 

Each cultural collection contains a combination of text 

and images: a cultural overview written by an Alaska 

Native scholar; contemporary and archival photographs 

linked to in-depth captions, and Smithsonian objects 

from the region linked with collections information, 

knowledge from community experts and a curatorwritten historical summary.

The Distance Learning section presents nine education 

units for teaching and learning at home or in a 

classroom. Five units were drawn from past projects—

“Salmon Give Life: Learning from Alaska’s First 

Peoples”; “Gifts from the Land: Lifeways and Quill 

Art of the Athabascan Peoples”; “Iñupiaq Lessons: 

Language and Culture”; “Tsimshian Bilingual Guide: 

Twining Cedar”; and “St. Lawrence Island Yupik 

Lessons: Language and Culture”. Four new units were 

completed working collaboratively—and virtually due 

to COVID-19—with Alaska Native educators—“Alaska 

Native Designs: Parkas”; “Fun with a Purpose: Alaska 

Native Games”; “Athabascan Potlatch Values”; and 

“Yup’ik Ingenuity: Local Materials”. Each unit has 

a lesson, complete with all materials, answers and 

activities. Materials for the lesson consist of new essays, 

archival and contemporary photographs with in-depth 

captions, and Smithsonian collections objects with 

detailed Indigenous and historical information. There 

are also links to additional related resources. The unit on 

parkas was completed through additional funding from a 

new program with The CIRI Foundation. To learn more 

about this program, please see the article “Alaska Native 

Museum Fellowships” in this issue. 

The Community Videos section provides eleven 

collections for learning about and practicing Alaska 

Native arts and languages from collaborative programs 

with Alaska Native Elders, scholars, artists and 

culture-bearers. Each program was extensively filmed 

and carefully edited to include insights from Alaska 

Natives, cultural context, historical photographs and 

Distance Learning section of the “Smithsonian Arctic Studies 

Center in Alaska” site on Learning Lab. 

Image by Dawn Biddison
 ASC Newsletter 19

film footage, with additional detailed information 

provided in lower-third and intertitle texts. A twelfth 

collection presents videos from research, talks and 

events from Living Our Cultures exhibition events. 

The fourth and final section “Work in Progress” is a 

placeholder to let people know that more resources are on 

the way. It currently contains the start of a new program 

“Conversations,” which will be a series of moderated 

virtual discussions, including audience participation, 

with Alaska Native and Canadian Inuit artists providing 

insights and information on current issues. Conversations 

will be recorded and posted on Learning Lab with 

additional resources. The program will be joined and 

supported by the Inuit Arts Foundation. A pre-program 

talk “Land Acknowledgement: How to Honor Alaska 

Native Peoples” will be held in January featuring Ahtna 

Athabascan artist Melissa Shaginoff. Six Conversations 

are in the planning stages for every other month starting 

in February, 2021. 

CIRCUMPOLAR EXCHANGES: INUK ARTIST 

GLENN GEAR

By Dawn Biddison

In the fall of 2019, a new partnership began between 

the Alaska office of the Arctic Studies Center (ASC) 

and the Inuit Arts Foundation (IAF) led by ASC 

Museum Specialist Dawn Biddison and by IAF 

Executive Director and Publisher Alysa Procida

and IAF Editorial Director Britt Gallpen. The plans 

were to bring Canadian Inuit artists to Alaska and 

Alaska Inuit artists to Canada for individual and 

collaborative work, and for opportunities to foster 

new relationships between Inuit artists, organizations 

and communities. The first “Circumpolar Exchanges” 

residency in Anchorage was with Inuk artist Glen 

Gear from Montreal in January, 2020. The next artists 

scheduled with travel booked for April were Inuvialuk 

artist Maureen Gruben from Tuktoyaktuk, Northwest 

Territories, and Iñupiaq Sonya Kelliher-Combs from 

Anchorage, but this was cancelled due to COVID-19 

and substituted with work from home (see Shorelines, 

Inuit Art Quarterly, Fall 2020: 40-47).

Glenn Gear arrived in Anchorage to very cold January 

weather and with great enthusiasm about his time in 

Alaska. Glenn is an animator, filmmaker and visual artist, 

originally from Newfoundland, who finds inspiration by 

exploring his identity as an urban Inuk with ancestral 

ties to Nunatsiavut. For his animated short films, Glen 

utilizes collage and archival materials to explore issues of 

“individual and collective history, the exchange between 

Indigenous and settler populations, folklore, gender, and 

archival material.” A selection of his films played in the 

ASC exhibition space throughout January. During his 

residency, Glenn studied the Smithsonian and Anchorage 

Museum collections and gave an artist talk. He turned 

the ASC archaeology lab into an animation studio, where 

he also hosted open studio hours for Alaska Native 

artists and for museum staff and visitors. Glen made 

community connections by meeting staff at the Alaska 

Native Heritage Center and Cook Inlet Tribal Council, 

and shared the goal that he return to teach animation 

workshops. There was time for a weekend winter road 

trip with views of the mountains and ice-clad mudflats of 

Turnagain Arm, and the muskox and wood bison of the 

Alaska Wildlife Conservation Center. 

The Inuit Arts Foundation and Arctic Studies Center 

plan to restart the Circumpolar Exchanges program 

in 2021. Meetings will begin in January. Look for 

program updates in the next ASC Newsletter.

ALASKA NATIVE MUSEUM FELLOWSHIPS: 

A NEW PROGRAM WITH THE CIRI 

FOUNDATION

By Dawn Biddison

In the fall of 2019, Nadia Sethi at The CIRI 

Foundation (TCF) contacted Aron Crowell and Dawn 

Biddison to meet with their staff about a new initiative 

in support of Alaska Native museum opportunities 

through the new grant program Alaska Native Cultural 

Heritage and Artistic Sovereignty in Museums 

Project. The Alaska office of the Arctic Studies Center 

was asked to host the first program, which was codeveloped with and funded by TCF over the winter of 

2019–2020. The Museum Sovereignty fellowship was 

planned as a paid, intensive, in-person mentorship with 

Dawn over eight-weeks in the spring of 2020, and was 

reorganized into a fourteen-week virtual mentorship in 

the fall/winter of 2020 due to COVID-19. 

Inuk artist Glenn Gear at Turnagain Arm. 

Photo by Dawn Biddison
20 ASC Newsletter

The fellowship focused on creating a free online 

educational resource about Alaska Native heritage 

utilizing new research and writing with museum and 

archival collections. The mentorship also addressed 

larger themes regarding museum practices, including 

decolonization. The fellowship recipient was Amelia 

“Amy” Ahnaughuq Topkok, an Iñupiaq from 

Kotzebue who lives in Fairbanks and whose parents 

are from Shishmaref and Noatak. Amy has worked 

at University of Alaska Fairbanks (UAF) since 1994 

and is the Biomedical Learning and Student Training 

program Reporting and Outreach Coordinator. In 

addition, she teaches courses at UAF on Alaska Native 

dance and performance. Since the subject of her MA 

work at UAF was Iñupiaq parkas, which she plans 

to build on when she pursues her Ph.D., the selected 

subject for the educational resource was Alaska Native 

parkas with a focus on the Iñupiaq atigi (fur parka). 

Amy’s fellowship provided her the opportunity 

to conduct new interviews and write essays on 

the subject of her academic interest and to learn 

about creating educational materials. She studied 

the Distance Learning units on the Smithsonian 

Arctic Studies Center in Alaska Learning Lab site 

and co-developed a framework for a new education 

unit. Amy learned about selecting museum objects, 

archival images and contemporary photographs, and 

about writing in-depth captions. Grant funding gave 

honorarium to three Iñupiaq culture-bearers for her to 

conduct extensive interviews about the Iñupiaq atigi, 

developing her knowledge base and providing content 

for her writing. 

Amy spoke with Elder Mary Sue Anderson, her 

aunt, whose memories included how her grandmother 

Emily Paizuzraq Kiyutelluk Barr trapped and 

tanned squirrels at Ublasaun, a former winter reindeer 

herding camp northeast of Shishmaref, and how her 

grandmother made an atigi with them. Amy also 

spoke with skin-sewers Mary Lou Sours of Noatak 

and Nasugraq Lane, originally from Point Hope. In 

writing three essays for the project, Amy worked with 

Dawn over drafts to brush up on her writing skills and 

to increase the role of Indigenous knowledge in her 

writing. The resulting education unit Alaska Native 

Design: Parkas presents nineteen photographs of 

people and museum objects with detailed captions, 

three essays and a lesson. There are also three 

additional resources, including a guide for making a 

qaspeq/atikłuk—the Yup’ik and Iñupiaq word for a 

summer shirt or dress, similar to an atigi but made 

from fabric—written by Amy for a past workshop and 

now improved with additional information and editing, 

which she can utilize in the future along with all of her 

research and writing. 

Before the first Alaska Native Cultural Heritage and 

Artistic Sovereignty in Museums Project was completed, 

The CIRI Foundation asked the Arctic Studies Center to 

provide the next one, which was gladly accepted. ASC 

looks forward to partnering again with TCF to mentor an 

Alaska Native in museum-related work.

The list of web-sites in the same order as they are 

mentioned in the text: 

Center in Alaska Learning Lab site: https://

learninglab.si.edu/org/sasc-ak

Alaska Native Design: Parkas: https://learninglab.

si.edu/q/ll-c/W4o8K4pBDVcFswN2#r/30467

NEW MEDIA: WEAVING A YUP’IK ISSRAN 

(GRASS CARRYING BAG)

By Dawn Biddison

In 2019, the Alaska office of the Arctic Studies 

Center partnered with Qanirtuuq Inc., the local tribal 

organization for the village of Quinhagak, Alaska, to 

research and document the Yup’ik tradition of weaving 

an issran (grass carrying-bag) in their community. 

Local artist Grace Anaver joined the team as lead 

artist, under the guidance of her older sister Pauline 

Beebe and assisted by her younger sister Sarah Brown. 

Locally harvested taperrnaq (coarse seashore grass) was 

gathered and processed for drying and curing in July, and 

grass from the previous fall was dyed. In August, Grace 

Cover of the DVD set “Material Traditions: Weaving a 

Yup’ik Issran (Grass Carrying-Bag).” Image by Dawn 

Biddison; photo of Lance Anaver by Erika Larsen, 2015 
 ASC Newsletter 21

taught Yup’ik grass weavers and learners how to twine 

an issran in the Nunalleq Culture & Archaeology Center. 

To learn more about the field research in Quinhagak, see 

Yup'ik Twined Grass Bags: Renewing an Ancestral Art, 

ASC Newsletter 26:6-8, 2019. The collaborative project 

was managed, filmed and edited by Museum Specialist 

Dawn Biddison, who produced a DVD set with eleven 

videos, Material Traditions: Weaving a Yup’ik Issran 

(Grass Carrying-Bag).

In the videos, viewers meet Grace in an extended 

interview and learn about the cultural context of 

Yup’ik grass-weaving, supplemented with archival 

photographs and photographs of woven grass objects 

from the Smithsonian and Anchorage Museum 

collections. Additional videos provide detailed 

information, instructions, patterns and demonstrations 

from when and how to harvest grass—including how 

to accommodate practices for the changing climate—

to all of the techniques needed to complete an issran. 

Viewers learn directly from Grace and along with 

students. The videos are posted on YouTube at the 

Smithsonian Arctic Studies Center Alaska channel

nd on the Smithsonian Learning Lab platform at the 

Smithsonian Arctic Studies Center in Alaska site 

with links to issran examples from the Smithsonian 

collections. The Learning Lab site also offers a related 

educational unit Yup’ik Ingenuity: Local Materials 

with a lesson, activities and materials, including 

archival and contemporary photographs and museum 

object photographs, all with in-depth information. DVD 

sets were widely distributed to project participants, 

to Alaska Native organizations and schools, and 

to libraries, archives, and museums in Alaska and 

nationally.

The list of web-sites in the same order as they are 

mentioned in the text

Smithsonian Arctic Studies Center Alaska channel:

https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCNpC1tXkqJaSU7ZSxUWAfA

Smithsonian Arctic Studies Center in Alaska site: 

https://learninglab.si.edu/q/ll-c/

sbmuMYcg9n5Gv0QC#r/38039

Yup’ik Ingenuity: Local Materials: https://learninglab.

si.edu/q/ll-c/y3BDjoz5n87sBu0N#r/30376

CENTENNIAL PUBLICATION ON THE DANISH 

FIFTH THULE EXPEDITION (1921–1924)

By Aron L. Crowell

Since 2018 the Arctic Studies Center has collaborated 

with the Danish National Museum, the Danish Arctic 

Institute, and a team of international and Indigenous

scholars to commemorate the centennial of the Fifth 

Thule Expedition (FTE) from Greenland to Chukotka 

in 1921–1924, led by Danish-Greenlandic ethnographer 

Knud Rasmussen. The FTE retrospective, organized 

by Igor Krupnik and Aron Crowell, has generated 

new historical assessments of the expedition and its 

results, innovative research based on its voluminous 

records and collections, and increased understanding of 

the FTE’s enduring value for community-based cultural 

heritage. The project began with planning meetings 

and archival research in Copenhagen and Washington 

DC, leading up to an all-day session of research papers 

at the 2019 meeting of the Alaska Anthropological 

Association in Nome, the endpoint of the expedition’s 

Arctic journey (see ASC Newsletters 25:38-42 and 

26:38-42). An exciting recent outcome was Brendan 

Griebel’s 2020 ASC Burch Lecture, which presented 

work by the Inuinnait (Copper Inuit) organization 

Pitquhirnikkut Ilihautiniq / Kitikmeot Heritage Society 

to access, restore, and mobilize Inuit knowledge 

documented during the FTE (Griebel, this issue). 

The FTE project will reach a new milestone later this 

year (2021) with the publication of 18 articles and 

essays by Danish, Russian, Canadian, and American 

authors in a double issue of the Alaska Journal of 

Anthropology. Crowell and Krupnik are the co-editors 

of the volume, which leads off with a foreword by 

Bernadette Miqqusaaq Dean of Rankin Inlet, 

Nunavut, who participated in the Nome conference and 

whose grandparents hosted Rasmussen at their snow 

home on Southampton Island in 1922.

The Fifth Thule Expedition was many things—a bold 

adventure in Arctic travel and fieldwork, a crowning 

achievement of Danish polar exploration, a cooperative 

research program that relied heavily on Inughuit and 

Inuit knowledge and support, and an early example 

of “insider ethnography” conducted by Rasmussen, 

who was part Greenlandic Inuit and a fluent speaker 

of Kalaallisut and Inuktitut. Rasmussen’s overriding 

interests were in oral traditions, spiritual beliefs, and 

mythology, which he recorded for the Iglulingmiut, 

Nattilingmiut, Qairnirmiut, Inuinnait, Inuvialuit, Iñupiat, 

and Cup’ig peoples of Canada and Alaska. Cultural 

studies by Rasmussen and Kaj Birket-Smith were 

complemented by Therkel Mathiassen’s archaeological 

research in the Central Arctic, which uncovered evidence 

of the ancestral Thule culture and of the Thule migration 

from Bering Strait to Greenland. In the frame of polar 

scientific history the FTE stands out as an audacious and 

unequalled attempt to survey the entire geographical and 

historical continuum of Inuit cultures across the polar 

regions of three continents, and to resolve theoretical 

debates about their origin and development. Not all of 

these aims were achieved at the time, yet as the scholars 

to commemorate the centennial project demonstrates, 
22 ASC Newsletter

the FTE continues to generate new scholarship and 

meaningful understandings of Arctic cultures.

Records of the FTE include its massive Final Report, 

a series of 35 monographs by Rasmussen, BirketSmith, and Mathiassen that fill entire shelves in 

Arctic libraries; extensive object collections at the 

Danish National Museum in Copenhagen; 4,000 still 

photographs in various repositories, many posted online 

by the Danish Arctic Institute; 25,000 meters of movie 

film shot by expedition photographer; and a plethora of 

FTE correspondence, diaries, maps, and field reports in 

the Knud Rasmussen Archive, Royal Danish Archive, 

and Greenland National Museum and Archive. 

Papers in the upcoming volume of the Alaska Journal of 

Anthropology draw on these resources and reveal their 

rich potential for new discoveries, interpretations, and 

applications. The authors and titles (with “Fifth Thule 

Expedition” abbreviated) give a quick preview of the 

scope and diversity of the AJA collection. Appearing 

in the Introduction are the “Foreword” (Bernadette 

Makusak Dean); “The FTE: A Western Arctic 

Perspective” (Aron Crowell); and “From Greenland 

to the Pacific: Celebrating the Centennial of the FTE, 

1921–1924” (Kenn Harper and Igor Krupnik). Part 

One, Intellectual History, includes: “Plans for the FTE 

and the Great Sled Journey across Canada and Alaska” 

(Knud Michelsen); “The FTE and the Indigenous 

Participants Who Made It Possible” (Marie Kleist); 

“Assessing the Significance of the FTE for Inuinnait 

and Inuit Knowledge” (Brendan Griebel, Darren 

Keith, and Pamela Gross); “Inuit Cultural Heritage: 

Museum Collecting before the FTE” (Bernadette 

Driscoll Engelstad); and “Competing Arctic Pasts: 

Cohort Assessment of the FTE Legacy” (Igor Krupnik).

Part Two, Alaska-Chukotka Crossroads, emphasizes 

Rasmussen’s observations and interactions during 

the final leg of the expedition when he and a small 

Inughuit team traveled by dogsled and skin boat 

along the Alaska coast from Utqiaġvik to Kotzebue, 

Utqiagvik whalers and umiat at the ice edge. 

Courtesy of Danish Arctic Institute. Photo by Leo Hansen

and by schooner from Nome to Cape Dezhnev (East 

Cape) on the Russian side of Bering Strait. The papers 

are: “Whaling and Whale Spirits in the Western 

Arctic: Notes from the FTE (Aron Crowell); “Spirits 

across the Arctic: Selected Drawings Collected by 

Knud Rasmussen in Nome, 1924” (Birgitte Sonne); 

“Tracking Nayagnir: A Shaman’s Encounters with 

Murder, Western Law, the Lomen Brothers Company, 

and Knud Rasmussen” (Kenneth Pratt); “The FTE’s 

Siberian Legacy” (Daria Schwalbe, Anne Lisbeth 

Schmidt, and Kristofer Schmidt); and “Dezhnev 

(Kengisqun): The Westernmost Point of the FTE” 

(Sergei Shokarev).

Part Three, Fifth Thule Expedition Resources Today, 

highlights research and resources in museums, 

archives, and private collections: “Inuit Pencil 

Drawings and Co-Creation: Rediscovering the Artwork 

Made During the FTE” (Martin Appelt, Bjarne 

Grønnow, and Anne Mette Randrup Jørgensen); 

“Records of the FTE in Danish Archives” (Bent 

Nielsen); “Tracing the Lost Films of the Fifth Thule 

Expedition in Alaska” (Scott MacKenzie and Anna 

Westerstahl Stenport); “Menadelook: An Iñupiat 

Teacher’s Photographs of Wales, Diomede, and 

Nome during the FTE Years” (Eileen Norbert); 

“Rasmussen’s Engraved Walrus Tusks from Chukotka” 

(Mikhail Bronshtein); and “Epilogue: Reflections on 

the FTE Centennial” (William Fitzhugh).

As guest editors of the special FTE issue of the Alaska 

Journal of Anthropology, Igor Krupnik and I are 

grateful to the authors who co-created this exceptional 

collection of FTE papers; to dozens of peer reviewers 

(you know who you are!) who gave their time and 

attention to improving the texts; to Kenneth Pratt and 

Brian Wygal, editors at the journal; and to the Danish 

National Museum, Danish Arctic Institute, Smithsonian 

Institution Archives, Peabody Museum, and other 

repositories that made their collections available for 

study and publication. We all look forward to the 

publication, anticipated this fall.
 ASC Newsletter 23

NEWS

ORAL HISTORY, ORAL PRESENT, ORAL 

FUTURE: THE LANGUAGE OF INUINNAIT 

HERITAGE RESEARCH

By Brendan Griebel

[Editor’s note: Dr. Griebel adapted his 2020 Ernest S. 

Burch Memorial Lecture for the presentation below. The 

event was given virtually because of COVID-19 travel 

restrictions and was followed by a panel discussion 

reported in the article follow this one. There one can find 

Dr. Griebel’s and the panelists’ bios.] 

I wanted to start this talk by recognizing the man to 

whom this speaker series is dedicated. As a researcher, 

Ernest S. Burch, Jr. was keenly interested in 

questions about the Inuit past and understood the key 

to exploring this history was Inuit themselves. He 

carefully constructed arguments for how and why Inuit 

ethnography—or the gathering of firsthand accounts 

and oral histories—was needed to qualify the Arctic 

past. Burch became attuned to Inuit stories through 

extensive fieldwork among the Inupiat of Northern 

Alaska and the Caribou Inuit along the western shores 

of Hudson’s Bay. He listened to what Inuit had to say, 

and in doing so he was richly rewarded with a storied 

past rarely granted to those outside the culture.

In light of Burch’s work, I want to focus my talk on 

his conviction that the inclusion of Inuit orality holds 

the key to the successful reconstruction—and hence 

a fuller understanding—of the Inuit past. I would like 

to forward a second argument: that the Inuit past—or 

more precisely Inuit orality about the Inuit past—also 

holds the key to supporting a future for Inuit language 

and traditional knowledge. Across the Arctic, Inuit 

communities are using language as a key for building 

greater understanding about their history, but also for 

strengthening the collective body of cultural knowledge 

being transferred to future generations. 

I would specifically like to describe what the intersection 

of Inuit history and language looks like through the 

perspective of Inuit directed research. For over a decade, 

I have been an employee of a research facility called 

Pitquhirnikkut Ilihautiniq, or the Kitikmeot Heritage 

Society, located in the western Nunavut community of 

Cambridge Bay. Pitquhirnikkut Ilihautiniq is led by an 

Inuinnaq Executive Director and a board of twelve local 

Elders. Unlike many research institutions, its emphasis 

is not only on generating new data, but making sure that 

existing knowledge—deeply embedded in Inuinnait 

culture—continues to inform present and future ways of 

being in the world. 

CANADIAN PLANS TO CELEBRATE THE 

FIFTH THULE EXPEDITION

Reviewed by Kenn Harper

Some of the initiatives underway in Canada to celebrate 

the centennial of the Fifth Thule Expedition are being 

made by Danes residents in Canada.

The Federation of Danish Associations in Canada will 

shortly publish a book by Knud Michelsen (a relative 

of Knud Rasmussen) geared to a Danish-Canadian 

audience, in a limited edition expected to be 500 

copies. It will be titled Ambassador on a Dog Sled. In 

December, the Federation of Danish Associations in 

Canada published an article by Kenn Harper, “‘It is 

the Eskimos that Own My Heart’: Knud Rasmussen and 

the Fifth Thule Expedition,” as the lead title in its 2020 

Heritage Book (Ottawa, pp. 22-31). 

Harper will also be writing a brief article for the 

publication “Danes,” published by Danes Worldwide 

for the Danish diaspora and distributed in 114 countries.

Inhabit Media, an Inuit-owned publishing company 

based in Iqaluit and Toronto, plans to publish another 

version of Knud Michelsen’s book edited and geared 

specifically to the interests of their primary readership, 

Canadian Inuit. Their books also appeal to a general 

Canadian readership, and this volume will be targeted to 

young adult readers. 

In 1976, the Government of the Northwest Territories, 

Department of Education, published an oversized 

three-volume set of books called simply Fifth Thule 

Expedition. The books were thin, ranging from 19 to 

32 pages, and published bilingually in English and 

Inuktitut using the syllabic orthography. They were also 

unique in that they were written in the first person, in 

Knud Rasmussen’s voice. They were illustrated with 

photographs from the expedition and drawings by 

the well-known Inuit artist Germaine Arnaktauyok. 

Inhabit Media is also considering republishing these 

volumes to celebrate the centennial. 

A presentation on the Fifth Thule Expedition was 

expected to be a part of Nordic Bridges, a year-long 

cultural initiative between the Nordic countries and 

Canada, to be co-ordinated by the Harbourfront Centre 

in Toronto, but with exhibitions to appear in many 

venues across Canada. Unfortunately, the entire initiative 

has been postponed until 2022 because of COVID-19. 

Similarly, there will be a Fifth Thule Expedition 

component to the next Inuit Studies Conference. The 

next conference will be held in Winnipeg, but the date is 

as yet unknown because of the pandemic. There is still 

time for other initiatives to be brought forward as the 

FTE centennial spans three years.
24 ASC Newsletter

Inuinnait are a regional group of Inuit who live in the 

Central Canadian Arctic. For hundreds of years, this 

group has lived in a specific landscape and become 

highly attuned to its environment. Prior to initial contact 

with western civilization and its material culture, 

Inuinnait lived a purely land-based existence, relying on 

their immediate surroundings for the tools they made, 

the clothes they wore, the food they ate, in short... for 

everything. The term Inuinnait quite literally means ‘the 

people’ in their language. Over the last several decades, 

its use as a collective name has emerged to replace 

‘Copper Inuit,’ or ‘Copper Eskimos,’ terms attributed to 

them by early explorers due to their distinct use of the 

naturally sourced copper as metal for their tools.

Beyond their geographic territory and use of copper, 

Inuinnait define themselves from other Inuit groups 

through their 

clothing styles, 

social practices, and 

material technologies, 

but perhaps most 

importantly through 

their language 

called Inuinnaqtun. 

Inuinnaqtun has 

an estimated 600 

speakers distributed 

across the four 

communities 

of Ulukhaktok, 

Kugluktuk, 

Cambridge Bay, and 

Gjoa Haven. Most 

of these speakers are 

Elders. The disappearance of a language precipitates 

the loss of culturally unique knowledge. Inuinnaqtun 

not only means to speak, but also to create, to practice, 

to do, to think—to be—like an Inuinnaq (Inuinnaq, 

meaning a human being); a larger cycle in which 

language allows people to both name their world and 

properly function within it. 

While knowledge and awareness of Inuinnaqtun 

continues to be embedded in the memories, skills, and 

technology of modern populations, it is increasingly 

based on experience with urban as opposed to landbased living. The transition from land to town happened 

quickly among the Inuinnait. They were among the last 

Inuit groups to be contacted by western culture, most 

families not encountering non-Inuit explorers and traders 

until the mid-to-late 1910s. By the mid-1950s, Inuinnait 

life was shifted into towns and a system of residential 

schooling further removing children from their families, 

language, and land. As Inuinnait life adjusted to the 

realities of settlement, practices associated with living 

on the land became less used. This in turn, brought 

about the gradual disappearance of highly customized 

technology, terminology, and social relationships that 

accompanied these activities. 

Pitquhirnikkut Ilihautiniq’s Inuinnait heritage 

programming is grounded in the blunt reality that the 

Inuinnaqtun language and contexts of oral history 

are disappearing from popular use. Inuinnaqtun and 

its supporting knowledge is described by many to be 

‘sleeping’—its absence qualified as dormancy rather 

than loss. But how to ease the language into a more 

wakeful state? Our solution lay in making Inuinnaqtun—

both the language and the greater ecosystem it implies—

the specific focus of our heritage research. 

I wanted to start my description of the Inuinnait heritage 

program by thinking about the past and the language 

we use to describe 

it. I am, by trade, an 

archaeologist. This 

profession encourages 

a certain way of 

thinking and talking 

about old objects and 

locations as though 

they truly belong to a 

different era. They are 

‘artifacts,’ ‘remains,’ 

material testaments to 

a past event. When I 

first began my work 

as an archaeologist 

in Cambridge Bay, 

I was specifically 

there to research Inuit stories about archaeological 

artifacts and sites. Like Ernest Burch, I was mostly 

seeking correlation, this idea that Inuit narratives could 

be recorded to better position archaeologists’ own stories 

or theories about what, exactly, happened. Over the 

course of multiple archaeological excavations with local 

Elders, it quickly became clear that they were speaking 

a different language of archaeology. Conversations 

about the objects or sites being excavated were not 

always anchored in the past. They were often not even 

about the past or even the materials being discussed. 

Rather, they provided much more subjective narratives, 

ones that included personal memories and experiences; 

descriptions of technologies and social practices; 

place and seasonality; people, their relationships and 

their regional names; and, perhaps most importantly, a 

highly focused Inuinnaqtun terminology for all of these 

phenomena.

Rather than sifting through these narratives for 

information that helped to support archaeological 

questions at hand—the specific age of sites visited, for 

The geographic distribution of Inuit languages. Note the Inuinnaqtun 

language positioned in the Central Canadian Arctic. 

Source: noahedits/wikipedia.org
 ASC Newsletter 25

example, the functions of old tools, or possible diets of 

past people—we began to ask how Inuinnait stories could 

be used to access and communicate a more comprehensive 

Inuinnaqtun perspective. The most obvious way for our 

team to approach this work was to redirect storytelling 

and language about history into the present community 

by creating opportunities for experiential learning about 

historical practices, technologies, and places. The resulting 

workshops—which typically focus on the revival of 

traditional technologies, hunting practices, and cultural 

skills—use the firsthand memories of Elders to transfer 

skills and language in a setting where people are engaging 

with each other, deepening knowledge of landscape, 

and can actually feel the meaning of new words they’re 

learning.

While ideal for bringing Inuinnaqtun back to 

communities, these workshops have their limitations. 

Sometimes collective memory of the past has gaps. 

Perhaps no one remembers the name of an old tool. Or 

the name is remembered, but the details of how to make 

it, forgotten. Both the strength and the weakness of an 

oral culture, is that its entire knowledge resides in people. 

Where does one go when these people can’t be found, 

or no longer exist? How does one re-cover intangible 

knowledge about the past? For some of our projects, we 

had to start looking for information outside the culture. 

As generations grow more distant from traditional 

lifeways, there is an increasing reliance on secondary 

sources for the recovery of traditional knowledge. 

This brings the issue of knowledge access to the 

forefront. The reality for many northern communities 

is that a great number of historical sources lie beyond 

collective memory, and beyond the Arctic itself. 

Museums, archives and memory institutions, both in 

North America and around the world, hold a significant 

portion of existing Inuinnait knowledge. Beginning 

around 1910, anthropologists, traders, and explorers 

began to travel throughout the Inuinnait region, 

receiving information directly from knowledge holders 

and recording them in the relative permanence of 

photographs and fieldnotes. Numerous objects were 

collected. As time and social change reduced the 

number of these resources made, used and owned by 

Inuinnait, exported collections have remained intact 

and are full of potential to guide contemporary efforts 

for cultural revival. But how to get at them? Most 

often, by going to museums. Our team has worked with 

multiple museums over the years to visit collections 

and begin the process of reclaiming Inuit knowledge 

from them. For the purposes of this paper, I will 

describe one specific case study.

2021 marks the 100th anniversary of the Fifth Thule 

Expedition. Between 1921 and 1924, the DanishGreenlandic ethnographer Knud Rasmussen led a 

research team across the whole of the North American 

Arctic—from Greenland to Siberia, acquiring detailed 

observations, collections, and documentation about 

the Inuit cultures they encountered. The linguistic and 

cultural fluency of Knud Rasmussen—resulting in 

part from his mixed European and Greenlandic Inuit 

heritage—allowed him to communicate with Inuit 

in their own tongue and earn their trust as an insider. 

Rasmussen spent a total of three months specifically 

documenting Inuinnait life. 

In 2015, we began to consider the meaning and 

utility of Rasmussen’s work for contemporary 

Inuinnait. We partnered with the National Museum 

of Denmark—the recipient of many of Rasmussen’s 

collections—and over the years made several trips 

with Elders and staff to view and interpret their 

object and archival collections. Elders Bessie Pihoak 

Omilgoetok and Joseph Tikhak, both descendants 

of Inuinnait who met with the Fifth Thule Expedition, 

spent days in the museum’s collection rooms telling 

stories and gathering information about the items, 

including identifying their uses, social context, and 

terminology. Despite being almost 100 years old, 

many of the objects were familiar to the Elders from 

their childhood and opened gateways to related stories 

from that time. 

Rasmussen’s writings about Inuinnait society are a 

wealth of linguistic information. In some cases, they 

are the only source material for Inuinnaqtun terms: 

names of tools, songs, and people. These recorded 

words quite literally define whole new ways of thinking 

about Inuinnait history. But getting at these terms 

is not so easy. While fluent in the West Greenlandic 

language, Rasmussen used a very unusual script for 

his writing, which he adopted from German Moravian 

missionaries. Because of its orthography, this script is 

particularly difficult to read for translation purposes. 

Luckily, Rasmussen provided a phonetic key, a 

guideline to the specific sounds accompanying each 

letter. This key frustratingly diverted the text through 

four other languages: English, French, German and 

Scottish. A team of language experts across the 

Inuinnait communities was organized, with each team 

overseeing the transcription of Inuinnaqtun songs, 

stories, and terminology from these writings. Each 

word of Rasmussen’s text was carefully eased back to 

orality, Inuinnaqtun experts combining their existing 

knowledge of available sounds within the language and 

finding closest equivalents within the foreign languages 

Rasmussen set as keys. 

Once translated into contemporary Inuinnaqtun 

orthography, translation of meaning still had to occur. 
26 ASC Newsletter

The songs and spiritual chants of Inuinnait are their 

own form of poetry, riddled with metaphors, allegory 

and narrative devices. The song of a hunter waiting 

for seal, for example, might never make a mention of 

the animal as it would be a sign of disrespect. Another 

word might be used to reference the animal without 

naming it outright. To understand the meanings of the 

song, one has to draw on this larger Inuinnaqtun body 

of cultural association and context. 

The case studies described focused on bringing the past 

into the present. But for Inuinnait-directed research, 

there is also a further requirement of knowledge 

transmission: in other words, ensuring that the past, 

and the present’s engagement with the past, is brought 

into the future. Our team decided at an early stage that 

this future would be digital. I like to think that this was 

prompted, in part, by the fact that the Inuinnaqtun word 

for computer is the same word as for brain: qaritaq. 

What, we asked ourselves, would a digital version of an 

Inuinnaq story-teller’s brain even look like? How would 

it function? We worked with this concept of digital 

memory to begin mapping out the ways that history 

resided in both the individual and collective mind. We 

determined three key points about oral history that would 

guide our work: (1) it relies first and foremost on orality 

and spoken language; (2) it encourages connectivity, 

bringing together the many parts of an Inuinnaqtun 

ecology including language, people and land; and (3) it 

is the product of an individual’s life experience. What 

they heard, what they saw, what they remembered. In 

figuring out how a digital format could accommodate 

these qualities, we came up with the idea of a knowledge 

bank. A knowledge bank, as we saw it, would be an 

enduring repository of everything a community believed 

was important about its heritage. While it would never 

replace firsthand experiences with historical content, 

it could serve as a way to remember and continue 

telling them, not as a single event or unique object, 

but as a larger atmospheric cloud of conversation and 

association.

We understood early that a knowledge bank would 

have to be custom built. In 2006, we partnered with 

the Geomatics and Cartographic Research Centre at 

Carleton University in Ottawa, Canada to develop our 

own solution to storing, organizing and preserving 

Inuinnait knowledge. At the time, the Geomatics 

Centre was pioneering a cybercartography framework 

called Nunaliit. There were several qualities about 

this framework that immediately struck a chord: (1) It 

was open source. All its code is publicly available and 

non-proprietary. Nobody owns it, nobody profits from 

it. (2) It is what’s referred to as a distributed network, 

meaning that it connects multiple users through the 

same underlying system. A benefit of this is that as 

these users shape the framework to their specific needs, 

any new functions, features, or upgrades developed 

by one user is immediately available to anyone else 

using the framework. The costs of maintaining the 

system over time are also distributed, making it more 

sustainable. (3) It is a relational database, which means 

that each piece of information entered into a Nunaliit 

database is a discrete document. A museum record 

of an Inuinnait parka, for example, would be its own 

document. A photo of that parka, a separate document. 

A photo of someone wearing the parka a separate 

document, a comment that someone makes about the 

person wearing the parka, a separate document. And so 

on. This allows for a system in which data is a cloud of 

free-floating documents with no prescribed structure. 

As documents become increasingly related through use, 

they form ever-changing pathways of interconnection 

and association.

Using Nunaliit as its foundation, the first Inuinnait 

heritage platform was developed in 2007 to visualize 

and explore place name research conducted by our 

organization. Called the Kitikmeot Place Names 

Atlas (atlas.kitikmeotheritage.ca), the platform was 

designed to enhance western cybercartography with 

Inuinnait language and understandings of land. The 

platform features a continuous, zoomable map that 

allows users to navigate the Inuinnait region and 

select specific place names for further investigate. 

As a language-focused map, it also provides users 

with the pronunciation of each place name by a 

fluent Inuinnaqtun speaker. Places can be linked to 

multimedia files of Elders and land user interviews 

about activities and traditions associated with the 

specific landscape. In some cases, specific places 

were enhanced by 3D panospheres, allowing users 

to virtually view the described environment. To date, 

roughly 1500 Inuinnait place names have been entered 

into the system.

As we became better acquainted with developing these 

platforms, we began to map out new ways of engaging 

with Inuinnait knowledge and orality. In partnership 

with the Danish National Museum, we created a new 

model for sharing digital Inuinnait knowledge. In 2017, 

the National Museum transferred all its digital records 

of Inuinnait photos, objects, stories, songs, and place 

names to Pitquhirnikkut Ilihautiniq under a creative 

commons license. We used this digital collection to 

create a platform called the Fifth Thule Atlas (www.

thuleatlas.org), specifically designed to provide access 

to all Inuinnait knowledge gathered by Rasmussen’s 

expedition. 

The Fifth Thule Atlas allows for Inuit knowledge to be 

accessed in three different ways. Firstly, users can locate 
 ASC Newsletter 27

knowledge in a spatial manner through a geographic 

map tracing out the Fifth Thule Expedition’s travel 

routes and encounters with Inuit camps. Each location 

can be clicked to access Inuit information related to that 

place: photos of Inuit encountered, transcribed songs 

and stories collected at a particular site. The second 

form of interface is an interactive PDF version of the 

Expedition’s reports. These can be navigated much like 

a traditional book, but have added features of keyword 

searchability and allows users to access and comment 

on each reference to Inuit knowledge. Comments can 

take the form of audio, video or text. The Atlas’ final 

interface allows users to directly access categories of 

content such as place names, people, oral traditions, 

photographs, or maps. 

The Fifth Thule Atlas was our first foray into thinking 

about how material collections in particular can benefit 

from this digital approach. Last year, we developed 

a prototype collections 

management software 

that we call the Inuinnait 

Knowledge Bank. The 

Inuinnait Knowledge 

Bank holds digitized 

records from a growing 

number of museums and 

archives in addition to its 

own digitized archival 

collection. The ultimate 

goal for the Inuinnait 

Knowledge Bank is to 

have a centralized and 

searchable record for 

every digitally available 

Inuinnait object, photo, 

and archives document 

around the world. 

The Inuinnait Knowledge Bank is specifically 

designed to foster new opportunities for documenting 

the Inuinnaqtun language. Inuinnaqtun terminology 

can be layered over objects, photos, and audiovisual 

media within the digital collection. We have 

simplified the process for Inuit to write, speak or 

video record Inuinnaqtun descriptions of collections. 

Users can re-structure the relationship of existing 

records, creating a web of related documents to better 

illustrate their Inuinnaqtun context. We are exploring 

improvements such as content tagging to allow an 

even broader audience to describe, categorize, ‘like’, 

and share new language and information with one 

another. 

The Inuinnait Knowledge Bank currently lives at the 

May Hakongak Cultural Centre in Cambridge Bay.

An early priority for our digital work was to ensure 

that virtual forms of knowledge remained anchored 

in the physical world. We wanted the ability to point 

to a location when asked by the community where 

their knowledge is being stored. To accomplish this, 

we installed a local server to house our entire dataset. 

Controlling the physical location of digital knowledge 

comes with multiple benefits. A server linked to a 

WiFi network can give local people faster and easier 

access to its content. It can also prevent information 

from leaving the community, building the community’s 

capacity as decision makers regarding who can access 

what information. 

To close my talk, I wanted to go full circle and bring 

it back to the work of Ernest Burch, Jr. Burch had 

a critical stance on storytelling, and a very strong 

opinion of what a good story about history entailed. 

Among the many criteria he lists for such stories are 

accuracy, reliability, and 

consistency. A good story, 

he believed, is one that 

provides a firm handle 

on history; a statement 

about the past that so 

tightly and convincingly 

braids available threads of 

evidence that one has no 

choice but to grab hold, 

and hang on. 

But what stories are lost 

through this process? 

What is silenced? I’ve 

spent a lot of time thinking 

about how Burch’s criteria 

for storytelling applies 

to the Inuinnait heritage 

program that we’ve created. My first impulse is to 

say it doesn’t, that their respective goals to define the 

past, and to shape the future, are just too far apart. 

But deeper consideration shows there are elements of 

overlap. Inuinnait oral history has its own culturally 

internal processes for determining fact from fiction, for 

weeding out the tall tales. Getting it right in Inuinnait 

oral histories is found in expansiveness rather than a 

narrowing down to key truths. Truth is not found in the 

most reasonable conclusion, but in the accuracy of the 

many details that bring it together. But sometimes the 

truth of stories resides simply in the fact that they are 

told between people to deepen their sense of belonging 

in a language, in a culture, in a way of life. It is this 

sense of truth that gives a culture the foundation to 

understand, on their own terms, where they’ve been 

and where they are, and where they want to be.

Figure 2. A successful seal hunt at a knowledge transfer land 

camp outside of Cambridge Bay in 2014. 

Photo by Brendan Griebel
28 ASC Newsletter

CELEBRATING QAUMAJUQ: INUIT ART 

CENTRE OF THE WINNIPEG ART GALLERY

By Bernadette Driscoll Engelstad

For over 60 years the Winnipeg Art Gallery (WAG) 

has been a pivotal center for the exhibition, research, 

and publication of contemporary Inuit art. During this 

period, the WAG has developed an internationally 

renowned collection now comprising almost 

12,000 sculptures, prints, drawings, weavings, and 

embroidered and appliqué textiles by Inuit artists 

from across the Canadian Arctic. Under the inspired 

leadership of Director Stephen Borys, the WAG will 

soon open Qaumajuq, a world-class center of Inuit art, 

to celebrate this collection. Qaumajuq is the Inuktitut 

name chosen by Inuit, First Nations, and Metis elders 

and language-keepers working with the WAG’s 

Indigenous Advisory Circle. Pronounced KOWma-yourq or 

HOW-ma-yourq 

(depending on the 

regional dialect), 

Qaumajuq

translates as ‘it is 

bright, it is lit’.

Given the 

exquisite nuance 

of the Inuktitut 

language, the 

process of 

naming offers a 

meaningful insight 

into Inuit cultural 

philosophy. 

Qaumaujuq, 

for example, is 

directly linked to the stem word ‘qau’ 

meaning light, daylight, dawn (Dorais 

2020:294). However, beyond describing 

the physical aspects of light (e.g., qaummalak, lightning; 

qauppat, tomorrow—when there will be light), qau 

also embraces the intellectual concepts of knowledge 

and enlightenment. As recorded by linguist Louis 

Jacques Dorais, qaujimaniq refers to the acquisition of 

knowledge, i.e. the fact of having become aware. The 

term qaumaniq describes the angakkuq’s attainment of 

esoteric (shamanic) knowledge—a process detailed by 

Knud Rasmussen based on discussions with the Iglulik 

shaman, Aua (Rasmussen 1929:112-119). Therefore, 

Qaumajuq not only reflects the brilliant physical light 

of its new home but the complex, often enigmatic, even 

metaphysical layers of human knowledge and cultural 

insight embodied in the skilled artwork and creative 

vision of Inuit artists.

Designed by Michael Maltzan Architecture of Los 

Angeles—and constructed in association with 

Winnipeg’s Cibinel Architecture Ltd.—Qaumajuq is 

a stunning four-story edifice of 40,000 sq. ft. Inspired 

by monolithic forms of drifting ice—a familiar sight to 

Inuit—these colossal shapes seeded the architectural 

vision of Michael Maltzan on a design expedition 

to Nunavut. In contrast to its undulating white stone 

exterior, Qaumajuq incorporates a curved glass streetfront encouraging views into the ground floor at all 

hours of day and night, underscoring the architect’s 

vision of light and accessibility. On each level, bridges 

connect Qaumajuq to the Gallery’s original building, a 

landmark structure with sharp geometric lines designed 

by Winnipeg architect Gustavo da Roza, soon to 

celebrate its 50th Anniversary. Over twenty skylights 

in the ceiling of the third-floor gallery illuminate the 

8,000 sq. ft exhibit space. Monumental commissions 

by Inuvialuit sculptor, Abraham 

Anghik Ruben (b. Paulatuk/Salt Spring 

Island, BC) and Manitoba-based artist 

Goota Ashoona

(b. Kinngait/Cape 

Dorset) highlight 

Qaumajuq’s exterior 

plaza, named Nutaaq 

Tummaqtuyuq, 

Inuvialuktun for 

“big steps forward”. 

In anticipation of 

its formal opening 

in early 2021, a 

spectacular display 

of the Northern 

Lights has been 

projected onto the 

exterior façade 

of Qaumajuq, 

brightening the dark 

winter evenings.

The foyer is anchored by a multi-storied, glassenclosed visual vault displaying over 4,500 sculptures 

from the WAG and the Government of Nunavut 

Fine Arts collection, on long-term loan to the WAG. 

Organized by WAG senior curator, Dr. Darlene Wight

and Inuit assistant curator, Jocelyn Piirainen, this 

expansive presentation of Inuit sculpture in stone 

provides an unparalleled opportunity to witness the 

remarkable breadth of work created by Inuit sculptors 

from the early 1950s to the present. Individually 

and in their totality, these carvings provide striking 

evidence of the creative imagination, distinctive artistic 

styles, variety of subject matter, and ingenious use 

of natural materials by Inuit artists in communities 

across the North as well as in more southern locales. 

View of Qaumajuq 

with Northern Lights 

Display, Winnipeg Art 

Gallery 

Glass-enclosed 

Visual Vault, 

Qaumajuq. Courtesy 

of Winnipeg Art 

Gallery
 ASC Newsletter 29

The name Illavut (“our relatives”), adopted by the 

Indigenous Advisory Circle for the visual vault, aptly 

describes the intimate and often familial relationship 

of Inuit to the works on display as well as to their 

creators, reflecting the multi-generational dedication 

of Inuit men and women to art production, not only 

as a conduit of creative expression but perhaps more 

critically as a vital means of supporting one’s family 

in a time with few economic opportunities. Indeed, 

many younger artists today recall childhood memories 

of watching their parents, grandparents, siblings and 

community members engaged in carving, drawing, and 

printmaking. 

In addition to the prominent display of sculpture in 

the visual vault, Qaumajuq opens with a challenging, 

thought-provoking exhibition entitled Inua, sure to 

unseat preconceived notions of Inuit art production. 

Entitled Inua (spirit, force)—elaborated in the acronym 

INUA: Inuit Nunangat Ungammuaktut Atautikkut

(‘Inuit Moving Forward Together’)—the inaugural 

exhibition brings together over 100 works of art 

by 40 sculptors, graphic artists, filmmakers, and 

innovative clothing designers. Curated by a talented 

team of Inuit artists and scholars representing the four 

regions of Inuit Nunangat—Dr. Heather Iglorliorte 

(Nunatsiavut), Krista Ulujuk Zawadski (Nunavut), 

AssinaJaq (Nunavik), and Kablusiak (Inuvialuit 

Settlement Region)—Inua features works by longestablished, mid-career, and emerging artists, including 

many newly-commissioned works. The list of artists on 

the WAG website (https://wag.ca/event/inua) invites 

one to search out images, websites, and YouTube 

videos of the featured artists and their works, providing 

a captivating introduction to the Inua exhibit while 

awaiting the much-anticipated opening of Qaumajuq.

It is noteworthy to add that in addition to Inuktitut 

names conferred on Qaumajuq, the elders and 

language-keepers working with the Indigenous 

Advisory Circle have bequeathed formal names 

in Michif (Metis), Ojibway, Cree, and Dakota to 

physical spaces throughout the WAG (https://wag.ca/

qaumajuq/indigenous-naming-wag). In this way, the 

Winnipeg Art Gallery signals a renewed relationship 

not only with Inuit artists and the North, but with all 

Indigenous communities. As Stephen Borys states, “We 

understand that the history of our Inuit art collection 

is tied to colonialism. We see these names as steps 

along our path to integrating and honouring indigenous 

knowledge.” In this way, the Winnipeg Art Gallery’s 

long-standing history with Inuit art has begun to 

forge an even broader path to a fuller, more respectful 

recognition and acknowledgement of Indigenous art, 

artists, and societies across Canada (Fig. 3).

References

Dorais, Louis Jacques. 2020. Words of the Inuit: A 

Semantic Stroll through a Northern Culture. Winnipeg: 

University of Manitoba Press.

Rasmussen, Knud. 1929. Intellectual Culture of the 

Iglulik Eskimos. Report of the Fifth Thule Expedition 

1921–24, vol. 7(1). Copenhagen: Glydendal. 

BURCH ENDOWMENT SUPPORT FOR ASC 

ACTIVITIES IN 2020

By Igor Krupnik

The Ernest S. (‘Tiger’) Burch Endowment with the 

NMNH was established in 2012 by the family of our late 

colleague and long-term research associate, Ernest S. 

(‘Tiger’) Burch, Jr., with the aim to support, promote, 

and interpret the study of Arctic Indigenous peoples and 

their cultures. The fund ensures that our work and the 

legacy of Tiger’s many decades of collaboration with the 

Smithsonian continues. As in previous years, the Burch 

Endowment remained the prime source of funding for 

various ASC operations in 2020. 

Due to the COVID-19 pandemic restrictions, many 

regular activities of the Arctic Studies Center (ASC) 

staff supported by the Endowment were put on hold. 

Tuniigusiia/The Gift, 2020, by Goota 

Ashoona (Kinngait/Cape Dorset; Elie, 

Manitoba). Gift of the Manitoba Teachers 

Society
30 ASC Newsletter

There was hardly any conference travel, no summer 

fieldwork, no visiting scholars, interns, and fellows 

to support. Since March 2020, all operations were 

conducted via teleworking, online conferencing, and 

other electronic channels. That, in turn, allowed the ASC 

to re-direct some of the Burch funds to support online 

outreach programs conducted out of its Anchorage office 

(primarily by Dawn Biddison) and online work by two 

Anthropology contractors, Sadie Colebank and Sara 

Babouri, on the joint collection project with the Oberlin 

College (see “Nelson in the Cloud” in this issue).

The Endowment supported the ASC annual public 

event, the “Tiger Burch annual lecture” that helps 

promote the impact of Arctic anthropological research 

to wider audiences and colleagues across the globe. 

Begun in 2014, the “Tiger Burch Lecture” has emerged 

as one of the key events that ASC hosts every year 

for the Museum community and the public. The 2020 

annual ‘Burch Lecture” was delivered on October 

27, 2020, by Canadian anthropologist, Dr. Brendan 

Griebel (see below). In addition to Dr. Griebel’s lecture, 

the 2020 ‘Burch Event’ included a two-hour webinar 

(panel) with six in-house and invited speakers on the 

topic of Museums and Anthropologists working with 

Indigenous communities to facilitate the use of museum 

collections as heritage, language, knowledge, and 

artistic resources (see below). The Burch Endowment 

paid the speaker’s award; it was agreed that a portion of 

the unused 2020 travel funds would be reserved for Dr. 

Griebel’s research visit to NMNH in 2021.

As in the previous years, the Endowment provided 

much-needed support for the production of the recently 

published ASC volume, Arctic Crashes. People and 

Animals in the Changing North (Krupnik and Crowell, 

eds., 2020—see this issue). It paid for graphic work for 

the next major ASC publication, the proceedings of a 

special session organized by the ASC in Nome, Alaska 

in 2019 dedicated to the centennial of the 5th Thule 

Expedition of 1921–24, led by Danish-Greenlandic 

explorer, Knud Rasmussen. This collection is to 

appear as a special issue of the Alaska Journal of 

Anthropology in summer 2021 (see Crowell, this 

issue). The endowment continued to provide funds 

for other ASC operations, such as the production 

of the ASC Newsletter, the ASC membership in the 

Arctic Consortium of the United States (ARCUS), 

and research travel in the first two months of 2020. 

As our post-COVID life resumes, we plan to continue 

using Burch Endowment to advance our research and 

public programs, in conference travel and fieldwork, 

and to promote our research and Burch’s legacy 

to the international Arctic research community via 

publications, conferences, and professional exchanges.

THE 2020 ERNEST S. BURCH MEMORIAL 

LECTURE PROGRAM

By Igor Krupnik and William W. Fitzhugh

On October 27th, the Arctic Studies Center hosted the 

2020 Annual “Ernest S. Burch Lecture” and a follow-up 

Zoom webinar organized jointly with the Department 

of Anthropology. The focus of the event was on 

museums and anthropologists working with Indigenous 

communities in facilitating the use of collections as 

heritage, language, knowledge, and artistic resources. 

The event began with a lecture by our invited speaker, 

Dr. Brendan Griebel, who presented a talk titled “Oral 

History, Oral Present, Oral Future: The Language 

of Inuinnait Heritage Research.” His talk featured 

activities of the Kitikmeot Heritage Society (www.

kitikmeotheritage.ca) of Cambridge Bay, Nunavut. 

Brendan Griebel is a Canadian researcher of Inuit 

material culture and the relationships betweenArctic 

history, materiality, and collective identity. He holds a 

Ph.D. in Anthropology from the University of Toronto 

and has spent two decades engaged in land-based and 

experiential research with Inuit scholars and knowledge 

holders in the Canadian Arctic. He is a long-term 

employee and the former Executive Director of 

Pitquhirnikkut Ilihautiniq (Kitikmeot Heritage Society) 

in the Inuit community of Cambridge Bay in Nunavut, 

also a member of Carleton University’s Geomatics 

and Cartographic Research Centre, and Co-Founder 

and Director of The Museum of Fear and Wonder, a 

private museum located approximately one hour north 

of Calgary, Alberta in Canada. Dr. Griebel’s talk is 

provided in this issue.

Following Dr. Griebel’s talk, we screened four YouTube 

videos on heritage and knowledge documentation 

programs with Indigenous communities that had been 

prepared by Dawn Biddison in our Anchorage Office. 

The first of these was extracted from “Weaving a 

Yup’ik Issran/Grass Carrying-Bag”; the second was on 

“Material Traditions: Athabascan Moosehide Tanning 

and Sewing”; the third was from “Sculpting Ivory”; 

and the fourth from “Twining Cedar: Annette Island 

Tsimshian Basket Weaving” (see the links below):

(1) https://www.youtube.com/

watch?v=aNADxHHCnPU&list=PL3wBN-dh9DMS

CNafPQaxFpWPG456yKWH0&index=1&t=24s 

(2) https://www.youtube.com/

watch?v=yTPWADw6Ol8&list=PL3wBN-dh9DMQ

OB7AvbKb2NLHQ9NtbG55K&index=1:

(3) https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_NMJ7n7-

loo&list=PL3wBN-dh9DMRrXiXA10N3mOsiKzvN

2Hiy&index=1&t=11s 
 ASC Newsletter 31

(4) https://www.youtube.com/

watch?v=YrFOFxftByQ&list=PL3wBN-dh9DMT043en5-6YYpTuLogAwkU&index=1&t=746s

This video ‘intermission’ was followed by a twohour discussion panel, “Museums, Communities, and 

collections: Current Practice and Future Horizons,” 

moderated by Dr. William Fitzhugh and featuring 

six invited panelists: Bernadette (Yaayuk) AlvannaStimpfle from Nome, Alaska; our own Joshua Bell, 

Gwyneira Isaac, and Dawn Biddison, a former SIMA 

student of 2014, Krista Zawadski, now in Rankin 

Inlet, Nunavut Canada, and the event speaker, Brendan 

Griebel. Each panelist shared their experience in 

community collection sharing projects by providing 

insights on their experiences with these projects. 

This was followed by another Q&A session. The biostatements of this year’s speaker and panelists are 

shown below. and the discussion panel is available at: 

https://smithsonian.zoom.us/rec/play/f6UFZUPdRTf9lRyfMfwHf1cIaSSnHys1JRvFK1uNxvHFGI

QjQmuwrchHt3KOqPTKugkU2yCc2pwjUtk._

qD2rUUzWILTyrz0

Our experience with our virtual Burch event 

revealed both the power and limitations on public 

communications (such as Zoom ‘fatigue’ and time 

zone differences) in the COVID-19 era. We were 

indebted to Nancy Shorey for administrative support 

and Katherine Barca for organization, assistance, and 

masterminding the virtual environment. 

SOUNDS FROM THE NORTH: LOCATION 

TIME ART

By Charlie Morrow

Days get longer here in Helsinki now that it's 

February. A 97-year-old local just said, “summer's 

coming!" Further south in the U.S. state of Maine, 

locals boast two seasons, “wintaaaaa” and “the 4th of 

Julyyyyyyy.” 

The past twelve months, Year One in this time of 

COVID-19, has been very surprising for me. Spring 

2020, a Russian painter could not take himself or 

his paintings to Helsinki's Kohta Taidehalli for his 

scheduled show. To fill the slot, director curator,

Anders Kreuger, created retrospective, Charlie 

Morrow: A Gathering, October 20 to December 21, 

Winter Solstice.

Anders in Helsinki and Jay Walbert, who manages 

my Barton, Vermont archive, toured archive assets 

digitally to inspire Anders to create a theme and 

workflow for the retrospective. COVID-19 restrictions 

shaped this show: paper posters from events and 

projects 1964–2020 in the main gallery with 

MorrowSound spatialized music and soundscapes, and 

projected videos of performance works and of media 

with my music and sound 1975–2020 in the media 

room.

In October 2020, Recital Edition Los Angeles released 

America Lament, a vinyl album with a red cover. 

Sean McCann cut a thoughtful compilation of my 

music created over 60 years. Anders painted his main 

gallery red and his media room blue. He draped black 

audio cables like circus tent ropes in both rooms. 

You can visit the walkthrough of posters, the opening 

performance of Serenade II and closing event Four 

Winds Winter Solstice celebration at: https://kohta.fi.

Solstice celebrations are a major part of my work, 

featuring a premier of a new Wave Music for a herd 

of like instruments, like 40 Cellos, 60 Clarinets, and 

a boat. Enjoy my 1975 first solstice event poster for 

New York Parks and Recreation. Here's a description 

of Solstice24, one hour in each of twenty-four time 

zones, co-produced with Smithsonian Institution 

Arctic Studies (https://www.smithsonianmag.com/

smithsonian-institution/its-global-solstice-partyand-youre-invited-180959462).

Serenade II song cycle includes a north English tenor, 

Ian Honeyman, in kilts, French Horn soloist Ville 

Hiilivirta, and Otso Pakarinen playing keyboard 

soundscapes, electronics, and guitar. I begin Serenade 

II setting with the sad Keats poem with which 

Benjamin Britten ended his Serenade written around 

the time of my birth in the1940s. Four Winds – A 

Winter Solstice Concert is a composition for four 

horns in Finland, USA, Australia and Japan, and 

America Lament, an album of 60 years of 

Charlie Morrow music
32 ASC Newsletter

works of Phil Dadson in Auckland, New Zealand, 

Phill Niblock in New York, NY, and Åsa Simma in 

Kiruna, Sweden.

A Gathering of Healers, Anders' inspiration for the 

retrospective show title, is a small artist book for five 

workshops with texts by collaborators and me. It was 

created for our 1977 event in New York. A new edition 

will be issued by Kohta Taidehalli and Recital Edition, 

Los Angeles on Equinox, March 21, 2121. 

Immerse!, a book and podcast, are in production 

containing my 40-plus interviews with collaborators in 

creating immersive experiences. William Fitzhugh's 

overview of cultural context is key for connecting the 

human world over time with the research, collections, 

publications and shows of Arctic Studies. Brian Katz, 

who inspired my 3D sound work in the 1990s, shares 

how he mapped the acoustics of Cathedral of Notre 

Dame before the tragic fire. The data sets are valuable 

in themselves and for restoration. Miya Masaoka

shares her work with sound, external and internal.

In this time of pandemic, I managed all from a flat 

in downtown Helsinki. I think of Marcel Proust in 

isolation as he fashioned a literature of memory. My 

isolation is purely physical. I have tools of modern 

communication and production and a network of 

collaborators. 

[Editor’s note: Charlie Morrow has provided 

ASC and SI with exhibit soundscapes and solstice 

programming. He is at www.morrowsound.com, an 

interview at toneglow.substack.com/p/0365-charliemorrow]

ILLUSUAK CULTURAL CENTRE OPENS IN 

NAIN, LABRADOR

By Lena Onalik and Joan Dicker

The Illusuak Cultural Centre located in Nain, 

Nunatsiavut (Labrador), saw its grand opening take 

place on November 21, 2019. Elders and youth from 

each of the five Labrador Inuit communities, Labrador 

MP Yvonne Jones, and representatives from the 

Government of Canada, took part in the ceremony. 

Nunatsiavut President, Johannes Lampe stated, 

“Illusuak will help bridge the generation gap between 

elders and youth, encouraging open dialogue, the 

sharing of traditional knowledge, and the vision for 

the future. The stories that will be told in Illusuak will 

make Labrador Inuit proud. By understanding where 

we came from and how we survived as a people, 

Labrador Inuit will have a better appreciation of who 

we are as individuals and as a culture continuing to 

evolve in a modern world.” 

Illusuak is located in the center of Nain, on the 

shore facing the harbor. Designed by architect Todd 

Saunders to replicate a sod house, this is where the 

name “Illusuak” came from. The Centre consists of 

exhibit spaces, theatre, café, and the offices of some 

of Nunatsiavut Department of Language, Culture, and 

Tourism, as well as Parks Canada staff for the Torngat 

Mountain’s National Park Reserve. 

Entering Illusuak, one is presented with faces of 

Nunatsiavut—8x10 inch photographs which highlight 

people from each of the five Inuit communities. The 

Illusuak café and gift shop run by NGC, (Nunatsiavut 

Group of Companies) offers tea, coffee and delicious 

Charlie Morrow: A Gathering. Morrow at left. 

Photo by Anders Kreuger

\The new Illusuak Culture Center in Nain, Labrador. 

Photo by Lena Onalik
 ASC Newsletter 33

baked goods, with meals offered three days a week. 

A large mural of caribou done by Jason Jacques of 

Postville is on the wall as you enter the exhibit space. 

The exhibit consists of artifacts from the region, 

storyboards, a life-size Igloo story nest, interactive 

stations where you can sing karaoke, and a large 

3D map of the Labrador Inuit Land Claims region 

from its southern boundary at the mouth of Lake 

Melville to the northern tip of the Torngat Mountains. 

The multipurpose theatre supports audio/visual 

presentations, film screenings, lectures and live musical 

and dance performances. It has a seating capacity for 

80 people.

The coronavirus pandemic has impacted Nunatsiavut. 

Aside from the complete shutdown of research in the 

region, four months after opening the Centre it had to 

be shut down and did not open again until November 

2020. Programming continues to be impacted due to 

COVID-19 restrictions. Under the new manager, Joan 

Dicker, programming includes after school student 

social visits, a Senior’s tea social, and storytelling 

once per week. The café and exhibit space is open 

to the public weekdays from 8:30AM-4:30PM. Says 

Joan Dicker, “I really enjoy working here as Illusuak 

Manager. It is something that I wanted to do after I 

retired from teaching, to welcome people to a place 

of culture and tradition. I love welcoming visitors 

and showing people what this building has to offer.” 

Community member Tracy Denniston says, “I love 

how it represents our culture seeing the photographs 

as soon as we walk in. The lights are amazing for our 

sewing groups. The view is great. It’s beautiful to see 

the site of Nain Harbour.” 

To date, the Illusuak Cultural Centre and café have 

hosted a wedding, graduation ceremony, a Residential 

School Survivor’s event, a Young Men’s Day Festival 

celebration, and a Nalujuit night event.

PITUL’KO WINS 2021 SCOPUS RESEARCH 

EXCELLENCE AWARD 

By William Fitzhugh

On March 31, 2021 the 

science publishing giant 

Elsevier announced 

the winners of the 

annual Scopus Russian 

Research Excellence 

Awards given across 

a broad range of 

disciplines, based on 

citation indices. One of 

those chosen for work 

in the Humanities was 

the ASC’s colleague, 

Vladimir Pitul’ko, an 

archaeologist who for forty years has researched the 

ancient cultures of the Russian High Arctic.

 Best known for his excavations at the 8000-year old 

habitation site on Zhokhov Island and the 30,000-year 

old Yana River RHS site, Pitul’ko, a leading researcher 

at the St. Petersburg Institute of the History of Material 

Culture (Russian Academy of Sciences), is wellknown in North America for research into cultures at 

the gateway to Beringia and the New World. His work 

has included large teams of environmental scientists 

together with his partner, Elena Y. Pavlova, and his 

multi-authored publications have appeared in leading 

journals and collections. Much of his work has been 

financed by grants from the NYC Rock Foundation via 

Adelaide and Ted Carpenter, and other organizations. 

One of the Illusuak display halls. 

Photo by Lena Onalik
34 ASC Newsletter

RESEARCH

up western North America, across Bering Strait by 

underwater cable to Siberia, to eventually connect to 

telegraph systems in Russian capitals and from there to 

western Europe.

With support from powerful Russian nobles and 

imperial officials, the project began in 1865. Sections 

of the proposed route were delegated to specific 

major work parties in the U.S, British Columbia, 

Russian America, and Siberia. The project was 

directed by Colonel Charles Bulkley, a former 

Army Superintendent of Military Telegraphs, who 

organized the parties in military-style units. Hence, the 

SI researchers in natural history and ethnology were 

the Scientific Corps, while the unit responsible for 

getting researchers, engineers, and vast quantities of 

supplies to the shores of two continents was the Marine 

Division. The initial supply fleet proved inadequate to 

the task, so the Marine Division secured the flagship 

Nightingale, and its captain, C. M. Scammon, to lead 

the expeditions.

The route of the proposed Telegraph System 

(Robb, 1966)

“WUTE”: THE WESTERN UNION 

TELEGRAPH EXPEDITION AND VOYAGES 

OF THE ARCTIC NIGHTINGALE 

By John Cloud

The Smithsonian Institution (SI) commonly 

recognizes the participation of various SI researchers 

in natural and ethnographical history associated with 

the Western Union Telegraph Expedition (WUTE) 

of 1865–67. WUTE’s foundational fieldwork and 

collection-building program created the model for 

subsequent SI programs and had a direct bearing 

on the US decision to buy Alaska from the Russian 

America Company in 1867. Research over many 

years, but especially connected to the Alaska 

Sesquicentennial in 2017, reveals a much more 

nuanced story.

To understand the truncated history of the WUTE, it 

should be recognized that, for all parties, what occurred 

was a response to major wars. The Russian American 

Company was a private profit-seeking enterprise 

which was owned by rich and powerful members of 

the royalty of the Russian Empire. In the 1850s, the 

Crimean War between Imperial Russia and Imperial 

Great Britain had gone disastrously for both empires, 

with mass slaughter, debt, and political stalemate. 

Meanwhile, the American transcontinental telegraph 

from New England to San Francisco was completed 

in 1861 when the country became engulfed in the 

Civil War. The Russians needed new revenues, and the 

Americans wanted a western telegraphic connection to 

Europe, because many expensive plans for an eastern 

telegraphic connection across the Atlantic Ocean 

had failed. A wealthy American entrepreneur, Perry 

Collins, approached the president of the Western Union 

Telegraph Company, Hiram Sibley, about a project 

to establish a telegraph system from San Francisco 

Capt. C.M. Scammon, from the Overland Monthly magazine, 

undated
 ASC Newsletter 35

Over many years, the Smithsonian has made much of 

the pioneering collections and observations made by 

members of the Scientific Corps before the WUTE 

project was abruptly terminated in 1867 when the 

trans-Atlantic telegraph cable was completed. But it is 

worth noting that the only way the Scientific Corps got 

to Alaska and Siberia in the first place was by sailing 

on the Nightingale. One participant in particular, 

William Dall, whose prolific work for the Smithsonian, 

the Coast Survey, the US Geological Survey, the 

National Academy of Sciences, etc. is well-known, 

became, amongst other distinctions, a major classifier 

of mollusks. And his foundational mollusk specimens 

were netted from the deck of the Nightingale.

The abrupt termination of the WUTE truncated much 

research. Nevertheless, Capt. Scammon synthesized 

his decades of work studying marine mammals, and, in 

1874, at his expense, he published his masterpiece, The 

Marine Mammals of the North-Western Pacific Coast, 

Described and Illustrated: Together with an Account 

of the American Whale Fishery. The book includes an

The Nightingale, built in England, 1851 Pelagic mollusk, collected by Dall in the North Pacific 

Ocean from the Nightingale in 1866.

(Source: SI Archives)

Capt. Scammon’s chromolithograph of the flags and 

pennants of the WUTE fleet.

(Source: Bancroft Library, UC Berkeley)

Scammon’s own illustration of sea otter hunting from a 

baidarka. (Source: SI Libraries)

Nightingale was a fast clipper ship, built for the 

lucrative Shanghai-to-London route carrying 

Chinese tea. In 1860, its owners converted it to an 

illegal slave ship to carry Africans to plantations in 

South America. In 1861, the U.S. Navy’s slavery 

patrol seized the ship and sailed its enslaved cargo to 

freedom in Liberia, although many died of diseases 

on route. The U.S. Navy acquired the ship, refitted it 

to carry stores and coal, and made it part of the US 

Blockading Squadron to seal off the Confederacy 

during the Civil War. After the war, it was acquired 

by the Western Union Company as the flagship for 

the WUTE flotilla. The company hired Captain 

C.M. Scammon, a legendary mariner and whaler, to 

command Nightingale. In his new role for WUTE, 

Scammon abandoned whaling and was transitioning 

to becoming a marine biologist.

In addition to Nightingale, the WUTE fleet included 

various other sailing ships and two paddle-wheel steam 

ships to explore the Yukon River and other shallow 

rivers. Russian vessels were engaged for the work in 

Siberia.
36 ASC Newsletter

appendix by William Dall, in which Dall “synthesized” 

Scammon’s and the SI’s classifications. The volume 

has voluminous ethnographic descriptions of human 

interactions with marine mammals.

The WUTE Scientific Corps did pioneering research, 

but it is past time to acknowledge that possibly the 

most productive platform for natural history in the 

history of the WUTE was the long, sleek deck of the 

Nightingale. (For more, see Fitzhugh and Selig, The SIAlaska Connection, Alaska Jour. 1981: 193-208.)

SEARCHING FOR BASQUES ON THE 

QUEBEC LOWER NORTH SHORE: 

THE UNIVERSITÉ DE MONTRÉALSMITHSONIAN COLLABORATION

By Brad Loewen

It’s been a pleasure to collaborate with the Arctic 

Studies Center and Dr. William Fitzhugh over the 

years. Bill and I sat down for lunch at the Pointe-àCallière Archaeology Museum in 2006 and worked on 

an archaeological partnership between the Smithsonian 

Institution and the Université de Montréal (UdeM). At 

the time, Bill was surveying and excavating sites on the 

Gulf of Saint Lawrence north shore. He had identified 

Basque and Inuit features on land, and a diver had 

discovered underwater features that Bill suspected had 

a relation to the land site. This site became a training 

ground for a steady stream of UdeM students in 

maritime archaeology. A key person in the partnership 

was Erik Phaneuf, an experienced underwater 

archaeologist—and UdeM graduate—who enjoyed 

working with the students and fit well into the routine of 

life on the Pitsiulak. With his unique abilities, cheer and 

professionalism, Erik made it all happen.

Hare Harbour—or Petit-Mécatina as Canadian 

archaeologists call it—opened our eyes to aspects of 

the Basque presence in the Gulf of Saint Lawrence that 

previous archaeologists had entirely missed. The first 

aspect was the Basque cultural chronology in the Gulf 

of Saint Lawrence. While previous researchers had 

simply pasted a 16th-century date on any Basque site, 

Petit-Mécatina showed a Basque timeline that extended 

into the late 17th century, and the wound glass beads 

even date to the early 18th century. The site forced 

us to rethink Basque material culture. Early Basque 

ceramics, including roofing tiles, are highly distinctive 

within North American historical archaeology, and 

previous analyses loosely ascribed them to France 

or Iberia. Studies that grew out of Petit-Mécatina, 

especially by Basque archaeologist Sergio Escribano 

Ruiz and UdeM graduate students Saraí Barreiro

Argüelles and Vincent Delmas, showed that these 

early “Basque” ceramics were all Iberian in origin. 

Related historical studies confirmed that Basques in 

this region, known as Grande Baie, overwhelmingly 

came from Spain. As the 17th century wore on, Basque 

ceramics found at Petit-Mécatina evolved with the 

introduction of products from southwest France as well 

as new styles of Muel (Aragon) majolica and Bilbao 

coarse earthenware. We can now trace the gradual shift 

of Basque supply lines in Spain toward those in France, 

while maintaining a distinctive “Basque” character.

Before Bill’s work at Petit-Mécatina, many 

archaeologists thought that “Basque” sites were 

devoted to whaling. A lasting impression of our 

collaboration with Bill was his initial perplexity that 

Petit-Mécatina had none of the massive masonry 

features called tryworks that characterize whaling sites. 

For Canadian archaeologists, this site has become a 

reference for other Basque activities, notably the cod 

fishery. The underwater component is exceptionally 

informative about cod fishing, as fishermen threw the 

bones of thousands of fish into the water, as well as the 

Petit Mecatina Basque-Inuit land and 

underwater site. Photo by Will Richard

UdeM and Smithsonian divers at Petit Mécatina Basque 

underwater site. Photo by Will Richard
 ASC Newsletter 37

occasional tool, pot, or other artifact. UdeM students 

learned how to excavate an underwater site using 

stratigraphic methods developed on land sites. PetitMécatina’s underwater sequence shows a lower level 

of brush cleared from the site and wood chips from 

construction activities, a middle level of cod bones 

mixed with other artifacts deposited during the period 

of fishing activities, and an upper level of roofing 

tiles that had fallen into the water as their supporting 

woodwork collapsed. Bill and I have long discussed the 

underwater features and their chronological relation to 

the land features. For UdeM students, the experience 

of an underwater stratigraphic excavation was unique, 

and Petit-Mécatina has become a reference for such an 

approach. We now know that other Basque sites have a 

comparable underwater sequence that show cod fishing, 

even at the specialized whaling station at Red Bay. 

In partnering with the Smithsonian, Canadian eyes 

were opened to the juxtaposition of Basque and Inuit 

features in the terrestrial component of Petit-Mécatina. 

Previously, researchers considered Basque whaling and 

fishing crews in Canada as little autonomous islands 

of European culture, bringing all their supplies and 

eschewing contact with Indigenous peoples. PetitMécatina showed us not one, but two phases of Inuit 

occupation amidst the complex of Basque buildings that 

included a cookhouse and a smithy. The site also showed 

that the site’s occupants prepared charcoal for use in the 

forge, using wood collected nearby and a charcoal pit. 

The Inuit likely produced this charcoal over winter, in 

order to supply the Basque blacksmith who arrived in 

summer. The Basque-Inuit “partnership” likely had many 

other aspects that archaeologists have not yet detected. 

The ideas that grew out of the Petit-Mécatina project–a 

long-term Basque presence from Spain, diversified 

activities, a gradual shift from Spain to France in Basque 

supply networks, Inuit year-round partnerships—have 

led to a re-evaluation of Basque-Indigenous relations 

throughout the Gulf of Saint Lawrence. 

The 2019 Field Program

In the summer of 2019, Bill asked me to organise 

an underwater survey of Bonne-Espérance harbour. 

Having finished the excavation at Petit-Mécatina, Bill 

had shifted his attention to this region where he was 

working on a couple of sites called Hart Chalet, Grand 

Island, and Kettle Head. He had heard that, about thirty 

years ago, a local scallop fisherman had dredged up a 

Saintonge chafing dish that was typical of 17th-century 

Basque material culture. The Université de Montréal 

task was to work with the fisherman to find the spot 

where the chafing dish had been found and look around 

for other signs of an early Basque site.

We proceeded in a counter-clockwise order around the 

harbour. Our first dives found only an old lawn mower. 

We struggled with tidal currents at the harbour’s 

southern entrance. The fisherman came by to tell us we 

were getting warmer, and we soon found 18th and 19thcentury ceramics from New England. We thought about 

the “schooner fleet” from Newburyport, Massachusetts 

that anchored in Bonne-Espérance for the Labrador 

fishery. Erik was getting impatient and doubled down 

on his student divers. He and Saraí were in two metres 

of water, near the rocky shore of Bonne-Espérance 

Island, when they came across heaps of Basque roofing 

tiles. It did not take long to understand that the tiles 

had tumbled from land, and we scrambled up to find 

a pristine site combining a Basque tryworks and a 

rudimentary Inuit-style winter house. Half an hour 

later, we had another, similar site.

In the days that followed, we returned to a couple 

of nearby sites where Bill had previously collected 

fragments of coarse redware that looked like roofing 

tiles. Both of these sites were reoccupied in the 19th 

and early 20th centuries, leaving abundant vestiges. 

We think they may have older Basque components 

that careful excavation may reveal. It now looks as 

Chaffing dish from Bonne Esperance Harbor found by a 

local fisherman. Photo by William Fitzhugh

UdeM Students Serai Barriero-Arguelles, Emilie Teasdale, 

Marianne Dorais, and Erik Phaneuf preparing to dive at Old 

Salmon Bay. Brad Loewen at right. 

Photo by William Fitzhugh
38 ASC Newsletter

though Bonne-Espérance harbour may hold the biggest 

concentration of Basque vestiges west of Red Bay. 

Known as Brest in the 16th and 17th centuries, this 

location has long remained mysterious, but ongoing 

research after the COVID-19 pandemic will doubtlessly 

shed light on this major site in Canadian history.

Due to the COVID-19 pandemic, we haven’t returned 

to Québec’s Lower North Shore, and the sites 

discovered in 2019 still await us. Since 2006, more 

than a dozen UdeM graduate students have trained with 

the Smithsonian in underwater archaeology, in some 

cases for several years. All remain in archaeology, and 

four have gone on to doctoral studies. I’d like to think 

UdeM has helped Bill achieve his scientific goals in 

Québec, both intellectually and pragmatically, while the 

Smithsonian Institution has certainly helped to train a 

generation of young Québec maritime archaeologists. 

We are all making sacrifices to control the sanitary crisis 

as part of the intense international effort, and we are 

hoping the pandemic will soon abate and let us get back 

into the field! In closing, I wish to thank the Whiteley 

Museum, Garland Nadeau, Eileen Schofield, and 

Florence Hart whose hospitality and support have 

made our project both productive and enjoyable.

ANALYSIS OF WIND REVEALS PATTERNS 

IN PREHISTORIC SETTLEMENT 

LOCATIONS 

By Igor Chechushkov

A comparative approach is a long-standing feature of 

ASC research. A recent paper by Igor Chechushkov, 

Iliya Valiakhmetov, and William Fitzhugh published 

by the Journal of Anthropological Archaeology (61, 

2021) implements this approach to northern prehistory. 

In this paper, we conducted a comparative analysis of 

site locations in the Quebec Lower North Shore, the 

southern Urals in Russia, and the steppes of Mongolia. 

Utilizing WindNinja computer models, our methodology 

incorporated intense field observation of local conditions, 

including gathering high-resolution topography and 

wind-speed data both in Canada and Russia. 

As the first step, we analyzed published and 

unpublished data collected by Dr. Jean-Luc Houle

in Mongolia during his dissertation research at the 

University of Pittsburgh. Using high-resolution 

satellite topographic data, regional wind averages 

gathered by local weather outposts, and WindNinja 

software, we mathematically tested Houle’s hypothesis 

that winter campsites are located at foothills least 

exposed to the winter wind, as opposed to summer 

locations near the river. Our analysis agreed well 

with Houle’s ethnographically supported conclusion 

and demonstrated the applicability of the proposed 

methodology to study archaeological landscapes. 

During the 2019 Gateways Project fieldwork in 

Quebec, we created detailed topographic maps of the 

17th–18th-century Inuit winter villages of Hart Chalet, 

Belles Amours, Grand Isle-2, and EiBh-9 (see ASC 

Newsletter 2017–2020 reports). At the same time, we 

conducted a wind survey, i.e., collected data on the 

wind speed and direction in various locations around 

the sites using a hand-held anemometer. Collected data 

was used to create high-resolution wind prediction 

maps which were compared with the actual daily wind 

speed. While the proximity to the sea was the most 

important factor, our models suggest that the Inuit 

could have chosen quieter locations. 

Similar work was conducted in the southern Urals in 

partnership with the State Museum-Reserve “Arkaim” 

(Chelyabinsk, Russia). There, we collected landscape 

and wind data at twenty-two Sintashta Late Bronze 

Age walled settlements and enriched our sample by 

comparing it with unwalled Bronze Age settlements 

and a 1930s GULAG village. We found a tendency 

towards locating these sites at the least wind-exposed 

winter locations, even though other factors contributed 

to the decision-making process. 

Our work allowed us to conclude that the studied 

ancient populations cared about their winter locations 

to at least some degree. The cold winter wind of the 

northern latitudes in Eurasia and Canada could be a 

factor in locating and protecting their winter villages. 

Further, in the southern Urals, the protection from 

extreme climate events could lead to the development 

of social complexity as societies had to aggregate to 

build their winter shelters. 

A wind model over a topography map near the Late Bronze 

Age settlement of Kamennyi Ambar and the 1930s GULAG 

village in Russia. The map predicts a relatively low winter 

wind speed, suggesting that in Bronze Age people

purposefully chose the site location
 ASC Newsletter 39

form and extent, almost like a living organism. The 

excavation revealed 43 rooms from eight phases of 

occupation from year 1000 to about 1350. At times 

the site was unoccupied, and all the rooms were never 

occupied at the same time. 

Most of the finds connected to children date to the 

later occupation period. Here it was possible to 

identify fixed places like fireplaces, walls, and door 

openings. One room could be identified as a weaving 

room because it contained implements for textile 

Reference

Chechushkov, Igor V., Iliya A. Valiakhmetov, and 

William W. Fitzhugh. From adaptation to niche 

construction: Weather as a winter site selection factor 

in northern Mongolia, the Quebec Lower North Shore, 

and the southern Urals. Journal of Anthropological 

Archaeology 61 (2021): 101258.

CHILDREN AT THE NORSE ’FARM 

BENEATH THE SAND’(FBS)

By Joel Berglund

During the 1990s the Greenland National Museum 

and Archives researched the remains of a Norse farm 

from Greenland`s medieval period. The excavation 

was presented in Vikings: The North Atlantic Saga

published in 2000 by the Smithsonian Institution for 

the millennium exhibition on the Norse North Atlantic 

world. For a description of environment, excavation, 

and history see my chapter, “The Farm Beneath the 

Sand” (Berglund 2000).

Children were an important part of Norse Greenland 

population since they were the future of the society, 

but mostly their archaeological presence is not very 

distinct. We meet them in the excavations through their 

toys or in the graveyards as skeletons. As artifacts, their 

toys represent a special group because they held no 

practical meaning in the adult world. 

The archaeological material concerning children at 

the Farm Beneath the Sand (FBS) is not extensive and 

can hardly represent the numbers of children who ran 

about the farm. No doubt bits and pieces of unidentified 

skin, wood, bones, and textiles might have been a toy, 

since anything can be anything in a children`s world. A 

few things were made by adults and can be interpreted 

as articles for children`s play and care for them. But 

most interesting are the few examples of toys made by 

children, things that represent something concrete.

The children’s external world was their surrounding 

environment that enabled the farms to survive by 

animal husbandry, hunting, and fishing. Of most 

importance was production of enough hay to keep 

animals like sheep, goats, and a single horse alive 

through the winter. The inland ice that determined the 

farm’s climate was only a few km away. During winter 

the temperature could drop to minus 50 degrees Celsius 

and in summer could climb to plus 26.

The children’s internal world was the farmhouse with 

all its rooms, corners, animal sheds, and different 

hiding places. The house was a complex, and over 

its use for more than 300 years it constantly changed 

Excavation of the Farm Beneath The Sand showing walls 

and rooms of the farmhouse. 

Photo by Joel Berglund

Wood carved by a child showing a horse 

tethered to the ground. 

Photo by Erik Holm

Steatite sherd carved by a child showing the gable 

view of a house. Photo by Joel Berglund
40 ASC Newsletter

production. To this domestic context you can add dark 

places sparsely lit by fire sticks (torches), the smell of 

animals housed under the same roof, vermin, and sour 

smoke from peat fires and sheep excrement. Such was 

the internal environment children grew up in—if they 

survived their first critical years.

The world of the children reflect on a small scale the 

adult world they were born into, and their toys and 

plays were an imitation of this. Toys from FBS show 

this very clear, and can be divided into following 

categories: human, domesticated animal, fish, birds, 

tools and building.

Despite the reality that adults were central to their lives, 

deciding virtually everything that happened, only one 

toy was found to represent a human figure: a 5.8 cm 

long peg of wood carved with a crude head. The other 

end was pointed, perhaps so the figure could be placed 

standing during play. This is the nearest we come in 

seeing the image of a human inhabitant of FBS.

Research on the bones shows a varied animal 

husbandry involving sheep, goats, cows, horses, and 

dogs, all of which were naturally a great part of the 

children’s everyday life. Among the toys was a crude 

carving on a piece of wood showing a long-legged 

animal—probably a horse—tethered to the ground. 

What is interesting is that the child showed the horse 

tethered—that the child transformed the scene into 

physical form. We only know one other similar find, 

and this one was carved by an adult.

Another interesting piece is a steatite sherd with a carved 

figure looking like the Latin letter A with a round top. 

But since the farm’s inhabitants used runes when writing, 

it has to be something else. I dare to believe the carving 

shows a house with a gable with saddleback roof! Unlike 

the previous find, this carving does not show an act, 

but just a house. If I am right, this is the first and only 

contemporary picture of a building in Norse Greenland.

Among the toys were two tools, namely a knife and 

a miniature wooden shoe last. The knife is probably 

the most common Norse implement found in sites, 

and adult shoe lasts are not uncommon. That a shoe 

last appears as a toy shows how important shoes were. 

Small miniature vessels of steatite point to play at 

producing food, even though we don’t know who the 

cook was. Hunting and fishing was the second leg of 

the farm economy and is also represented among the 

toys. We have a wooden flatfish (probably a halibut), 

bones of which are known from the farm as are bones 

of different birds. Small bird figurines were also among 

the toys and can be interpreted as swimming birds. 

The number and kinds of toys is probably not 

representative but generally seems to reflect the life at 

the farm. The toys must have been played on the floor 

or ground simulating the place where the scene shown 

took place. From this one can assume these toys were 

used by children between 2 and 5 years old. Childhood 

was over by seven, and until then children were part of 

the women ́s domain. 

Finds of religious symbols at FBS underline that the 

inhabitants were Christian, and when people died they 

were buried in a church yard, which was about 20 km 

away, at Sandnes. This church was in use in the 1300s, 

and some of the buried people must have been from 

FBS. The oldest to be buried were around 50 years 

and the youngest were between zero and five. Child 

mortality was quite high, in line with Scandinavia 

at that time. Life was dangerous for the young ones. 

Apart from injuries from accidents there were diseases 

that left no mark on the skeletons. One thing could, 

however, be identified: inflammation of the middle 

ear. This seems to have been a frequent suffering, 

along with infection of the trachea/respiratory passage. 

Both probably caused many deaths resulting from the 

unhealthy conditions in cold, damp sod houses that also 

housed many domestic animals. 

Miniature toys, steatite vessels, a bird, a shoe last, and a 

wooden knife. Photo by Erik Holm

Miniature halibut of wood. Photo by Erik Holm
 ASC Newsletter 41

After nearly 400 years, the Farm Beneath The Sand 

was left for good in the late 1300s. The reasons were 

various, but as long as a farmer’s life was possible, they 

continued. When conditions in the Western Settlement 

became too bad, they moved south to the Eastern 

Settlement or maybe off to other parts of the Norse 

Atlantic World. 

[Editor’s note: Joel Berglund is former vice director of 

The Greenland National Museum and Archives. He is 

now retired and living in Sweden.]

“ARCTIC CRASHES” SAILS TO 

PUBLICATION

By Igor Krupnik

The 7-year Arctic Crashes Arctic Studies Center (ASC) 

project last reported in the 2017 (ASC Newsletter 24) 

was finally wrapped up in 2020. The project began 

in 2014 as a collaborative research effort with a team 

of anthropologists, archaeologists, biologists, and 

indigenous experts from the United States, Canada, 

Denmark, Greenland, and the Netherlands on what 

was then envisioned as two-year study titled, “Arctic 

People and Animal Crashes: Human, Climate and 

Habitat Agency in the Anthropocene.” The program 

was funded by a grant from the Smithsonian ‘Grand 

Challenges’ Consortia and by the ASC Ernest S. 

(Tiger) Burch endowment. The project goal was to 

explore the roles of people, climate, and ecosystem 

change in the historical dynamics of key Arctic 

wildlife species, such as seals, walrus, bowhead whale, 

beluga, narwhal, polar bear, caribou, and cod. In this 

context, “crashes” referred to rapid collapses of animal 

populations or of their ranges due to human impacts 

or natural cycles of population variation influenced by 

climate, predation, and disease.

Besides individual research ventures (on which we 

have reported in ASC Newsletters 21–23, 2014–2016), 

the project included two international symposia held in 

Anchorage in March 2015 and in Washington D.C. in 

February 2016, public lectures, a website, and outreach 

materials. A specific aim of the project was to give a 

prominent voice to Indigenous and local ecological 

knowledge and interpretations of human–animal–climate 

relations. Additional cross-disciplinary collaborations 

included scholars from the fields of population ecology, 

genomics, history, and climate research. All ASC staff 

and many of its associates participated as researchers, 

speakers, collaborators, and contributors on the project. 

In 2017, we began working on a major publication 

volume to disseminate the results to the scholarly 

community and the public. Igor Krupnik and Aron 

Crowell spearheaded the effort as volume co-editors 

partnering with the Smithsonian Institution Scholarly 

Press (SISP), which had already published two books 

in the ASC Contributions to Circumpolar Anthropology

series and the Early Inuit Studies volume in 2016. 

The 570-page volume, Arctic Crashes: People and 

Animals in the Changing North was released in August 

2020 in the midst of the COVID-19 pandemic. SISP 

shipped copies to all individual authors and major 

international journals for reviews; but the bulk of 

the 500 print-run are still locked in the ASC offices 

in Washington and Anchorage, and in the press 

warehouse, waiting to be mailed to colleagues and 

readers worldwide.

Arctic Crashes was originally timed to celebrate the 

50th anniversary of the publication of the seminal 

monograph by Danish zoologist Christian Vibe

(1913–1998), Arctic Animals in Relation Climatic 

Fluctuations (1967), the first focused study of the role 

of climate and sea ice change on Arctic animals and 

people who hunted them. Vibe relied primarily on the 

Greenlandic hunting statistics from the early colonial 

era, but his more general outcomes were aimed to be 

circumpolar. Our goal was to revisit Vibe’s framework 

and his interpretation by using wider geography, 

modern data, and Indigenous knowledge. 

The book includes 25 individual contributions 

organized in four major sections reflecting four 

specific approaches in studying animal population 

“crashes”: via archaeology, Indigenous people’s 

knowledge, population biology, and historical 

records. It opens by a general overview chapter by 

Igor Krupnik that introduces the past and present-day 

analytical framework in studying ‘Arctic Crashes’ 

(including Vibe’s approach) and the history of the 

 Igor Krupnik celebrates the publication of the “Arctic 

Crashes” volume, August 2020
42 ASC Newsletter

‘Crashes’ project. The next five chapters written by 

environmental archaeologists (Morten Meldgaard, 

Ben Fitzhugh with William Brown and Nicole 

Masarti, Max Friesen, William Fitzhugh, and 

George Hambrecht) cover a broad swap of northern 

land- and sea-scapes, from the Kurile and Hokkaido 

Islands in the Pacific to Iceland, Greenland, Labrador, 

and the Faroes in the North Atlantic. The following 

eight chapters address ‘cultural synergies’ among 

Indigenous users, anthropologists, and resource 

managers who work with northern communities (Ann 

Fienup-Riordan, Judith Ramos (Daxootsú), Merlin 

Koonooka (Paapi), Amy Phillips-Chan, Kenneth 

Pratt with Matt Ganley and Dale Slaughter, 

Brenda Parlee and the Inuvialuit Game Council, 

Martin Nweeia with three Inuit and one Greenlandic 

contributors—the late Cornelius Nutarak, Charlie 

Inuarak, Pavia Nielsen, Jayko Alooloo, and 

Bernadette Driscoll Engelstad).

Today’s studies of animal fluctuation owe much to insight 

from population and molecular biologists (G. Carleton 

Ray, Michael Etnier, Karen Mager, and Brenna 

Fraiser) as well as from those who, like Vibe, dive 

into historical records (Aron Crowell, Douglas Veltre, 

Igor Krupnik, Moira McCaffrey, Hunter Snyder, 

and Frigga Kruse). Pitseolak Pfeifer, originally from 

Iqaluit, Nunavut, and Shari Fox, who lived for 15 

years in Clyde River, Nunavut co-authored an eloquent 

Foreword describing northern residents’ vision of humananimal relations. Historical archaeologist Kent Lightfoot

provided a concluding overview of the “Crashes” stories 

from the perspective of the Anthropocene-era humananimal-environment relations. 

The chapters written by 35 contributors range from 

the shores of Northeast Asia to Svalbard in the North 

Atlantic and collectively provide coverage of human 

relations with over a dozen key northern species. Of 

course, we could not reflect in one book on people’s 

interactions with all animal species critical to human 

sustenance in the North. Yet the emerging collective 

narrative produces a colorful tapestry of individual 

stories over space and time that reflects the multitude 

of changes at regional, community, and animal 

subpopulation levels. Our shared goal was to “weave” 

these local or species-wise stories into a common vision 

and to offer perspectives on today’s urgent concerns 

about the future of a warming Arctic, and its animals and 

people. Stephen Loring and Carleton Ray provided 

the beautiful photos for the jacket. We are grateful to our 

SISP partners, its director Ginger Minkiewicz and book 

copy editor, Meredith McQuoid-Greason, as well as to 

our ASC partners, Chelsi Slotten and Dawn Biddison, 

who helped convert the many voices of the “Crashes” 

team into a beautiful book.

ARCHAEOLOGICAL NOTES FROM 

MONGOLIA

By William Honeychurch

2020 was a challenging year for archaeological 

research in Mongolia since international expeditions 

could not work in the field with Mongolian colleagues 

due to the COVID crisis. While this was disappointing, 

it did not stop major advancements in scholarship on 

periods of Mongolian prehistory and history, from 

the Neolithic to the Mongolian Empire. I wrapped 

up an eight-year project in eastern Mongolia in the 

region of Delgerkhaan Uul where more than 2500 new 

archaeological sites have been discovered. Following 

several seasons of settlement and burial excavation, 

our fieldwork suggests how eastern communities of 

the Mongolian steppe were integrated into the first 

nomadic state more than 2,000 years ago. When 

we think of ancient states the despotic powers of 

Mesopotamia or Egypt come to mind, but our results 

indicate that the first Mongolian state was likely built 

by political consensus among aristocratic houses, one 

of which may have been centered at Delgerkhaan Uul. 

We also have discovered and excavated a Neolithic site 

from 4000 BC which sheds light on the way huntergatherers lived long before domesticated sheep, goat, and 

cattle were introduced to Mongolia from western Eurasia. 

Finally, our research on imposing stone-built burials from 

the Bronze Age reveals some of the earliest domestic 

horses from central and eastern Mongolia dating as early 

as 1440 BC. Our researchers believe that these horses 

were involved in the very first horse trade to Shang 

Dynasty China where they were used to drive chariots 

belonging to the Shang emperors at 1200 BC.

Another archaeological project, assisted by Bruno 

Frohlich, made discoveries related to the Mongolian 

Landscape of Delgerkhaan Uul. 

Photo by Sarah Pleuger
 ASC Newsletter 43

Empire of Genghis Khan. About 700 km northwest of 

the Delgerkhaan Uul project, the northern Mongolian 

Tarvagatai Valley has been explored since 2010. During a 

reconnaissance along a dry riverbed, we noticed a partial 

human burial eroding out of the river bank. We carefully 

extracted the burial remains and studied the complicated 

soil stratigraphy on either side of the burial feature which 

indicated the presence of an extensive settlement site. 

Mongolia is well known for its horse-riding nomads and 

herders who move seasonally with their herd animals, but 

excavations and analysis of what is now known as the 

Tsagaan Ereg settlement has revealed the importance of 

farming as well. 

Tsagaan Ereg is a large settlement made up of several 

round pit-houses with wooden supports for roof 

coverings, hearths, and birch bark flooring dating to 

1220 AD. These habitations were probably used as 

seasonal dwellings during the warmer months when 

the neighboring floodplain could be plowed and sown 

with grain. Analysis of plant remains from each pithouse yielded grains of wheat, barley, and millet and 

copious amounts of wheat pollen indicating a nearby 

farming plot. On the far edge of the settlement, a granite 

threshing stone was unearthed with organic materials 

dating to the Mongolian Empire. This evidence from 

Tsagaan Ereg supports historical accounts describing 

Genghis Khan’s conquest of the region in order to secure 

its great agricultural potential for the expanding empire.

These results are now in the process of publication, 

but we already have our eye on a future project to take 

place in 2021. Our eastern archaeological team will 

begin work at the Gobi Desert site of Chandmani Khar 

Uul near the Mongolian border with China in order to 

further study the Bronze Age horse trade southwards. 

To complement our data collection, we will collaborate 

with another team of archaeologists working on the 

Inner Mongolian side of the border and compare results. 

This will be the first cross-border archaeological project 

between Mongolia and Inner Mongolia and should 

uncover important new information on the beginning of 

horse riding in East Asia.

A VIEW NORTH FROM THE TIBETAN 

PLATEAU

By John Vincent Bellezza

Why the topic of Tibet in a newsletter devoted to Arctic 

studies? This elevated landmass extends almost to 

the 27th parallel, the same latitude that circumscribes 

central Florida, Saudi Arabia and southern Pakistan. 

Aside from the spread of Buddhism as far north as Tuva 

and Buryat, isn’t it a bit counterintuitive to speak of 

the Tibetan Plateau in the same breadth as the Arctic? 

Afterall, in myriad archaeological, ethnohistorical and 

ethnological studies carried out in the West and Russia 

(and erstwhile Soviet Union) over the last century, the 

southern bounds of the North European-Siberian realm 

are usually set no further south than greater Mongolia 

and the boreal fringe forests and steppes of Central Asia. 

As has been repeatedly demonstrated, in terms of their 

material culture assemblages, ethnologies, genomes, 

and linguistic affiliations, these northern territories share 

manifold links through time and space and are well 

Excavation of a Bronze Age stone-built burial made with 

large stones. Local herders arrived to assist! Photo by 

William Honeychurch

Mouth of the Tarvagatai Valley looking south. Photo by 

Patricia Glass

Excavations at the Tsagaan Ereg settlement looking north 

along the Tarvagatai Valley. Photo by William Honeychurch
44 ASC Newsletter

suited to allied programs of research and publication 

fora. Tibet (shorthand for the Tibetan Plateau, which 

is divided among five modern states) has been the odd 

man out in this equation. However, as I shall show, this 

view of the areal extent of the far northern world may be 

neither warranted nor helpful in understanding the full 

historical scope of cold-adapted human culture. 

This article reviews prospects for conducting 

archaeological and ethnohistorical study of the Tibetan 

Plateau in association with (but not limited to) Siberia, 

Central Asia, Mongolia, Xinjiang (East Turkestan), and 

the Northern Zone of the PRC. I will briefly describe 

avenues of research I have been pursuing for more than 

two decades, before noting some of the promising areas 

of inquiry awaiting the attention of archaeologists and 

ethnohistorians (those who have traditionally set the 

geographic boundary of their work north of the Tibetan 

Plateau). I hasten to add that botanists, biogeographers 

and others working in the natural sciences have seen 

things quite differently, clearly aware of hundreds of 

palearctic species of flora and fauna found in Tibet and 

concepts such as the ‘Himalayan third pole’ (where, 

incidentally, average annual temperature increases in 

the last two decades are as great as the Arctic). 

While certain aspects of ancient cultures in Tibet find 

correspondence with those in the far north, this is not to 

insinuate that Tibet is arctic in anything but analogy. It 

is not. The Plateau squarely sits in the middle latitudes 

and is subject to that celestial geometry, making for 

more equable diurnal cycles, higher minimum winter 

temperatures, monsoonal effects, etc. If it were not 

for its extreme altitude (averaging around 4,000 m), 

Tibet would be a warm temperate and subtropical 

land. In fact, in the southeastern region of Pemako, 

the Brahmaputra rivers cut a channel so deep that 

subtropical biomes exist north of the Himalayan crest. 

Farther east, in what is now northwestern Yunnan, 

grapes (and, yes, wine-making) prickly pears and 

pomegranates are cultivated in the Tibetan-speaking 

reaches of the Salween, Mekong and Yangtze river 

valleys in Mediterranean-like microclimates. 

But this is only part of the picture; Tibet is also home 

to extremely high tablelands and valleys, where native 

inhabitants have biologically adapted and culturally 

adjusted to living permanently at elevations of up 

to 5200 m (with even higher seasonal habitation). 

Two-thirds of the Plateau is covered in montane 

steppe, alpine meadows and high altitude deserts, 

environments best suited to stockbreeding and 

hunting. These non-arable tracts of the Plateau have 

a frigid climate and are prone to snowfall even in the 

summer. The highest regions of Tibet are concentrated 

in the western half of what is now called the Tibet 

Autonomous Region (sometimes referred to as ‘Inner 

Tibet’) and the eastern half of Qinghai (traditionally, 

part of the Tibetan province of Amdo as well as 

Two herders belonging to the Apha Hor tribe, Upper Tibet

An Apha Hor family

Weaving on a backstrap loom, Purang, Ngari, Upper Tibet
 ASC Newsletter 45

containing enclaves inhabited by people of Mongolian 

stock). It is in the former territory, which I call Upper 

Tibet (after traditional ascriptions), that is the focus of 

my research. So, let’s zoom in there, beginning with a 

quick look at its ethnohistory.

Ever since the work of Nebesky-Wojkowitz and 

Helmut Hoffman in the mid-20th century, scholarship 

has been aware of uncanny similarities between Tibetan 

spirit-mediums and the shamans of central and north 

Asia. I follow a bit in the tracks of my predecessors 

in my book Calling Down the Gods (2005). Parallels 

between Tibetan and northern trance practitioners are 

manifold, embracing their worldview, healing ethos, 

bipartite or three-tiered cosmology, the composition and 

function of their helping spirits, as well as there being 

remarkable similarities in their material accoutrements 

(e.g., drums, arrows, use of feather and horned 

headdresses, animal horns, mirrors, etc.). For one thing, 

the resonance in mythologies regarding bear ancestors, 

cross-species marriage and ursine healing rites in Upper 

Tibet and northern Asia is most impressive.

Yet, before we get too carried away and start viewing 

Tibetans as long-lost cousins of hyperborean tribes, 

it is crucial to remember that abstract and material 

parallels between peoples are the result of many kinds 

of demographic, cultural and environmental forces, 

most of which do not signal direct spatio-temporal 

ties between far-flung societies. This observation 

is especially pertinent here, for genetic population 

histories conducted thus far indicate that Tibetans 

(speaking around 30 different languages) are most 

closely related to other Tibeto-Burman groups like 

the Tu and Nakhi, sharing in common far fewer 

haplogroups with Turco-Mongolian speaking peoples 

and others of north Asia. I will only mention in passing 

resemblances in the dress, coiffures, ornamentation, 

and comportment of Tibetan shepherds and northern 

groups. They are quite self-evident. 

Again, this does not necessarily mean that any particular 

object or behavior was handed down from the taiga to 

the Plateau or vice versa. Maybe yes, maybe no. If you 

subscribe to shamanistic theory (seeing contemporary 

shamanism as a survival of Bronze Age or even Stone 

Age religions,) you will be more tempted to posit direct 

kinds of connections, perhaps as part of a Eurasian 

religious substrate. I am not so sanguine. The length 

and nature of historical continuities in shamanism are 

still questioned and there is dubious profit in lumping 

together the tribal religious traditions of boreal groups 

with Tibetan folk practices. There is a vast amount of 

specificity exhibited by contemporary cultures, let alone 

equate sophisticated religious traditions existing in 

ancient Tibet with household shamanism. One must be 

ever vigilant in attributing cause and effect. 

The archaeological record (funerary, monumental, 

artifactual and artistic) is unambiguous: there were 

multiple cultural and technological congruences between 

Tibet and more northern territories, some of which 

were brought about through interregional exchanges 

(potentially comprising intellectual currents, religious 

trends, economic imperatives, political entanglements, 

demographic shifts, etc.). Before giving a bird’s eye 

view of a few of these congruences, let us set our time 

parameters (modified to fit Tibetan archaeological 

evidence, a work still in progress). The Late Prehistoric 

era includes the Late Bronze Age (ca. 1200–700 BCE), 

[Early] Iron Age (ca. 700–100 BCE) and Protohistoric 

period (ca. 100 BCE to 600 CE). The Late Prehistoric 

era is followed by the Tibetan Early Historic period, 

which is made up of the Imperial period (c. 600–850 

CE) and post-Imperial period (850–1000 CE). Later 

periods under Lamaist (Buddhist and Yungdrung 

Bon) domination need not concern us here (the role 

of the Mongols in the transmission of cultural and 

technological resources to and from Tibet is a story for 

another time). I refer readers to my website and works 

cited below. Here I will touch upon just a few areas vital 

for coming to grips with the full thrust of cross-cultural 

transmission in Late Prehistoric Inner Asia.

Funerary and monumental evidence—the erection 

of cognate unmarked menhirs (called long stones 

in Tibetan) in Upper Tibet, the Altai, and southern 

Siberia appears to have been part of an ongoing transcultural bequest of considerable proportions in the Late 

Prehistoric era. The main areas of correspondence are 

with the Deer Stone-Khrigsuur complex (Late Bronze 

Age), Tagar culture (Iron Age), and Turkic balbals 

(Protohistoric period). The orientation, geographic 

settings and funerary associations of menhirs and their 

complement of collateral monuments in the heart of 

Asia allude to the mutability of seminal ideals and 

technologies, those that cut across the bounds of sundry 

cultures. Although tombs of diverse types characterize 

Inner Asia in the Late Prehistoric era, there are certain 

widespread morphological commonalities, particularly 

among the burial structures of the Slab Grave culture 

of eastern Mongolia and Transbaikalia and the 

funerary slab enclosures of Upper Tibet belonging to 

a comparable time frame. More telling are parallels in 

grave goods with the remains of horses and caprids, 

equestrian gear, weapons, semi-precious stone beads 

(carnelians, agates, turquoise), and cowries diffusing 

far and wide in the north and in Tibet during the Late 

prehistoric era. An alternative point of reference are 

Tibetan archaic funerary ritual texts, which describe 

mortuary traditions with analogies in the burials of 

the so-called Scytho-Siberian cultures (e.g., horned 

headdresses, avian and cervid motifs, special treatment 

of the mane and tail of psychopomp horses, etc.). 
46 ASC Newsletter

Artifactual and rock art evidence: there is a growing body 

of copper alloy objects with zoomorphic and geometric 

motifs produced in Tibet in the Late Prehistoric era 

available for study, which can be compared stylistically 

to those produced elsewhere in Inner Asia. Research 

recently carried out by others has identified Central Asian 

traits in the ceramics of lower Ladakh (on the western 

margin of the Tibetan Plateau) dating to the Protohistoric 

period. Finally, there is rock art, the various geographic 

groupings of which bring to light many cognate themes 

and subjects. These include mascoids, chariots, big game 

hunting, dueling scenes, so-called ‘giants’, handprints, 

Eurasian animal style figures, etc. Through an abundance 

of evidence, Tibet might be best classified as ‘South 

Inner Asia’, while ‘North Inner Asia’ encompasses all 

territories typically seen as making up Inner Asia. 

The foregoing discussion is just a glimpse into a 

field of study with great potential, but one that will 

demand many kinds of expertise going forward. A 

rigorous regimen of excavation and analysis in Tibetan 

regions, one that goes well beyond the glorified 

treasure hunting approach of many recent campaigns 

(where molecular, isotopic and botanical evidence is 

frequently discarded), is the order of the day. Of high 

priority is the sequencing of DNA extracted from 

ancient osteological materials, both human and animal. 

Analytical methods and chronometric technologies 

meeting international standards must be brought 

to bear on all parts of the Tibetan Plateau. This is 

essential if we are to secure the basis for a more refined 

investigation of the Tibetan legacy and its place in the 

Eurasian cultural mosaic of antiquity. 

References

Bellezza, John Vincent. 2014. The Dawn of Tibet: The 

Ancient Civilization on the Roof of the World. Lanham: 

Rowman & Littlefield. 

Bellezza, John Vincent. 2008. Zhang Zhung: 

Foundations of Civilization in Tibet. A Historical 

and Ethnoarchaeological Study of the Monuments, 

Rock Art, Texts and Oral Tradition of the Ancient 

Tibetan Upland. Philosophisch-Historische 

Klasse Denkschriften, vol. 368. Wien: Verlag der 

Österreichischen Akademie der Wissenschaften. 

[Editor’s note: John Belezza is a Senior Fellow, 

Institute for the Science of Religion and Central 

Asian Studies, Bern University. See Book section for 

reviews of two recent Bellezza books. For the author’s 

full bibliography, extensive series of articles and 

other information about his research work, see www.

tibetarchaeology.com. All photos by John V. Bellezza, 

1999–2005; all portraits were taken with the express 

permission of the subjects.]

NUNAMIT WORKSHOP EXPLORED QUEBEC 

LNS INUIT HERITAGE

By William Fitzhugh

In January 2019, a conference of academics and 

community residents of the Quebec Lower North 

Shore (LNS) spent two days exploring Inuit culture and 

heritage in Quebec City. Hosted by Laval University and 

with support from an SSHRC grant, thirty participants 

presented papers on what is known and remains 

unknown about the Inuit who have lived on this coast 

and whose culture, language, and history have been 

overshadowed by European dominance and government 

neglect. Nicolas Shattler of St. Augustine led the Inuit 

delegation, which included several other Inuit from the 

LNS. Among the participants were historians, linguists, 

anthropologists, archaeologists, folklorists, genealogists, 

lawyers, and included a strong Laval student contingent.

Unlike the Inuit of Nunavut and Labrador, Quebec 

Inuit have not had formal land claims discussions with 

their governments. The purpose of the conference was 

to share information on what is known about Inuit 

history, culture, and life in the northeastern Gulf of 

St. Lawrence—a neglected part of the Inuit world—

and make plans for future partnerships. Despite their 

many contributions to traditional European life here 

(dog sleds, harpoons, ulus, sea mammal hunting, etc.), 

Quebec Inuit have not received much attention from 

anthropologists or historians. Many aspects of their 

culture and history have not been recorded and exist 

only as oral history in today’s Inuit population. Early 

historical reports are spotty and vague and emphasize 

confrontation and hostilities. And until recently, their 

history has been obscured by the absence of physical 

evidence in the form of documented archaeological 

sites. Recent archaeological work has confirmed 

Groswater and Dorset Paleo-Inuit occupations between 

2500–2000 years ago, and Inuit winter villages during 

the 17–18th centuries. So while Inuit presence has 

been sporadic historically, their reappearance as a new 

Nicholas Shattler of St. Augustine, Quebec. 

Photo by Will Richard 2011
 ASC Newsletter 47

returning immigrant population in the 19th century and 

continued presence today is a demographic reality. 

The conference took the form of a workshop more than 

an academic conference and provided opportunity for 

broad discussion between academic and community 

representatives. As described in the workshop’s 

concluding report, “our objective was to mobilize 

knowledge on Inuit heritage from the LNS pertinent 

to the Nunamit Foundation’s endeavor to obtain 

recognition of their distinctive way of life.” 

The report continued: “The event marked the beginning 

of the Nunamit Foundation’s journey toward having 

a greater voice in the production of knowledge 

about their cultural heritage through oral tradition, 

archaeology, and archival research. In the spirit of the 

[Canada’s] Truth and Reconciliation Commission, and 

as a means to fulfill SSHRC’s objectives for Indigenous

Research Capacity and Reconciliation strategy, 

we used the opportunity of the grant to position 

knowledge about LNS Inuit history at the heart of 

present and future academic research, and to encourage 

dialogue between LNS Inuit and researchers about 

traditionalInuit knowledge and its place in scholarly 

research. Ultimately, the forum we held should enhance 

understanding and reconciliation and lay the foundation 

for a long-term research program for building LNS 

Inuit research capacity as a tool for education.”

Part of the Nunamit program calls for sharing 

knowledge and information and participating in how 

that information is gathered, created, and used. The 

Nunamit Foundation is also seeking recognition of 

Inuit subsistence and other rights needed to sustain 

their culture and way of life. In addition to gathering 

information for an eventual land claims or other 

agreements with government entities, Inuit and 

others on the LNS are eager to develop resources 

that can provide educational materials documenting 

Inuit history and culture for schools and the public. 

Ultimately a research partnership between universities 

and LNS Inuit can create new economic benefits from 

eco- and heritage tourism when Route 138 is completed 

along this stretch of road-less coast. The Nunamit 

Foundation program seeks to promote a general 

awakening on the LNS of the importance played 

by Inuit culture in social, political, and economic 

development, as so amply demonstrated by the recent 

spectacular transformation in Labrador resulting from 

land claims coupled with Memorial University’s recent 

SSHRC partnership project, “Tradition and Transition 

Among the Labrador Inuit”. We thank Nick Shattler, 

Lisa Rankin, Reginald Auger, and Brad Loewen for 

their efforts organizing the conference and the SSHRC 

proposal that was submitted in early 2021.

A BRONZE AGE LOGBOAT FROM THE 

STARNBERGER SEE, BAVARIA, GERMANY

By Timm Weski

The Starnberger See is situated about 30 km south 

of Munich. In 1986 volunteers of the Bayerische 

Gesellschaft für Unterwasserarchäologie discovered 

the remains of a logboat in the shallow water near the 

shore of Roseninsel (Island) in the lake. Since 2011 the 

island has been part of the UNESCO World Heritage 

“Prehistoric Pile Dwellings in the Alps”. The logboat 

had sunk on its starboard side, and the bow rested 

higher than the stern. Therefore, the portside, the bow, 

and about two-thirds of the upper parts of the starboard 

side are missing because they were not covered by 

sediment, like the rest of the hull. 

The vessel was initially recorded underwater by the 

volunteers under leadership of Hubert Beer with 

financial help of the Bayerisches Landesamt für 

Denkmalpflege. After it was raised it was handed over 

to the Archäologische Staatssammlung München, 

where it was conserved with PEG, a process which took 

several years. Dendroarchaeological research, which 

produced a date of 900 BC, was conducted by Sybille 

Bauer, Dendrolabor Trier, and later by Franz Herzig

from the Dendrolabor of the Bayerisches Landesamt 

für Denkmalpflege. Although a detailed drawing 

of the boat with sections of the hull had been made 

directly after it was raised, this documentation proved 

Excavating the stern in 1988. Photo 

BY Bayerische Gesellschaft für 

Unterwasserarchäologie

(Weski 2020: Fig. 3.4)
48 ASC Newsletter

insufficient, in 

particular at the 

stern with its 

protruding balk 

and several auger 

holes. Further, it 

was discovered 

that the position 

on the lakebed 

was not identical 

with the original 

floating condition; 

instead the hull had 

to be turned about 

45o anticlockwise 

from the present 

position in the museum. A complete photometric and 

3D-documentation was done in 2019 by Sven Gollub 

for his bachelor thesis under the supervision of Jens 

Czaja of the Fakultät für Geoinformation, Hochschule 

München / Munich University of Applied Sciences. 

With the help of these data it was possible to ‘move’ 

the hull from its position on the lakebed into its original 

floating condition. This showed that the balk at the stern, 

which is carefully worked out of the starboard side, was 

originally above, or just below, the waterline. On the 

inside of the block which forms the “transom”, a step 

was cut on the starboard side. The balk makes the shape 

of the stern unique. Unfortunately, the center of the trunk 

at the bow could not be identified, so its original shape 

could not be reconstructed. The present length of the 

boat is 13.34 m, but it must originally have been slightly 

longer. The breadth of the hull about 1 m from the 

stern was 1.12 to 1.20 m and the depth 0.78 m. Further 

forward, about 5 m from the stern, the dimensions were 

1.03 to 1.05 m and 0.63 m. 

Inside the hull were toolmarks showing how it was 

hollowed out. Oblong grooves were carved into the 

inside of the trunk, and the wood between these cuts 

was removed. For some of these tasks a hatchet with 

a half-circle blade was used. Further, there are—

particularly in the stern block—several auger holes 

whose function remains unknown. A thick, conical one 

runs straight through the transom, and, together with 

the square balk outside the hull and the step, may have 

been part of some superstructure. Another auger hole at 

the bow indicates it supported some kind of decoration. 

In the starboard side there are several large, oval holes 

of unknown function. There are no hints for the means 

of propulsion, but paddles are a likely answer. On 

the other hand, the holes noted, together with a rock 

carving in Brandskog, Sweden, suggests forwardfacing or “push” rowing, although this technique has 

not yet been 

recorded from 

prehistoric times 

in Central Europe.

This logboat 

is much longer 

than others 

known from the 

Starnberger See, 

which usually 

measure 5–7 m. 

Some were used 

as late as 1900 

AD. The few 

small branch 

roots in the hull 

imply that the original oak must have grown in a thick 

forest. Even at 900 BC trees of this quality must have 

been rare. Since there were no bulk goods like salt to 

be transported across the Starnberger See, the logboat 

could have been a warrior or ceremonial vessel. As 

the lake is too small for amphibious warfare, the latter 

is more likely, though many questions remain to be 

answered.

References

Timm Weski, Der urnenfelderzeitliche Einbaum aus dem 

Starnberger See bei der Roseninsel. Bergung–digitale 

Vermessung–Dendroarchäologie–kulturhistorische 

Einordnung (with contributions by Hubert Beer, Jens 

Czaja, Sven Gollub and Franz Herzig). Bayerische 

Vorgeschichtsblätter 85, 2020:7-39.

REFLECTIONS FROM TALLINN

By Jean-Loup Rousselot

As is the practice in Europe, museum employees 

leave their posts at the age of 65 to make room for 

the younger generation of researchers. This forced 

retirement happened for me ten years ago. I chose to 

keep it simple for everyone, so I decided to get away 

from the anthropology museum in Munich where I had 

worked for almost 25 years as curator of the Arctic 

Collections and as Assistant Director of the museum. 

On the one hand, I did not want to interfere with those 

who had taken over my fields of activity; however, it is 

difficult to be silent when you are witnessing decisions 

you do not understand.

On the other hand, I was ready to start somewhere 

else, something new. That something new was 

to transmit the anthropological knowledge that I 

have acquired through fieldwork and the study of 

ethnographic collections. I wanted to pass it to the 

Top view in position on the lakebed. 2: Sections in position on the lakebed. 3: 

Side view of the starboard side in reconstructed floating condition. 4: Top view 

in reconstructed floating condition. The red lines indicate the tool marks. Not 

to scale. Graphic by Sven Gollub (Weski 2020:Fig. 10.1-4)
 ASC Newsletter 49

European public as a continuation of the museum's 

work, and also to the Alaska Native students who 

had enrolled in the Arts Department at the University 

of Alaska in Fairbanks. I hoped to demonstrate the 

complexity and sophistication of Native technology, 

giving credit to the ingenuity of their ancestral 

technology and approach, to promote self-confidence 

and, hopefully, to make the young generation proud of 

their culture and ancestors.

So, I moved to the eastern end of Europe, to Estonia, 

where my wife is from. There, I had the opportunity 

to teach using the Russian America collections of the 

Estonia National Museum as an educational tool. This 

presented me with a unique opportunity to manipulate, 

touch, discover, and “read" materials collected by the 

early Russian navigators of the early 19th century. 

Another aspect of these early collections is that 

there was no systematic 

collecting, as would be 

the case fifty or seventy 

years later with the Bureau 

of American Ethnology. 

In this case the items 

were collected as rarities 

because of their unusual 

shape, designs, and 

materials.

When I moved to the 

Eastern Baltic, I was 

going to an area which 

was the cradle of Arctic 

anthropological research. 

During the Russian 

America era, its explorers, navigators, and colonial 

administrators were often from the Baltic Provinces of 

the Russian Empire. Many sons of families of modest 

means, but who possessed strong technical skills 

and the knowledge of a naval officer, could make an 

exceptional career in the Imperial Russian Navy. In 

the storages of the old learned societies of the cities 

rimming the Baltic Sea there are not only ethnographic 

collections, but also diaries, maps, and correspondence 

of the explorers of the North Pacific regions that are 

primary sources central to historical research. A number 

of these Russian America collections made by Estonian 

naval officers serving in the Russian imperial navy are 

today in Tallinn.

A group of veteran Arctic Soviet researchers called 

Estonian Polar Club, of which I became a member, 

provided a way for me to established connections 

with the outside world through the group’s monthly 

meetings of researchers from the Antarctic and Arctic.

Another reason to come to Estonia was to study the 

Finno-Ugric people, as I was invited by the Tallinn

Academy of Arts to participate to seven summer 

expeditions to Central Russian, Karelia, Hungary, 

Siberian Estonians, and Saami.

To discover recent history is for anyone coming from 

Western Europe probably the most unusual experience 

that one can have because of the fifty year occupation 

(1939–1991) of the Baltic countries by the Soviet 

Union and by the Nazis (1941–1944). For Westerners 

this history is a major reason to visit the Baltics. 

So, I am giving tours and lectures on the Cold War 

period. After the destruction of society orchestrated 

by Stalin and his secret police, a more benign form of 

communism prevailed among the Baltics; no longer 

were there mass deportations to Siberian Gulags, but 

it still was a life without freedom. The silent majority 

could live in peace as long 

they didn't raise their voice, 

while the life of single 

political protesters—the 

dissidents—was a living 

hell by the secret police.

As a result, Estonia is a kind 

of huge open air museum 

of Soviet architecture 

ruins, mostly of gigantic 

dimensions. Here too, a 

fieldwork situation is offered 

to historians since most of 

the actors are around, both 

the perpetrators and the 

victims, the freedom fighters, 

and the indifferent majority. 

They are neighbors in the same apartment building or in 

the same village.

The picture of my wife, Kadri (Catherine in Estonian), 

and me in Alsace is also connected with recent Baltic 

history. We wanted to hear about people who have 

been forced by Nazi Germany to fight in German units 

against Communist Russia. This was the case of many 

young Alsacians, Moselans, and Luxembourgers, 

whose homelands had been annexed by the Third 

Reich. In Estonia it was more a general mobilization to 

avoid a Soviet occupation that made them serve with a 

Nazi uniform.

Besides writing articles and translations on the 

preceding subjects in Estonian journals, I have 

contributed to several books as noted below. And now I 

am writing a little book on a newly discovered Russian 

American collection of mostly Yupik ethnography, 

as well as an introduction to a book on polar bear 

mythology in Siberia and North America. 

Kadri and Jean-Loup Rousselot visiting Alsace, Saarburg, 

Germany
50 ASC Newsletter

COLLECTIONS

region. Once tested, the approach can be expanded by 

encouraging institutions to digitize their polar resources 

and contribute data to the PE network linking regions, 

environments, and peoples for the benefit of science 

and humanities around the globe. Although PE is a 

pilot, it is also the seed from which a vast new set of 

data can eventually grow and become available.

Some Arctic material from field notes and books has 

already been digitized for Harvard’s Biodiversity 

Heritage Library, which the PE partners have 

identified as the best model or platform. Since 2005, 

the Biodiversity Heritage Library, now enhanced by 

Smithsonian Library participation, benefits natural 

science museums, libraries, and universities, in addition 

to institutions beyond the sciences. BHL’s infrastructure 

will be adapted to begin building the Arctic Digital 

Library. This prototype project will plan overlay historic 

cultural data from the Arctic onto environmental data 

of the BHL to begin to erase the false separation of 

human culture and the natural world. A successful Polar 

Explorer launch will unlock the huge trove of cultural, 

historical, and human data currently held in myriad 

institutions needed for building more realistic predictive 

models by integrating people, earth, and biological 

sciences. A focus on the Arctic is timely given the urgent 

need for understanding this rapidly changing region, its 

human and environmental history, and its growing future 

importance to humanity.

THE VEGA COLLECTION PROJECT 

ADVANCES INTO COVID-19 ‘ALLELECTRONIC’ ERA 

By Igor Krupnik and Martin Schultz 

The co-authors introduced initial steps in the ‘Vega

Collection project,’ named after the Vega expedition 

ship (1878–1879) in the previous issue of the ASC 

Newsletter. Our project began in fall 2019 when 

the authors explored the massive collection of what 

eventually turned out to be 1,100 objects from 

the Swedish polar expedition under Adolf Erik 

Nordenskiöld (1832–1901) during its wintering off 

the Arctic shores of the Chukchi Peninsula. It marked 

the first successful sailing through the ‘Northeast 

Passage’ along the shores of northern Eurasia. One of 

many outcomes of that journey was an ethnographic 

collection acquired among the local Chukchi people 

now housed at the Etnografiska museet, a part of the 

Statens museer för världskultur (National Museums 

of World Culture), in Stockholm. We described our 

pilot effort to explore the history of the Vega Chukchi 

collection over its 140-year life and to virtually 

POLAR EXPLORER: THE ARCTIC DIGITAL 

LIBRARY 

By William W. Fitzhugh and David Nordlander

For the past several years, David Nordlander, 

William Fitzhugh, and Nana Naisbitt have been 

laying the groundwork for developing an interinstitutional network of Arctic information similiar 

to the Biodiversity Heritage Library (BHL) and the 

NMNH Encyclopedia of Life. Initiated by two National 

Science Foundation (NSF)-sponsored workshops 

in 2016 and 2017, plans for launching a prototype 

drawing upon collections from Dartmouth’s Arctic 

collections (Stefansson Archives and others) and the 

Smithsonian’s IPY (International Polar Year) 1882-3 

and other collections have advanced to the proposal 

stage. If funded, work assembling digital materials to 

test the discovery and delivery process could begin in 

late 2021 and continue for the next three years.

Today the need for Arctic information is greater than 

ever. Arctic collections, widely dispersed among 

various institutions across the globe and often housed 

in remote locations, contain crucial historic information 

that is essentially hidden and difficult to access. The 

scientific community often expresses excitement and 

interest in these collections but fails to incorporate the 

data into their research because the data are currently 

very difficult to extract. There is an accessibility 

problem at a time when access to that information is 

critically needed. 

Polar Explorer will amass and integrate four centuries 

of Arctic records into a highly-searchable portal that 

places data into the hands of scientists, Indigenous 

populations, researchers, educators, and the public 

who will be able to mine historic data readily using 

advanced modern protocols. These ‘hidden’ records 

contain data about Arctic climate, botany, zoology, 

glaciology, northern indigenous populations, health, 

education, land claims, land use, history of polar 

expeditions, mining, engineering, government and 

governance, and more. For the first time, Arctic 

scientists will be able to tap humanities collections for 

scientific purposes, pulling valuable scientific data from 

historical records for modern analysis and comparison 

across space and time. Polar Explorer can become a 

primary resource for Arctic information for all.

The proposed project is a collaborative partnership of 

Dartmouth College, Smithsonian Institution, Sealaska 

Heritage Institute, and the community of Cambridge 

Bay, Nunavut, Canada. Our intent is to test a model 

using collections encompassing the entire circumpolar 
 ASC Newsletter 51

‘reunite‘ it with the descendants of Indigenous people 

who once interacted with the Vega crew. 

The project advanced in 2020, in spite of the realities 

of the COVID-19 era. The proposed second study of 

the objects in museum storage was put on hold, as were 

our plans to seek funds to bring the team of Chukchi 

experts on a visit to Stockholm. All activities had to 

morph into online searches and communication. Even 

with these limitations, we managed to achieve some of 

the goals we set out in last-year’s overview.

Expanding Vega Collection Database

The first goal was a physical (or virtual) reunion of 

the objects. At the beginning of our survey, about 660 

objects were identified as ‘Chukchi’ and attributed 

to the Vega collection in the museum database. Yet 

early ledger records from the 1880s and historical 

photographs from the Vega exhibit at the Royal Palace 

in 1880 revealed a somewhat larger set of objects, like 

14 mattocks and hacks (picks) arranged in two wall 

displays. The current database lists only10 such objects. 

One mattock may now be a part of the Smithsonian 

NMNH-Anthropology collection (ASC Newsletter

2020). In addition, many composite items displayed 

in 1880 in their entirety, such as harpoons, bow drills, 

fireboards, etc., were disassembled over the years, and 

their constituent pieces needed to be reunited. In some 

cases, as parts of composite objects, they never had 

numbers of their own. We also found objects that had 

missing parts which may have been lost on the way to 

Stockholm or later in museum storage. One example 

is a missing paddle from a kayak model with a hunter 

(1880.04.471). Wooden pegs clearly indicate he was 

once holding a paddle. Another challenge is that the 

collections were not fully inventoried until the 1950s, 

more than 70 years after the expedition returned, based 

on an object list produced by the Natural History 

Museum in the 1880s (see ASC Newsletter 2020).

As of early 2021, the number of Chukchi objects from 

the Vega collection surpassed 1,100, thanks to the 

addition of several formerly ‘unassociated’ objects 

and some 130+ archaeological specimens excavated 

at the old site of Ryrkaipyi (Jirkajpij). More items 

from the original Vega stock of 1878–79, including 

pencil drawings, photographs, archival documents, 

and other cultural resources are still to be added to 

the database from both the Etnografiska museet and 

other Swedish and foreign institutions that received 

portions of the collection. In winter 2020 a full list of 

Vega captain Louis Palander's photographs became 

available, featuring nine dry plate and 76 wet plate 

photographs, some with short descriptions of the image 

subject, names of the individuals, and place names 

where photos were taken. This list is part of Palander’s 

bequest in the archives of the Sjöhistoriska museet 

(Maritime Museum) in Stockholm (Inv. No. 1968:715). 

Etnografiska museet never showed much interest in 

these collections, apart from placing scores of Chukchi 

objects in its permanent exhibit display (since 2000) 

and making them available in the online database.

Connecting Objects to People

The second goal we identified was cultural reunion, the 

re-connection of objects with Indigenous knowledge 

holders from the home area. Local people never had 

access to any records originated from the Swedish 

expedition and to the collections held in a distant 

museum in Stockholm. Though the name “Vega” is 

familiar in Chukotka and recent reprints of the Russian 

translation of Nordenskiöld’s account of the Vega

voyage are available, few people could relate it to the 

description of their ancestors’ life.

During our initial work in Stockholm in September 

2019, we contacted Eduard Zdor, Chukchi 

environmental activist from Chukotka, Russia, now a 

Ph.D. candidate at the University of Alaska Fairbanks. 

He grew up in the community of Neshkan (Najtskaj in 

Nordenskjold’s transliteration), some 30 km (18 mi) 

east of the Vega 1878–79 wintering site. His and his 

wife’s, Lilya Tlecheivyn’e, relatives still live there. 

These people are the ‘descendant community’ for the 

objects, photographs, and ethnographic descriptions 

generated by the Vega expedition. 

In spring 2020, scores of images from the Etnografiska 

museet online database, http://collections.smvk.se/

carlotta-em/web were shared with Eduard Zdor and 

Lilya Tlecheivyn’e, and through them, with local 

Chukchi experts residing in Neshkan. As people’s 

comments started to flow back, Lilya organized 

them, adding the Chukchi terms added for constituent 

Martin Schultz and Igor Krupnik assembling the “Vega” 

Chukchi objects in the collection storage of the Etnografiska 

museet. Photo by Johan Jeppsson
52 ASC Newsletter

elements, like in the following description of a wooden 

fireboard (milghyn—Fig.2, 1880.04.0332): 

This object was used for lighting the fire or family 

hearth. Based on its condition, it was barely used 

[because of its light color—IK]. Often the family 

has several fireboards in its daily use. Unlike the 

family sacred [ritual] fireboards, this object does 

not have a roughly carved human head at its end. 

The ritual fireboards are always of dark-brown color 

covered in soot and grease from multiple ‘feeding’ 

ceremonies. During such feeding ceremony the 

board is rubbed with a combination of bone marrow 

and blubber [fat], usually at the place where the 

mouth would be on a human head. According to 

Nina Kyttagina, not all sacred fireboards have 

carved mouth, eyes, or nose. Each family commonly 

had its own fireboard and only members of that 

family could use it. It is forbidden to share fire 

from the family hearth with other dwellings in the 

camp. The fireboard set usually includes several 

objects, besides the fireboard (milghyn), including: 

Ngileq, a round wooden stick; Tinguchgyn, a small 

bow made of reindeer antler (another name is 

gyrilgyn) with a bowstring of bearded seal hide that 

is threaded through the holes at its ends and fixed 

with two knots; drill socket piece (arm protector, 

gyrgychychochyn) made of reindeer antler, kneecap, 

or any piece of large animal bone or walrus ivory. 

Certain family fireboards eventually become sacred 

objects and are kept in special secluded places. 

During family ceremonies the boards are ‘fed’ 

together with other family sacred objects. For ritual 

feeding of family objects, people use a mixture of 

bone marrow from reindeer front legs (qymlat) and 

marrow from crushed reindeer bones with added 

seal blubber (ypalgyn or palgyn).

[This description is based on phone interviews with 

the Neshkan residents Irina Nutetgivev (46), Nina

Kyttagina (68), and Nikolai Ettyne (56), in April 2020 

(translated from Russian notes by IK). The two women 

have been long-living residents of reindeer herding 

camps and users of their respective family fireboards.]

Of the five fireboards listed in the Vega Chukchi 

collection, only one (no. 04.0334) has a carved 

human head, but it is a newly made model of a family 

ritual fireboard, with no traces of prior use and no 

sign of a carved mouth for feeding. The rest are 

common household fireboards, also with minimal 

use or produced specially for collectors. These and 

similar comments illustrate the continuous intimate 

knowledge of objects that has been retained in the 

home community for over 140 years. Such information 

can vastly enrich the museum records with specific 

information on object use, making process, symbolism, 

and other aspects missed by both the Vega crew and by 

later generations of registrars and curators. 

Expanding knowledge about ethnographic collections 

by inviting Indigenous elders and experts to museums, 

engaging them in joint documentation projects and 

shared stewardship is an increasingly popular practice 

in today’s museum work (see ‘Nelson in the Cloud’ 

article in this issue). Yet each example of such ‘newly 

added knowledge’, thanks to insight by today’s 

Native experts, is something short of a miracle. Even 

if it takes place many decades later, it increases our 

understanding of the objects and reverses generations 

of knowledge loss. Such virtual reunion may be slow 

and painful, as details of former cultural expertise have 

been lost and not every object can be recognized by 

today’s experts 140+ years after the initial collecting.

Vega Collection within the Chukchi Museum 

‘Universe’

The third goal was to place the Vega collection in 

proper cultural context by comparing it with major 

Chukchi ethnographic holdings in other museums. 

In early 2020, we estimated the total number of 

Chukchi ethnographic objects held in various museums 

worldwide to be around 7,000–8,000, not counting 

archaeological specimens, photographs, and Indigenous 

drawings. This estimate has been revised somewhat 

upward, as several significant historical collections 

were brought to our attention lately. Of this number, 

almost 40% belong to the three largest collections: at 

the American Museum of Natural History (AMNH) in 

New York (about 1,300 objects collected by Waldemar 

Bogoras in 1900–1901), the Russian Ethnographic 

Museum (REM) in St. Petersburg, Russia (at least 

1,300 objects collected by Nikolai Sokolnikov

in 1901–1909), and Peter the Great Museum of 

Anthropology and Ethnography (Kunstkamera) in St. 

Petersburg (over 1,000 objects collected by Nikolai L. Fireboard (milghyn), 1880.04.0332, assemblage with fire 

drill and bow. Photo by Johan Jeppsson
 ASC Newsletter 53

Gondatti in 1894–1897). This makes the Vega Chukchi 

collection of about 1,100 pieces, and counting, the 

world’s fourth largest. 

Smaller, but also significant Chukchi ethnographic 

collections are held by the Arseniev Museum in 

Vladivostok (ca. 250 objects, Chukchi and Yupik 

combined), the “Chukotka Heritage” Museum Center 

in Anadyr (about 500 objects, plus a similar number 

of pieces of Native souvenir art and carved ivories), 

the Magadan Regional Museum (ca. 160), and in some 

museums in Europe, like Kulturhistorisk Museum, 

University of Oslo (about 400 objects from 1920–

1923), Museum Fünf Kontinente in Munich (330), 

Musée du Quai Branly in Paris (over 300, late 1800s), 

and Weltmuseum in Vienna 

(ca. 250). In addition, there 

is a 1,500-piece collection 

at the Sergiev-Posad 

Museum near Moscow, 

Russia, of Chukchi 

and Yupik carved and 

ornamented ivories from the 

20th century. 

Although we still lack the 

documentation on when 

and where individual 

objects in the Vega

collection were obtained 

(likewise we do not know 

who produced them), all 

were procured at the ship’s 

wintering site between 

October 1878 and July 

1879 from people visiting 

the ship, also on the crew’s 

visits to nearby camps. We 

assume that Nordenskiöld, 

a geologist with a prior 

experience in ethnographic 

collecting from his trips 

to Greenland and Arctic 

Russia was the prime 

collector, although we cannot exclude other crew 

members.

According to Nordenskiöld’s own writing (1881: 438-

441), his main collecting strategy was bartering with 

his Chukchi visitors, primarily for small objects, in 

exchange for European goods. Money was of no value 

and Nordenskiöld was short of many of the usual trade 

objects (knives, needles, tools, firearms, metal buttons, 

etc.), and even tobacco, except for two boxes of Dutch 

clay pipes that he used as gifts or ‘souvenirs,’ and stock 

of Swedish silver coins. It perhaps explains why the 

Vega collection contains so many small ivory carvings 

but does not account for the presence of truly large 

objects—two full-size Chukchi kayaks, fur clothing, 

hunting tools, and house utensils. The collection 

also includes several models of objects that were 

clearly ordered and made by the local people for the 

expedition.

To explore the composition of Nordenskiöld’s Chukchi 

collection, we organized it by seven major object groups 

(categories), such as ‘equipment’ (17.3%), including 

hunting and fishing tools (10%), clothing and clothing 

tools (11.7%), ‘weapons and ammunition’ (18.4%, 

over 100 arrows, dozens of arrow points and shafts, 

several bows, and quivers); and the huge number of 

small ivory figurines often listed as ‘amulets’ (over 

340 pieces, 38%). There 

are remarkably few objects 

related to children and 

child life, and only a small 

number of objects related to 

women’s life, like clothing, 

sewing, housekeeping. 

Such gender skewing is 

typical for early collecting 

conducted primarily by male 

researchers and travelers. An 

additional factor could have 

been the Chukchi strategy 

to protect (prevent?) women 

and children from interaction 

with the Vega crew. 

Nordenskiöld’s collecting 

shortcomings are particularly 

visible in the very low 

share (2.2%) of spiritual 

and symbolic objects. 

Certain types of such 

objects are common in other 

historical Chukchi museum 

collections, like ritual 

fireboards (Chukchi gyrgyrti, 

see above), family wooden 

guardians (tain’ykvyt), commonly made as strings of 

small objects; shaman drums (yarar) and amulets, 

carved wooden figurines and dishes (enanentytko’olgyt), 

hereditary family lances (poigyt), and others. Such 

objects are rare or absent in the Vega collection; if 

present, they are mainly new objects with no traces 

of use and produced for sale (see above). One reason 

might be that the expedition had already made a large 

collection of wooden idols at a Nenets sacrificial pile on 

the Vaygatch Island. 

The specific cultural ‘profile’ of the Vega collection 

may be properly understood only in comparison with 

Small ivory carvings from the Vega collection: 3a – seal, 

1880.04.0640-3; 3b – bird, 1880.04.0855-7; 

3c – two-headed torso, 1880.040578. 

Photo by Rose-Marie Westling
54 ASC Newsletter

other large Chukchi collections, even if from slightly 

later time, like Waldemar Bogoras collection at 

AMNH in New York and part of the Nikolai Sokolnikov 

collection at the Russian Ethnographic Museum (REM) 

in St. Petersburg. For the former, we used the AMNH 

Anthropology collections website (https://anthro.

amnh.org/collections) for all counts; for the latter, we 

relied on the data kindly provided by Natalya Kosyak, 

REM Siberian collection manager, since REM Siberian/

Arctic collections are not accessible online. 

The comparison of three 

major collections supported 

our preliminary findings. 

First, Nordenskiöld had 

secured a remarkably diverse 

stock of Chukchi ivory 

carvings, even though carved 

and decorated ivory pieces 

had been popular with other 

collectors. Second, the share 

of women’s and particularly 

children’s objects in his 

collection is indeed smaller 

than in other major holdings. 

Third, the ‘weapons and 

ammunition’ category was 

popular among all early 

collectors and accounts for 

the large number of arrows, 

bows, and quivers: all had 

been out of daily use due to 

the introduction of firearms. 

Nordenskiöld obviously 

tried to collect objects that 

reflected all sides of Chukchi 

daily life. Yet he was 

less successful than other 

collectors, like Bogoras and Gondatti (also Nelson in 

Alaska), perhaps due to the latter’s lengthy interactions 

with local people, fluency in their language, and active 

traveling across Native camps. 

The Vega Chukchi collection also revealed that the 

practice of making object models for sale or barter, 

such as those of boats, fireboards, hunting tools, sleds, 

even tents was well established among the Chukchi 

by 1878. Nordenskiöld, the first reported collector in 

the area, skillfully relied on this practice to expand 

the coverage of indigenous culture, particularly when 

people were reluctant to part with their precious 

family objects. 

Potentials

Our Vega collection study is still a ‘work in progress.’ 

The Etnografiska museet continues to populate the 

collection site and more objects are retrieved in storage 

and reunited with the core collection. Detailed input 

on about a half dozen objects have been secured from 

the Chukchi experts in Neshkan, and this work will 

continue. Ethnographic objects of the Vega expedition 

have been organized in major categories to construe 

Nordenskiöld’s collecting strategy and to compare it 

with those of Waldemar Bogoras in 1900–1901, Nikolai 

Gondatti in 1894–1897, and Nikolai Sokolnikov in 

1901–1907, based on their collections at AMNH, MAE, 

and REM. 

The sheer size of the 

collection, its level of 

documentation, and its 

respectable age of 140+ 

years make it a true ‘heritage 

treasure.’ No effort should 

be spared to help reunite 

the objects in Stockholm 

with descendants. Even 

if no memories of these 

interactions remain today, 

the objects carry enormous 

cultural and heritage value 

to local people. They could 

revive their interest in 

heritage, strengthen cultural 

pride, and inspire restoration 

of certain practices based 

on preserved museum 

specimens. It is now an 

established practice to 

open museum collections 

to Indigenous people and 

partner with communities 

anxious to connect to 

cultural treasures of their 

ancestors.

As the Vega online collection database is filled with 

data and images from museum records and the added 

information from Chukchi experts, it has a great 

potential to become an international treasure. Today, 

it functions with the Swedish-language interface only, 

whereas its main audience in the home area in Russia 

needs search and reading options in Russian and 

Chukchi, plus an English interface for international 

users. We believe that the Vega collection has a 

potential to serve as a model in ‘digital reunification,’ 

akin to efforts undertaken by other large museums in 

Oslo, Copenhagen, and Helsinki using their objects 

from the Arctic areas. 

Finally, the Vega collection—thanks to its size and 

early age—could serve as a starting point and a driver 

.“Spinner” (Swedish, snurra), a sinew twister,

though its lack of wear and elaborately decoration 

indicate it was probably made for collectors, 

1880.04.0959. Photo by Johan Jeppsson
 ASC Newsletter 55

to reunite the Chukchi collection ‘universe’ of some 

8,000+ ethnographic objects dispersed across many 

museums in Russia, Europe, and North America. Our 

pilot study inspired some initial steps to compare 

three major holdings of Chukchi heritage objects 

in Stockholm, in New York, and in St. Petersburg. 

More could be achieved when other museums open 

their Chukchi collections for a shared online access, 

perhaps in the footsteps of the Reciprocal Research 

Network (RRN: https://www.rrncommunity.org), 

an online museum alliance built around the First 

Nations Northwest Coast ethnographic collections, 

or an earlier venture by the Japanese Ainu specialists, 

“The Overseas Ainu Collections,” a world catalog 

of Ainu collections. It may create an online platform 

and a meeting place for Chukchi heritage experts 

and museum professionals interested in Chukchi 

culture. Reconnecting historical museum collections 

with Indigenous experts and communities of origin 

is an increasingly popular path to move objects from 

museum drawers and to start their new life as a source 

of heritage knowledge, cultural pride, education, and 

community empowerment. 

Acknowledgement. At the Etnografiska museet in 

Stockholm we are grateful to former and current 

staff members Monika Sargren, Linda Wennbom, 

Johan Jeppsson, Magnus Johannson and Tony 

Sandin. We owe our special gratitude to Eduard 

Zdor and Lilya Tlecheivyn’e and their partners in 

the community of Neshkan, Irina Nutetgivev, Nina 

Kyttagina (1952–2020), and Nikolai Ettyne. At the 

Russian Ethnographic Museum in St. Petersburg, we 

received precious help from Natalya Kosyak, Siberian 

collection manager, and Julia Kupina, museum 

director. Rachel Hand at the Museum of Archaeology 

and Anthropology in Cambridge, UK, and Elena 

Mikhailova at the Museum of Anthropology and 

Ethnology in St. Petersburg, Russia offered critical 

insight on some of the earliest Chukchi objects in their 

respective institutions. A much larger version of this 

paper has been published in the Vienna-based museum 

journal, Archiv Weltmuseum Wien. 

“NELSON IN THE CLOUD”: DIGITALLY 

REUNITING A HISTORICAL COLLECTION

By Alaina Helm and Amy Margaris

The “Nelson in the Cloud” project is a collaborative 

effort begun by Oberlin College and the Arctic Studies 

Center in September 2020 to digitally reunify the world’s 

largest collection of Alaskan ethnographic objects. The 

objects were obtained by naturalist Edward William 

Nelson on behalf of the Smithsonian in 1877–1881, 

and subsequently exchanged with many museums 

across the country and internationally in the late 1800s 

and early 1900s. Our goal is to create an online portal 

to a user-friendly database through which information 

about all parts of Nelson’s Alaska collection can be 

accessed by anyone who is interested in learning more. 

As a joint effort between students, faculty, and staff 

at Oberlin College and the Smithsonian’s Department 

of Anthropology, we hope to create a platform that is 

beneficial to both the Alaska Native peoples whose 

cultures are represented in these ethnographic objects 

and to the many institutions who maintain the items 

today. 

The project first took seed in April of 2016 when Arctic 

Studies Center curator Igor Krupnik flew to Oberlin 

College in northeast Ohio to participate in a panel on 

Alaska Native peoples and climate change. While there 

he viewed the College’s 36-item Alaska Native collection 

(part of the Oberlin College Ethnographic Collection) 

that includes fish skin bags, hunting and fishing gear, 

and ivory implements. Eighteen of the Alaskan items 

were obtained by the naturalist Edward William Nelson. 

During that visit Dr. Krupnik and Oberlin College 

anthropologist Amy Margaris began to envision what 

they playfully termed “Nelson in the Cloud,” a “sort 

of digital reunion where objects that are physically 

disseminated across many institutions, including Oberlin 

and the Smithsonian, could be reassembled for cohesive 

study” (see “Bark Blankets and ‘Esquimaux Implements 

from Alaska” in the ASC Newsletter 2017). 

Why focus on the collections of Edward William 

Nelson, in particular? Nelson was a prominent figure 

in late 19th century Alaskan ethnology and collected an 

astonishing 10,000 or so cultural items from diverse 

Alaska Native communities. Many of those were 

everyday objects including toys, sewing supplies, 

and hunting tools. Nelson described his observations 

of Alaska and the items he collected in his 1899 

ethnography The Eskimo About Bering Strait. Because 

Nelson was trained as a natural historian, he recorded 

these cultural items in a scientific manner similar 

to how one would record biological or geological 

specimens in that day. Yet we recognize that they are 

more than physical specimens: they are also reservoirs 

of cultural, spiritual, and ecological information that 

can be of tremendous benefit to Alaska Native as well 

as scientific communities today.

Over the next few years the “Nelson in the Cloud” seed 

began to germinate as Oberlin fully digitized its Alaska 

Native collection and consulting visits by Rosemary 

Ahtuangaruak (Iñupiaq) and Sven Haakanson Jr.

(Sugpiaq/Alutiiq) helped expand our understanding 

of these valuable objects. Current Oberlin College 

Senior Alaina Helm’s contributions to the project 

began as a student in Margaris’ 2019 course “Learning 
56 ASC Newsletter

with Indigenous Material Culture” which centered on 

Oberlin’s Alaska Native Collection. Generous support 

from the Oberlin College made it possible for Iñupiaq 

Elder Rosemary Ahtuangaruak and her granddaughter 

Shanae Ahtuangaruak to make the journey from 

Alaska to Oberlin’s campus for an inspiring and 

transformative week-long Consulting Residency. 

Rosemary Ahtuangaruak’s knowledge as an Iñupiaq 

person enlightened us and enlivened the collection as 

a representation of cultures still living today. At (the 

elder) Ahtuangaruak’s urging, students in the class 

recorded the consultation sessions; they incorporated 

the video into a digital book 

that showcases Oberlin’s 

entire Alaska Native 

collection as contextualized 

by Ahtuangaruak’s 

observations, and includes 

Native village and object 

names whenever possible. 

Helm then took the lead 

when a number of students 

from the course were 

inspired to continue working 

with the Alaska collection 

and create a related, fullscale exhibition that was 

slated to be installed in the 

campus library in spring 

2020. When COVID-19 

intervened, these dedicated 

students spent their summer 

working with Margaris to 

convert the exhibition to 

a digital exhibit platform 

where it is now available 

for anyone to visit. 

(The exhibition can be 

experienced at https://www.

artsteps.com/view/5ec9415

dfbf64b58219aa3e8). 

Through participation in these two projects, Helm 

became familiar with Oberlin’s Alaska Native 

Collection, the importance of Native collaboration, and 

some of the challenges of creating a digital resource. 

When Margaris proposed that Helm next pilot the 

“Nelson in the Cloud” project, Krupnik enthusiastically 

signed on as project collaborator. Our team has since 

grown as we have sought additional scholars to help 

refine our vision and pilot a database. Contributors 

now include Megan Mitchell, who is Oberlin’s Digital 

Initiatives Coordinator, and on the Arctic Studies 

Center side, Museum Specialist Dawn Biddison, 

anthropologists Aron Crowell, Stephen Loring, 

and William Fitzhugh, collections manager David 

Rosenthal, and assistants Sarah Baburi and Sadie 

Colebank.

Currently, the project has several evolving 

components. A list of over 800 items exchanged 

by the Smithsonian with museums and educational 

institutions worldwide is systematically being 

evaluated and, through email communication with 

curators and caretakers, the items on it are being 

located. A few hundred items are now housed at the 

Harvard Peabody Museum, for example, and smaller 

numbers can be found at the American Museum 

of Natural History, the British Museum, and the 

Cincinnati Art Museum. 

Many other items are less 

straightforward to track 

down. Some were sent to 

individual collectors, and 

these parts of the collection 

can sometimes be found 

in museums with which 

the individuals worked. 

Sometimes only a place 

name was provided, in 

which case the ease of 

locating an object depends 

on the city, as some cities 

are home to a single, 

obvious candidate museum 

or university while other 

cities may have dozens 

of possibilities. Language 

barriers present a further 

challenge in tracking down 

the whereabouts of specific 

objects, as not all items are 

located in English speaking 

parts of the world. Finally, 

some objects may prove 

impossible to identify 

even if the correct institution is located because 

information is too vague, or records may have been 

lost. One potential example is a single “skull” sent to 

Prague. The record on this object does not provide a 

specific institution or date and offers no identifying 

features except for the original Smithsonian collection 

number. It does not even specify if the skull is human 

or animal. Despite these challenges, between 300-400 

of the items that Nelson obtained have been already 

definitively located as of January, 2020, with many 

more leads still being followed. Additionally, over 

6,000 ethnographic objects collected by Nelson are 

housed at the Department of Anthropology collections 

at the Smithsonian today. This brings the total number 

of ethnographic objects to be digitally reunited to 

nearly 7,000. 

A page from the interactive book created by Oberlin 

students in collaboration with Rosemary Ahtuangaruak. 

The complete project can be explored at: scalar.

oberlincollegelibrary.org/arctic-ethnology/index
 ASC Newsletter 57

As these items are being located, an interesting 

snapshot of the worldwide museum exchange network 

is developing. Alaskan ethnographic materials collected 

by Nelson have now dispersed across five continents 

and dozens of countries. Items can be found all over 

the eastern United States and Europe, and have made 

it to Oceania, Asia, and South America. An important 

observation about the whereabouts of this collection 

is that no objects were sent to anywhere in Africa and 

even more significantly, none made their way back to 

Alaska.

As we begin to get an idea of where these items 

are and what information exists about them, we are 

also working on a second project component: a pilot 

database housed at Oberlin College using a free, opensource digital platform called Omeka. Currently about 

20 sample items from several different institutions 

have been added to the pilot, which has given rise to 

several questions 

about how best to 

proceed to make the 

best possible product. 

We want to ensure 

that each object is 

associated with all 

relevant metadata 

while also providing 

a means to access 

more information 

about an object from 

its home institution, 

when available. As a 

means for making the 

database searchable, 

we have discussed 

using techniques such 

as simplifying object 

names and including a range of possible ways an object 

can be referenced (such as with outdated or alternative 

names, like Yup’ik and Yupik). A complete and 

accessible database would allow objects to be searched 

by type, location, or culture and yield uniform results.

The final product of the “Nelson in the Cloud” project 

will require several key features that our team is still in 

the process of refining. The database needs to respect 

and meet the needs of Alaska Natives interested in 

learning about their own culture while also meeting 

the needs of researchers around the world. Our product 

needs to adhere to the copyright and data sharing 

standards of a variety of institutions, as we require the 

use of catalog data (and potentially images) from a 

variety of sources.

An additional challenge to organizing the database is 

network hosting and maintenance. Logistical obstacles 

would make it difficult for the Smithsonian to host the 

database, yet Oberlin does not have sufficient funding 

or resources to commit to maintaining it in perpetuity. 

Additionally, we must ensure that the database can be 

kept up to date once it is created, a challenge because 

it will contain information from many institutions 

that may continuously be updating their own catalog 

records. One solution is to maintain two paired 

databases, one documenting the current Smithsonian 

collection only and the other documenting the 

extended collection across the globe. A set of mirrored 

databases could allow for uniformity of information 

and searchability while removing the challenges of 

incorporating the larger portion of the collection still at 

the Smithsonian into an external database. 

What are the project’s next steps? This spring Helm and 

two additional Oberlin undergraduates will continue to 

track down objects. All metadata are being collected into 

a single document 

which will be ready to 

upload into a database 

once its final structure 

has been agreed 

upon. Consultation 

with Alaska Native 

stakeholders along 

the way will also 

be key. Historically, 

many ethnographic 

and archaeological 

collections have 

been displayed and 

studied in an academic 

setting without input 

from the peoples 

who had originally 

created these cultural items. Our team has begun 

investigating examples of other digital collections 

management projects that have been created by, or 

in collaboration with, Indigenous peoples, including 

Mukurtu, the Vanuatu Kaljoral Senta (VKS), and 

especially the Reciprocal Research Network (https://

www.rrncommunity.org) which like our project 

collates cultural materials that are physical housed across 

institutions.

Ours is a major undertaking with potentially farreaching results. The creation of a worldwide database 

that can unite institutions across borders and language 

barriers would serve as a model for dispersed 

collection of all sorts, from biological specimens to 

archaeological artifacts, in addition to the ethnographic 

objects our project was conceived. Most importantly, 

“Nelson in the Cloud” is envisioned to be a platform 

where digital representations of physical objects can act 

Present location of some of Nelson’s scattered collections 

(blue = known institutions, red = known cities)
58 ASC Newsletter

as a means for growth. By connecting people around 

the world to the network of institutions that now act 

as stewards for this significant collection of Alaskan 

items, a “Nelson in the Cloud” database would allow 

Alaska Native communities to access and understand 

where and how their cultural items have been 

distributed across the globe. It would help stewarding 

institutions keep their records on the included items up 

to date, empower Indigenous stakeholders and scholars 

to connect and work together, and contribute to cultural 

revitalization efforts that are happening in Native 

communities across Alaska. 

[Editor’s Note: Readers might be interested to learn 

about the Ainu database project created by Japanese 

scholars that created a world-wide inventory of Ainu 

cultural items and led to the Smithsonian exhibition 

documented in the catalog, Ainu: Spirit of a Northern 

People (Fitzhugh and Dubreuil 2000. Smithsonian 

Institution Press. See also: Kyuzo Kato and Yoshinobu 

Kotani (eds.), 1987, Bulletin of the National Museum of 

Ethnology Special Issue 5.] 

BERING SEA ART FROM NUNIVAK ISLAND: 

A CHRONICLE OF RICHARD D. TAKILNOK 

(CUP’IG, 1928–2007)

By Harald E. L. Prins

Arctic art has its casual vagrants, surfacing in distant 

places. This graphite-and-ink drawing found its way 

from Alaska to a small antique store in Maine, a 

halfway point between trash and minor treasure. That is 

where I spotted the kayak-faring walrus hunters scene 

framed behind dusty cracked glass. The unidentified 

piece was not dated, but I guessed it was made in the 

mid-1900s. The unique design of the kayaks caught my 

eye—a distinctive model typical for Nunivak Island in 

the Bering Sea. The faded signature was still visible: 

Richard D. Takilnok. 

I rescued the large drawing (15" x 20") and imagined 

the Cup’ig artist might be interested in knowing his 

artwork was valued. I tracked him down with the help 

of anthropologist Margaret Lantis, who had done 

ethnographic fieldwork on Nunivak in 1939–1940 and 

later revisited the island a few more times. Commonly 

known as Richard Davis, he probably resided in 

Mekoryuk, the island’s only still existing village (not 

counting seasonal encampment sites). So, I wrote to 

him there. On 15 October 1988, the 60-year old elder 

responded: 

Very much surprised, rec’d a letter. And I’m thank 

you for thinking how I am doing at this time. I am, 

of course, doing fine with all my family. However, 

I’m not much doing anything now, but living as 

the ways we used to be. I sure use to draw scitches 

arts before my eyes can see good, but now, failed, 

because of my poor near sights. I’m thank you, you 

have one of my work and you like it. Now a days, 

I’m doing slowly on Carving Ivorys. All of that have 

living, such as Walrus, Seals, Wales, and fishes, 

foxes, Musk-oxen and some birds that interested. 

Thank you again for your letter and you love the art. 

Sincerely Richard Davis (Takilnok).

Born in Tacirmiut, a seasonal hamlet on a large bay at 

Nunivak’s south coast, Richard was originally named 

Tekrilngur. Like many other Nuniwarmiut families, 

his spent the winter months in a sod-roofed semisubterranean home at Mekoryuk, their main village on 

the island’s north shore. In pursuit of seasonally-shifting 

resources, such as fish, seals, walrus, and sea fowl, they 

rotated to various spring, summer and fall encampments. 

When Richard was about nine years old, an Iñupiat 

Protestant missionary moved from Hooper Bay to 

Mekoryuk, also site of the island’s trading post. Soon, 

almost all Nuniwarmiut converted, including Richard 

and a young local shaman named Kangleg. The 

island’s small school was relocated from the village 

of Ellikarrmiut (Nash Harbor) to Mekoryuk in 1940. 

At the time, as Lantis recalled, 12-year old Richard 

“was a youth with almost no schooling.” The newlyarrived American husband-wife teaching team from 

Arkansas reported that Nunivakers still had “but few 

dealings with white men and therefore they speak only 

the Eskimo language. There are a dozen on the entire 

island who speak a little English, and only two of these 

go to school.” 

Richard was still young when his father Atakuilngur 

died. His widowed mother Apurin invited Kalirmiu, 

a kinsman later renamed Peter Smith, to help provide 

for the household and mentor her son. Traditionally, 

when boys turned thirteen or fourteen, they were given 

a small kayak. In the next five years or so, most grew 

into capable seal hunters, equally adept with harpoon, 

atlatl, and rifle (typically 0.22 caliber). Once they had 

harvested a full-grown bearded seal, an animal that 

ritually outranked other seals (and even walrus), they 

were considered on top of their game.

Historically, Nuniwarmiut hunters preyed on bearded 

seals and walrus primarily in the spiritual ceremonyrich spring season. These sea mammals yielded plenty 

of leather and flesh, plus blubber (used for light and 

heat). Their large intestine provided the raw material 

for waterproof parkas. Moreover, seal and female 

walrus hides were greatly valued as kayak cover. 

On their spring-time migration from wintering spots in 

the Bering Sea north to the thawing Chukchi Sea and 
 ASC Newsletter 59

beyond, small herds of migratory walrus pass through 

Nunivak’s coastal waters, usually for a few weeks in 

April and early May. Weighing twice as much as a 

walrus cow, a bull can grow to over 3.5 meters and 

weigh as much as two tons. Endowed with prominent 

tusks, up to 1 meter long and weighing over 5 kilos, 

walrus have long been prized because of unquenchable 

demand for raw ivory and ivory carvings.

Venturing out for a walrus hunt at dawn, Richard 

would have teamed up with two or three companions, 

each equipped with a one-bladed paddle, a rifle plus 

ammunition, and a harpoon tied with a long leather 

thong to an inflatable 

sealskin float lashed on 

top of the wooden sled 

secured on the kayak’s 

deck behind the cockpit. 

In his youth, these 

kayaks were painted 

with designs, usually 

representing “animals 

whose characteristics 

the owners hope will be 

transferred to their boats.” 

The aforementioned 

shaman, noted German 

anthropologist Hans 

Himmelheber in 1937, 

had an orca “painted on 

his kayak to help him 

during storms. Others 

depict fast-moving animals like seals or minks to speed 

up the kayak. [And] a painted human figure extending 

from the bow to the stern with arms and legs spread out 

may also be used to promote stability.” Nuniwarmiut 

preferred to target walrus asleep on ice floats, but the 

adventure could be dangerous due to shifting ice, sudden 

winds and strong currents. Moreover, a wounded walrus, 

if not quickly killed, may charge a hunter and overturn 

his kayak. Even hardened Alaskan Natives don’t survive 

very long in ice-cold seawater.

As shown in Takilnok’s drawing, walrus hunters tried 

to paddle as quietly and close as possible without 

agitating the beasts and causing them to escape into 

water. A precision shot (behind the ear) from a kayak 

in open sea requires a sharp eye, as well as a good rifle 

and a steady boat. Away from the shoreline, hunters 

could not lash their kayaks together to provide the 

desired stability. Instead, two companions maneuvered 

their narrow skin boats into a close flanking position, 

tightly wedging the central kayak manned by the 

designated sharpshooter. After a successful kill, the 

hunters towed their catch back for butchering on the ice 

floe closer to their spring encampment or home village. 

When a young hunter shot his first walrus, Lantis

noted, the haul “was celebrated by distribution of the 

meat, a sweat bath, song, and dance. The walrus head 

was kept in the qazgi [men’s house], for five days...”

During the first half of the 20th century, tuberculosis 

was rampant in Alaska’s indigenous communities. 

This contagious disease claimed many lives among 

the Nuniwarmiut whose numbers fell to about 225 

people. In 1941, one of the American teachers living in 

Mekoryuk reported: “About 75 percent have T.B. Many 

of them sit around with one foot in the grave and the 

other foot on the ice. I don’t know how they live.”

In the early 1950s, 

perhaps while serving as 

an “Eskimo scout” in the 

Alaskan National Guard, 

Richard was also infected. 

Diagnosed with T.B., he 

was transferred to the 

Alaska Native Services 

(ANS) hospital in Juneau. 

More than 1800 km from 

home, he made drawings 

of the traditional hunting 

life he had enjoyed and 

now longed for. His art 

work, stylistically informed 

by ivory engravings 

(scrimshaw), caught the 

attention of Alaska Native 

Arts and Crafts manager Don Burrus who reported in 

1952: “Richard Davis of Mekoryuk, no[w] confined to 

the tuberculosis ward of the ANS hospital in Juneau, has 

been producing a type of drawing that shows signs of 

becoming a consistently selling item.”

The following year, Richard was transferred to the 

Mt. Edgecumbe Hospital on an island outside Sitka. 

Perhaps to distinguish himself as a Native Alaskan 

artist, he signed his work as Richard D. Takilnok—as 

he phonetically spelled his Cup’ig name (Tekrilngur). 

In 1954, he submitted a “black and white” drawing at 

the Sitka Community Fair and received a red ribbon for 

it. Next, he entered the 1954 American Indian Painting 

Competition in San Francisco with a graphite-and-ink 

drawing titled, “The Hunt’s On,” winning “first place.” 

This was purchased by the Indian Defense Association 

of Northern California and gifted to the De Young 

Memorial Museum in San Francisco for its permanent 

collection, In 1955, still ailing, Richard was transferred 

to the ANS hospital in Anchorage. A year later, he was 

one of three “Alaskan Eskimo” artists represented in the 

11th Annual Contemporary Indian Painting Exhibition in 

Tulsa, Oklahoma, with Southern Cheyenne artist Dick 

West serving on the three-men award jury. 

Nunivak hunters approaching walrus by Richard Takilnok. 

Photo by Harald Prins
60 ASC Newsletter

Undoubtedly, Takilnok made quite a few fine drawings 

while hospitalized for T.B. But what happened to these 

minor treasures? Not yet identified to date is one of 40 

Alaskan artworks selected from “hundreds submitted” 

by the Farthest North Art Guild for a traveling exhibit 

touring the United States in 1959–1960. The “original 

purpose of the exhibit was to promote statehood,” and, 

explained one of its organizers, “to let you see Alaska 

through the eyes and abilities of her artists.” Only one 

other Alaskan Native, a Tlingit, was included in this 

exhibit, which also showed at the U.S. Commerce 

Department in Washington D.C. After almost ten years 

in Alaskan hospitals, Richard was finally discharged 

and returned to his Cup’ig family and friends on 

Nunivak where the traditional way of life was rapidly 

changing. Very few hunters still used kayaks, for most 

now ventured out in motor-powered wooden boats.

Meanwhile, the island’s musk oxen herd, transplanted 

from Greenland in the mid-1930s, had multiplied. By 

the mid-1960s, they numbered about 500. Grazing 

on Nunivak territory reserved as a National Wildlife 

Refuge, these Ice-Age survivors were under strict 

protection by Alaska’s Fish and Wildlife Service. The 

department offered Richard a salaried position, initially 

part-time, as the island-based guardian of the thriving 

wild herd. Meanwhile, he had married and become a 

father who primarily relied on hunting and fishing to 

feed his family. He also built a new house and his own 

wooden boat, leaving him little opportunity or energy 

for drawing. 

In 1968, the American Indian Museum-Heye 

Foundation in New York City published American 

Indian Painters: A Biographical Dictionary, featuring 

almost 1,200 individuals representing a few hundred 

tribes or nations. Included in this artistic multitude are 

Richard Davis Takilnok and thirteen other Alaskan 

“Eskimos.” When Davis died in 2007, few on the 

island knew this 79-year-old Nuniwarmiut elder 

had been a talented graphic artist. Nonetheless, his 

drawings remain distinctly valuable, not only because 

of their aesthetic appeal, but also as a Native Alaskan 

hunter’s representation of his own maritime culture in 

the Bering Sea.

Acknowledgements. Pioneering ethnographic research 

by Margaret Lantis (1939–1940) resulted in landmark 

publications on Nunivak consulted for this essay. Also 

informative are writings by Hans Himmelheber (1936–

1937), translated and edited by Ann Fienup-Riordan

in Where the Echo Began. Fairbanks: U Alaska Press, 

2000. Anthropologists Dennis Griffin and Kenneth 

Pratt, specialists on Nunivak culture and history 

who authored multiple publications, provided much 

appreciated critical feedback. The map is courtesy of a 

James VanStone publication.

THE JOHN MARR COLLECTIONS FROM 

NUNAVIK AT THE UNIVERSITY OF 

COLORADO-BOULDER MUSEUM

By Madison T. King

When I first encountered the Marr Collection at the 

University of Colorado Museum of Natural History in 

Boulder there was not a well-developed understanding 

of the extent of the collection or the context through 

which it had come to be. So, as an undergraduate 

student participating in a practicum on collections 

research, I began studying the objects. What began as 

an initial attempt to reassemble the collection eventually 

transformed into an opportunity to learn about the 

process of sharing museum resources and archival 

material with descendent Inuit and First Nations (Eeyou/

Innu/Northern Cree) communities in Northern Quebec. 

Marr and the Collection

Dr. John W. Marr (1914–1989) was a well-known 

professor in the Biology Department at the University 

of Colorado in Boulder. In addition to making many 

important contributions to the scholarship of alpine 

ecological research in the tundra throughout the course 

of his career, Marr also established the Institute of 

Arctic and Alpine Research as part of the University 

of Colorado in 1951. While on research expeditions 

in the Arctic, Marr also collected ethnographic objects 

from the Inuit communities with whom he crossed 

paths. There are two expeditions of Marr’s that are 

of particular interest to the research presented in this 

article, as they resulted in the objects and photographs 

that now comprise the Marr Collection.

In 1939 Marr accompanied an expedition to the Great 

Whale River and Richmond Gulf area as a student 

of Professor William S. Cooper at the University of 

Minnesota. While carrying out ecological research on 

the forest-tundra ecotone, Marr also collected two pairs 

of mukluks that were later accessioned into the museum. 

During this expedition Marr also took several hundred 

photographs, which eventually came to be housed at 

the John W. Marr Papers Archive at the University of 

Colorado Special Collections and Archives Department 

in Norlin Library. The majority of the photographs 

consist of aerial shots of large stretches of alpine forest. 

About thirty photographs, however, depict Inuit or First 

Nations people and their villages. These photographs 

became closely associated with my research on the Marr 

Collection, as they relate directly to the communities 

from which the objects originate. 

The second trip took place in 1948, under the title, 

“The University of Colorado Botanical Expedition.” 

Marr and his wife, Johanna C.W.R. Marr, traveled 
 ASC Newsletter 61

to Ungava Bay area in Northern Quebec (Nunavik) 

with two graduate students from the university. Their 

purpose was to study vegetation growth at the northern 

tree limit near Kuujjuaq, along the Leaf River. It was 

during this trip that the rest of the objects within the 

Marr Collection were obtained. During the threemonth expedition, the Marrs collected a variety of 

ethnographic objects from Inuit communities in the 

area. According to a letter from Marr to the museum 

during the accession process, many of the objects 

were personally made by Inuit community members 

as gifts for Johanna 

to wear and use. 

Other objects were 

obtained by Johanna 

by trading with 

people she met 

during their stay.

The objects that were 

collected during 

these two trips were 

accessioned by 

the University of 

Colorado Museum 

of Natural History 

in three separate 

instances. The first 

accession occurred 

in 1939, when the 

museum purchased 

a single pair of 

mukluks from John 

W. Marr. The second 

accession occurred 

in 1948, when the 

museum purchased 

many of the 1948 

expedition objects 

from Johanna. The 

third accession occurred in 1957, when John W. Marr 

donated the remaining objects to the museum after 

Johanna’s passing in 1955. Today, the full collection 

consists of twenty-nine ethnographic objects, including 

mukluks, dolls, raw materials, and articles of clothing. 

Reassembling the Collection

I assembled the information above regarding the 

context of the Marr Collection and the archival 

photographs over the course of a year, under the 

guidance and supervision of my mentor, 

Dr. Jennifer Shannon. Everything that I learned during 

my attempt to reassemble the Marr Collection resulted 

in a final report which acts as a comprehensive guide 

to the collection, the photographs, and the associated 

documentation. The report includes an image of every 

object in the collection (along with a description of 

materials and history), a copy of each photograph from 

the archive, and my own written work which explain 

the context of the museum and of Marr.

My hope was that this report would not only 

supplement the museum records, but that it could also 

serve as a resource for the originating communities. 

In order to share the materials with the descendent 

communities, however, I had to first identify and locate 

them. This was 

one of the most 

challenging parts 

of my research, as 

all documentation 

associated with 

the objects and 

photographs simply 

referred to the 

artists and subjects 

as “Eskimo.” There 

was no record 

of specific Inuit 

or First Nations 

individuals or 

villages, so it was 

not clear with whom 

we should share the 

materials.

With the help and 

guidance of Dr. 

Stephen Loring, 

who provided 

valuable insight 

regarding the 

specific groups that 

occupy the areas 

from which the objects and the photographs came, I was 

able to clarify both the communities from which the 

material originated and the appropriate classifications as 

either Inuit or First Nations.

Sharing the Material

Equipped with an approximate knowledge of who 

the originating communities may have been, and 

assistance from two cultural institutes in Quebec, I was 

able to connect these collections to their originating 

communities. Thanks to a few valuable introductions 

by Dr. Loring, I was put into contact with Sarah 

Gauntlett of the Avataq Cultural Institute, and Laura 

Phillips of the Aanischaaukamikw Cree Cultural 

Institute. To begin, both the Aanischaaukamikw Cree 

Cultural Institute and the Avataq Cultural Institute 

Inuit women at Richmond Gulf, 

1939. Box 35, Folder 2, Photo 39-

234, John W. Marr Papers, Norlin 

Library, University of Colorado, 

Boulder

Dr. John W. Marr (1914-1989). 

Founder and inaugural director 

of the Institute of Arctic and 

Alpine Research. Photo courtecy 

Ecological Society of America 
62 ASC Newsletter

were sent copies of my final research report. Both 

institutions expressed interest in retaining copies of 

the materials that had resulted from the research. With 

the assistance from staff at the University of Colorado 

Special Collections and Archives Department, both 

institutions received high-resolution, digital TIF copies 

of the thirty photographs from 1939 which feature 

Indigenous people and their villages in the Richmond 

Gulf and Great Whale River area.

I hope that these connections with the cultural 

institutions will help to fulfill two primary goals. The 

first aim is that Inuit and First Nations community 

members have easy access to these materials when they 

seek information from their own archival institutions 

and that these materials will contribute to the growing 

body of knowledge available to the contemporary Inuit 

and First Nations communities. The second aim is that 

the cultural institutions will be able to pass on to the 

University of Colorado Museum of Natural History 

any new information that is learned about the resources 

as they are circulated throughout the contemporary 

communities. As I learned from the Aanischaaukamikw 

Cree Cultural Institute, the flow in information is to 

occur in this way in accordance with The First Nations 

Principles of OCAP. By regulating the ownership, 

control, access and possession of the information in 

this way, the institutions can practice agency in how 

information pertaining to their community is used. 

Taking all of this into account, it would be wonderful to 

someday supplement the existing catalog records with 

the specific names of those who crafted the objects, and 

those who are the subjects in the archival photographs.

Reference

Marr, John. 1948. Ecology of the Forest-Tundra 

Ecotone on the East Coast of Hudson Bay. Ecological 

Monographs 18(1):117-144

Inuit mother and child dolls. University of Colorado 

Museum of Natural History Cat. #s 6827, 6828. Photo by 

Madison King

OUTREACH

FILMING FIFTY YEARS OF SMITHSONIAN 

ARCHAEOLOGY 

By Theodore Timreck

My new film, Ancient Sea Peoples of the North 

Atlantic, argues for considering the entire North 

Atlantic coastal region as an integrated historical and 

archeological zone. This is based on the idea that the 

Maritime Revolution which occurred during the last 

Ice Age is an under-appreciated part of human history 

and that similar environmental adaptations can produce 

similar cultural traits in different regions of the earth. 

But underneath this argument lies a deeper question 

about the history of the indigenous peoples of North 

America who once lived along the Atlantic coastline. 

This topic is barely discussed in anthropological 

textbooks and has been somewhat of “black hole” in 

Eastern Native American history.

I was introduced to the problem by William Fitzhugh

when I accompanied him with a film crew to Nulliak 

Cove, a 4,000 year old Maritime Archaic Indian 

settlement not far from the famous chert quarries of 

Ramah Bay in northernmost Labrador. Sitting along 

the ridge of a raised beach terrace overlooking the 

Labrador Sea, Bill asked, “the real question is, where 

did these people come from?”

The huge Nulliak site demonstrated that by 4,000 

years ago ceremonial landscapes including mound 

burials already existed in the Far Northeast and that 

Indians who lived there and used Ramah chert for their 

implements had to navigate wide, ice choked ocean 

expanses and must have had large boats and a welldeveloped maritime-adapted lifestyle.

In the same decade that Fitzhugh and his crew 

discovered these quarries and settlements in Labrador, 

Canadian scientists had also identified Native burial 

mounds in southern Labrador that were more than 

7,000 years old. These finds were so anomalous that 

they were almost never included in the academic 

timelines and descriptions of Native history—they 

didn't fit comfortably into the accepted Native history 

of the Western Hemisphere.

Now more than forty years ago, I found it an irresistible 

intellectual and artistic challenge to visually convey the 

story of this enormous disjunct in American and perhaps 

even the world's model of human cultural development. 

The 1970s was a time of controversy between the deeply 

entrenched scientific model of Native history and the 

seemingly inexplicable discoveries that were beginning 

to appear, and would continue to emerge in the following 
 ASC Newsletter 63

decades. This became a narrative I wanted to create out 

of the beautiful Labrador land- and seascapes and the 

fascinating stories of the scientists searching —often by 

accident—for a Native civilization that wasn't supposed 

to exist.

As a filmmaker and later as a website producer, I joined 

the Arctic Studies Center as a Research Collaborator 

and worked with other scientists from the Smithsonian’s 

Anthropology Department to document fieldwork 

in many places in North America and Europe, but 

especially in locations around the Circumpolar North. 

In the process of recording the fieldwork of William 

Fitzhugh, Stephen Loring, 

Dennis Stanford, Douglas 

Owsley, Noel Broadbent, 

Pegi Jodry, Chuck Smythe, 

Rosita Worl, Darrin Lowry, 

and others, I found them 

willing to help me develop 

my cinematic ideas about 

the unanswered questions 

in North American Native 

history. Their patience with 

my sometimes “fringy” 

notions has always been 

appreciated and helped 

inform my North Atlantic 

movie.

In my conversations with 

researchers, I emphasized 

that interviews on film or 

tape are not the same as peerreviewed proclamations. 

The moving image offers the 

opportunity to safely stretch 

the imagination, to offer a 

more personal perspective 

in order to suggest where 

responsible thinking might 

be heading in the future 

based on the discoveries of the present. In hindsight, 

when reviewing these interviews of more than twenty 

years ago for this film, I recognized that the emotional 

honesty and scientific balance these researchers brought 

to their work often turned out to be quite prescient.

Another result of these years of film and video 

documentation is that the narrative represents a 

generation of Smithsonian scientists’ perspectives on 

the process and vagaries of discovery. For example, 

Fitzhugh, Loring, and Stanford were laboratory 

neighbors at the National Museum of Natural History 

for decades. When they began working there, their 

research interests were easily defined by their Eastern 

vs. Western focus, as determined by the accepted 

theories of indigenous history. But because of 

accidental discoveries, and above all, a passion for 

looking at the often surprising discoveries, and then 

being willing to change their theoretical frameworks, 

the rewards of the scientific method came to be 

validated. Over decades, following their own separate 

paths, those three scientists independently discovered 

pieces of a larger but connected puzzle that might 

forever change Native history.

Perhaps the most important lesson I learned from 

my Smithsonian colleagues was best practices for 

collaborating with Native representatives in studies 

of cultural research and 

representation. Over the 

following decades, these 

collaborations became 

worthy of study in 

themselves. What I learned 

was that best practices, when 

successful, turned out to 

be a completely individual 

and often unique process 

of collaboration between 

each scientist and each tribal 

representative. In my case, 

I was fortunate to team up 

with tribal representatives 

like Rosita Worl and Doug 

Harris whose lifetime 

work has been to forge a 

remarkable understanding of 

Native tradition, scientific 

method, and the business of 

anthropology.

In my recent movie, Doug 

Harris, the tribal preservation 

officer of the Narragansetts, 

helped me understand a 

way of balancing scientific 

thinking with tribal tradition 

and contemporary politics. Harris, who appears 

throughout the video, represents the tribal voice that 

suggests the possibility of a future where archeological 

research and cultural preservation, working in 

partnership, may reveal an here-to-fore unimagined 

Native history that once existed as far back as the Ice 

Age on the submerged North Atlantic shelf. This may 

turn out to be the true, long term value of presenting 

forty years of research documentation and trying to 

put those discoveries into perspective for scholars, the 

public, Native Americans, and the future.

The movie illustrates some of the steps in our own 

short segment of a longer process that began with the 

Folsom discovery in the 1920s and will continue well 

Ancient Sea Peoples of the North Atlantic. Courtesy of 

Theodore Timreck

Theodore Timreck in his New York City studio. Photo by 

Theodore Timreck
64 ASC Newsletter

past our time as surprising discoveries continue to 

shatter the “glass basement” and expanding time frame 

of Native American history.

[Editor’s note: Since the mid-1970s Ted Timreck has 

documented ASC research, conferences, and public 

activities by producing documentary films, educational 

media, our original website (recently replaced by a 

generic profile), and exhibitions. His television works 

include “Franz Boas” for the PBS Odyssey series 

and “The Lost Red Paint People” and “Vikings in 

America” for PBS/NOVA. He is a recipient of the 

Peabody Award, and his television portraits of artists 

(PBS national specials and American Masters series) 

include Charles Ives, Thomas Eakins, Augustus Saint 

Gaudens, and Frederick Law Olmsted. Recently he 

completed a “Hidden Landscapes” series telling the 

story of the early Eastern Native American sea cultures 

that offers a new perspective on the ancient history 

of North America. This theme is further explored in 

a 110-minute film titled “Ancient Sea Peoples of the 

North Atlantic.” His website is www.twtimreck.com]

NARWHAL EXHIBITION ON THE ROAD 

AFTER COVID-19 BREATHER

By Carol Bossert

The narwhal, with its unique left spinning spiral tusk, 

has inspired legend in Inuit society and fascinated 

people across cultures for centuries. The exhibition 

Narwhal: Revealing an Arctic Legend, on view at the 

National Museum of Natural History from 2017–2019, 

is now a traveling exhibition circulated by Smithsonian 

Institution Traveling Exhibition Service (SITES). The 

exhibition digs deep into the narwhal’s Arctic world 

to explore what makes this mysterious animal and its 

changing ecosystem so important. Through first-hand 

accounts from scientists and Inuit community members, 

the exhibition reveals how traditional knowledge and 

experience, coupled with scientific research, heighten 

our understanding of these animals—and our changing 

global climate.

The travel version contains many of the elements in the 

original show, including a 16-foot fiberglass model of 

an adult male narwhal suspended from the ceiling, an 

audio soundtrack of narwhals and other Arctic sounds, 

a video entitled “What the Inuit Know” produced by 

the National Museum of Natural History, and a NASA 

visualization of the changes in Arctic Sea ice over the 

past ten years. The exhibition includes a cast models of a 

narwhal skull and an extinct narwhal relative, Bohaskaia 

monodontiodes and pop culture objects from plush toys 

to clothing, coffee mugs, and even a corkscrew. To make 

the animal accessible to all populations, SITES created 

a touchable 3D print model for blind and low vision 

visitors. Interpretive panels were resized, and photo 

murals were reprinted on fabric. 

Host venues may rent the 2,000 sq. ft. exhibition for 

a twelve-week period and will receive installation 

instructions, rigging equipment, promotion and 

education materials, digital resources, and access to 

SITES staff for help in developing exhibition programs.

The exhibition will open in May 22, 2021 at the 

Schiele Museum of Natural History in Gastonia, North 

Carolina, and will then travel to The Monte L. Bean 

Life Science Museum in Provo, Utah, and the Sam 

Noble Museum in Norman Oklahoma. SITES thanks 

Dr. William Fitzhugh, Director of the Smithsonian 

Arctic Studies program, Dr. Martin T. Nweeia, 

Harvard University, and Dr. Marianne Marcoux, 

Fisheries and Oceans Canada for advice and support. 

The exhibit was initially developed by the National 

Museum of Natural History and was redesigned for 

travel by SITES. For information about booking, 

contact Carol Bossert, SITES Project Director at 

bossertc@si.edu.

SITES staff get the 16-foot narwhal model ready for travel. 

Photo courtesy of ELY, Inc.

Narwhal: Revisiting an Arctic Legend as installed at the 

Smithsonian Natural History Museum, 2017–2019. 

Photo by Jim Fernandez
 ASC Newsletter 65

PARTNERS, FELLOWS AND INTERNS

CRUISING THE ASC, BEFORE AND DURING 

COVID-19

By Fiona Steiwer

Little did I know when I 

walked through the halls 

of Smithsonian’s National 

Museum of Natural History 

to meet with Dr. William 

Fitzhugh for the first time 

that I would be spending 

a majority of my time 

working with the lovely 

individuals of the Arctic 

Studies Center—in my 

studio apartment. Over a 

year ago in October of 2019 I began working at the 

ASC on digitizing transcripts of field notes written by 

one of the first Americans to visit Alaska from the 19th

century and piecing together the 2019 ASC Newsletter

with Nancy Shorey and William Fitzhugh. In addition 

to these projects I was quickly thrown into further work 

and activities across the museum’s campus.

Some of my favorite memories include spending 

time at the Museum Storage Center with Dr. Stephen 

Loring, where we explored the Anthropology 

collection, picking out pieces that I had selected from 

the online index to highlight in the upcoming Night 

Sky exhibit. Later that same day I was also able to 

provide support for a tour for a class of students from 

Hampden-Sydney College. It was a great way to learn 

more about the collections while connecting with other 

archaeology students.

Another memorable experience was working 

with the ASC team the weekend of the Mongolia 

Conference. Through this experience I was able to 

learn so much about not only the archaeology of the 

region, but the art, food and local D.C. Mongolian 

community, while gaining experience in event 

logistics and planning.

The ASC team has been by my side through many 

milestones: my senior year of undergrad, my graduation 

from American University, and my first post-grad job 

opportunities. Thank you so much to everyone who has 

been there along the way. I hope that everyone in the 

ASC community is staying healthy and occupied during 

these times. Looking forward to getting back to work 

with all of you in person someday soon.

BUILDING A MONOGRAPH

By David Rubenstein

As a junior history major 

at Middlebury College 

in Vermont, I have a 

deep-seated interest in 

uncovering historical 

narratives. While the 

fields of historical and 

archaeological research 

are markedly different, 

they both aim to reveal the 

details of humanity’s past. 

This similarity drove me 

to pursue an internship at 

the Arctic Studies Center during the summer of 2020, 

where I assisted Dr. William Fitzhugh in compiling 

data from the Gateways Project for publication. 

The information that I gathered primarily dealt with 

the archaeological findings on Petit Mécatina in 

Northeastern Québec. I was particularly struck by 

the willingness of Basque whalers and fishermen to 

work together at this site with Inuit people who had 

recently arrived from the North during the 16th and 

17th centuries. From my perspective, this behavior 

demonstrated a remarkable cultural flexibility by both 

groups, who were quick to overcome their differences 

and accommodate aspects of a foreign culture. While I 

am still unsure of my final career, I deeply appreciate 

the experience and guidance that I received while 

working for Dr. Fitzhugh. The internship taught me 

skills that I will undoubtably use in whatever career 

I pursue. I look forward someday visiting the sites I 

researched this past summer.

COMPILING DATA FOR THE DEER STONE 

PROJECT

By Morgan Taylor

Mongolia always held a certain fascination for me. 

When I was very young and enamored with dinosaurs 

and all things prehistoric, I knew it as a good place 

for finding fossils. Then as I grew older, I learned of 

the Mongolian art of throat singing and became more 

interested in learning the culture of its people and even 

a little of their language. That was perhaps what drew 

me most strongly to pursue an internship working with 

Dr. William Fitzhugh of the Arctic Studies Center in 
66 ASC Newsletter

the spring and early summer of 2020. A senior English 

major at George Mason University at the time, I had 

an interest in exploring a career as an editor, and to me 

there was no better opportunity than this. I had been 

surprised to find that an organization specializing in 

Arctic cultures would include Mongolia on its radar, 

but as I quickly learned from Dr. Fitzhugh’s work, 

there was a tangible link between a number of early 

Mongolian societies and more recent Arctic societies, 

one which was especially prominent in the deer stones 

that were being studied and documented.

Prior to the internship, I had had only a vague idea 

of what archaeological work entailed. I was highly 

impressed by the level of precision that went into 

the documentation of every excavated site and 

every collected artifact. 

Pictures too were among 

the data I worked with, 

and it was fascinating 

to see glimpses of not 

only the archaeologists 

themselves in their element, 

but also the Mongolian 

landscape, its people, and 

its archaeological treasure 

trove. One truly special 

opportunity I had while 

working at the internship 

was the chance to assist 

with the annual Mongolian Conference, held at the 

Smithsonian in early February of that year. My eyes 

were opened to an entire world dedicated to the 

documentation and preservation of Mongolian history 

and culture, from its archaeological artifacts to its 

historical art and its long song tradition. 

In all respects, I am immensely grateful for my 

experience, and especially to Dr. Fitzhugh and Ms. 

Shorey for giving me the opportunity to begin with. 

I learned so much in such a brief period of time. My 

interest in Mongolia remains, and is now perhaps 

stronger than ever. Mongolian is now cemented as 

one of three languages I want to learn in the future, 

and, though for most of my life I had not seriously 

considered travelling, I would love to one day visit the 

land under the Eternal Blue Sky. 

“MORE THAN MEETS THE EYE”

By Charlotte Bodenhagen

When I spent a summer at the Smithsonian Museum of 

Natural History, I was a rising senior in high school. I 

was about to begin a year filled with applying to college, 

which meant that I was coming to the point in my life 

where I was expected to know what I wanted to do. This 

presented a problem for me because I have always seen 

myself following a multitude of career paths. I didn’t 

know how I was ever going to be able to choose just 

one. With this looming over me, I arrived at the Arctic 

Studies Center.

When I arrived, I began working with Dr. William 

Fitzhugh. His extensive research has resulted in lots of 

collections from his trips to the Arctic. Most of these 

have found a home in the large floor to ceiling cabinets 

lining the hallways, called quarter-units. My job, 

along with another intern, was to get a feel for where 

everything was, and then find things that had missed 

being returned to Canada. For me, this task provided an 

opportunity to see what types of artifacts and samples 

got collected. I got to look 

at soapstone lamps, Ramah 

Chert flakes, lumps of 

charcoal, soil samples, and 

bags and bags of animal 

bones. 

I also spent time with Dr. 

Igor Krupnik, who had 

accumulated a similar 

volume of information but 

of a different kind—paper. 

Dr. Krupnik has written 

many books over the years 

and keeps both digital and paper copies of all drafts, 

correspondence, and reviews. I organized some of the 

files in reverse chronological order and then arranged 

them into bins to be placed in his quarter-units. This 

task showed me what day to day work at the museum 

was like. The papers were a large part of the job. Being 

in a museum is of course all about the artifacts and the 

expeditions, but it also has a more public-facing side—

using the collections and information to create exhibits, 

something to be shared with everyone. 

When my ten weeks came to a close, I was of course 

sad to be leaving but, I was also anxious to start my 

senior year because I finally had a sense of what I 

wanted to do. Over that summer, I had learned that 

there was so much more to a museum than meets the 

eye. The exhibits are truly just the tip of the iceberg; 

there are so many incredible things going on behind 

the scenes and so many incredible people like Dr. 

Fitzhugh, Dr. Krupnik, Dr. Loring, and Ms. Shorey, 

making it all possible. This year I am a freshman at 

college majoring in history. One day I hope to do 

something in a museum and help bring stories and 

information to the public. And wherever I end up, I 

know that the skills and insights learned that summer 

will be invaluable. 
 ASC Newsletter 67

BOOK REVIEWS

PAYING THE LAND, BY JOE SACCO

Metropolitan Books/Henry Holt and Associates, 

2020, 264 pp.

Reviewed by John Cloud

Joe Sacco draws 

“graphic novels” 

but none of them 

are fictional. He 

has made a career 

of going to difficult 

places—Bosnia 

during and after 

bloody wars there, 

Israeli-occupied 

Palestine—to 

illuminate the lives of 

people living through 

it all. In his most 

recent project, he 

spent years travelling 

through the vast 

area of the Canadian 

Northwest Territories 

(NWT). His guide and expediter was a non-indigenous 

woman, Shauna Morgan. How could that be? Ms. 

Morgan is not Dene, a speaker of a great branch of the 

Athabascan language family, but she is a member of the 

City Council of Yellowknife, capitol of the NWT. NWT 

has an area larger than France and Spain combined, 

but a human population of less than 45,000 people. 

But at any given moment, between a third and a half of 

the territories’ humans are in Yellowknife, the seat of 

power and money, of courts and medical care, of jails 

and schools, multi-national energy companies, big box 

stores, snowmobile dealers, smoke shops and liquor 

stores—the fabric of modern Canadian life.

The original project of Mr. Sacco and Ms. Morgan was 

the story of NWT Dene First Nations and the histories 

of “resource extraction” that have driven life in the 

territories for centuries now—furs and meat and fish, 

later mining gold, diamonds, uranium, and still later, 

oil and gas extracted by fraking. The major process was 

talking, over cups of tea, with women and men who are 

truly Elders in their First Nations’ communities. But 

their stories ranged back in time to their childhoods, 

and the stories their grandparents told them, and the 

histories of treaties made—and broken—that go back 

to the foundations of what is now “Canada”.

Sacco has an incredibly detailed graphics style, like an 

R. Crumb who has spent his life in the struggling and 

developing world. A single page might show an Elder as 

she or he is now, and with images from photographs of 

the same person half a century ago when she or he was 

a developing young indigenous radical, and vignettes 

from the childhood of the same person. The history of 

resource extractions is there, but as the book develops, 

an overwhelming theme is the horrors of the Canadian 

system of residential schools, in which entire generations 

of Dene children were taken from their parents and sent 

away to government supported schools run by Christian 

religious orders. Their explicit purpose was to strip away 

indigenous culture and language from the children, 

generally accompanied by horrendous physical and 

sexual abuse. Their stories are harrowing, but true.

Nevertheless, Sacco has made a celebrated career out 

of going to difficult places and finding the good there, 

where it can be found. There are many remembrances 

of the quiet joys of summer life in fish camps, and the 

awesome responsibilities attendant on Dene people, 

who don’t believe they own the land but that the land 

owns them. One comes away from Paying the Land

knowing a good deal more about NWT than one ever 

expected to learn, the hallmark of the best books.

THE BARK AND SKIN BOATS OF NORTHERN 

EURASIA, BY HARRI LUUKKANEN 

AND WILLIAM W. FITZHUGH, WITH 

CONTRIBUTIONS BY EVGUENIA 

ANICHTCHENKO

Smithsonian Books 2020, 276 pp.

Reflections by William W. Fitzhugh

Finally, the day 

came—15 September 

2020—when our 

decade-long study of 

indigenous Eurasian 

boats saw the light 

of day! The ‘canoe 

book’ has been a 15-

year epic of research, 

writing, illustrating, 

and publishing and 

for me, it was like 

completing three 

PhDs. For my 

colleague Harri 

Luukkanen, it has 

also been his longest 

research and publication journey, and even when most 

of the research and initial drafting had been completed, 
68 ASC Newsletter

we both endured multiple rounds of editing with three 

different editors before the manuscript was finally ready 

for press. Evguenia Anichtchenko assisted at many 

points along this journey, helping select illustrations, 

photographing boats and models in Russia, translating 

Russian literature, and writing a final chapter that 

carried the story into Alaska. 

Throughout the project we had great support from 

Carolyn Gleason who saw the import of the work 

for “completing the circle” that began with the 

Smithsonian’s publication of The Bark and Skin Boats 

of North America by Edwin Tappan Adney and 

Smithsonian curator Howard I. Chapelle, in 1964. 

If truth be told, their publication odyssey was far 

longer than ours, at least for Adney, who spent much 

of this life with canoes and their American Indian 

makers, interviewing them, documenting their work in 

photographs and elegant line drawings, and preparing 

text for a monograph he never was able to complete. 

That task fell to Howard Adney, who assembled the 

pieces, wrote up what Adney had not finished, and 

completed the corpus for publication. Since 1964, their 

book has never been out of print—probably the longest 

run for any Smithsonian publication and the darling of 

sportsmen, small boat enthusiasts, and replica-builders. 

Not being naval-scale architects and draftsmen, and 

not building on a lifetime of ethnographic and museum 

field studies, Harri and I could not create an ‘Adney 

and Chapelle’ for northern Eurasia; but we were able to 

create a parallel, if not a proper sequel. Our work has 

a more historical dimension since it is based largely on 

published sources, as well as—to a far more limited 

extent than we originally anticipated—archaeological 

information. For once you leave the well-documented 

and archaeologically explored field of European nautical 

archaeology and plank boats of the past 3,000 years 

for the history of indigenous crafts, you encounter 

Mother Nature’s penchant for re-cycling. Archaeological 

petroglyphs can take you back 6–8,000 years on the 

rocks of northern Eurasia, but physical remains are 

rare for bark and skin boats that were the stock-intrade for the small-scale societies of this region. Only 

a few finds of paddles exist, because they are more 

easily recognized. Otherwise, remains of boats are truly 

ephemeral. Their skin covers may last only decades, 

and their light wooden frameworks, when they survive 

to be exposed by shovels and plows, are misidentified 

as birch logs or twigs. Few have ever been excavated 

scientifically, and the few remains that have been 

documented—barely more than a thousand years old—

are little more than scraps that tell little about the original 

craft. The appearance of metal tools like axes and planes, 

and metal nails, resulted in the rapid spread of sturdier 

plank boats, and these craft quickly replaced bark and 

skin boats, spreading first from Europe across Asia to the 

Far East and Bering Strait. Skin boats persisted only in 

Arctic regions because of their advantages in ice-infested 

waters, while bark canoes persisted hundreds of years 

longer—even into the 20th century—in the Far East, 

where rural, river-based hunting and fishing was not 

commercialized.

Having produced this book by digging into all the 

available written and museum resources, we readily 

acknowledge its deficiencies. You are not going to build 

yourself an historically accurate replica of a Ket Yenisei 

birchbark canoe or a Chukchi kayak with our book, and 

you will not be able to trace back the origin of the canoes 

or kayaks to their origins in the late Paleolithic. Even 

kayak origins are completely mysterious. We could not 

answer definitively whether skin boats had a parallel 

life alongside massive dugout canoes (or were they 

skin boats?) seen in the White Sea petroglyphs. There 

is still controversy over whether those rock art images 

are dugouts or skin boats. Was there a deep history of 

skin boat use by peoples of the Okhotsk Sea, stretching 

north from Japan to Bering Strait? We are not sure, 

although we believe it likely. We also know that many, 

many boats and boat remains eluded our search in small 

Russian and Far East museums where language barriers 

and internet access blocked us. We also know that much 

of the history of bark and skin boats still awaits chance 

discovery in bogs, lake bottoms, and other preserving 

environments. That is work for another and future 

day. But if we are lucky, our Eurasia ‘boat atlas’ may 

stimulate interest and new research that will eventually 

help answer the questions of a deeper history.

NEW PUBLICATIONS FROM CALISTA 

EDUCATION AND CULTURE

Reviewed by Ann Fienup-Riordan

Although CEC’s work with elders ground to halt during 

2020, we used our time to put the finishing touches on 

three books, two now in print and the other on the way. 

Our first book is Nunakun-gguq Ciutengqertut/They 

Say They Have Ears Through the Ground: Animal 

Essays from Southwest Alaska by Ann FienupRiordan with Alice Rearden, Marie Meade, David 

Chanar, Rebecca Nayamin, and Corey Joseph, 

published by University of Alaska Press. In southwest 

Alaska, Yup'ik people believe that all animals, even 

tiny insects, possess minds. Animals are not viewed 

as resources but as co-inhabitants of a sentient world 

and as nonhuman persons responsive to thoughts, 

words and deeds. These essays—based on information 

shared over twenty years at community meetings and 

regional gatherings with elders—focus on some of the 
 ASC Newsletter 69

most important species (including moose, bears, seals, 

salmon, and birds) and how relations with these species 

have both changed and remained the same over the 

past two decades. In a place where hunting and fishing 

are still part of day-to-day life, these views of animals 

remain very much in action. Hunters are advised that 

if they are overconfident and brag, they will not catch; 

animals will hear them and they will get nothing. 

Conversely, what one gives away will be replaced. And 

if you are compassionate, others will wish for your 

future success.

Our second book, Kusquqvagmiut Neqait/Fish and 

Food of the People of the Kuskokwim by Ann FienupRiordan, Alice Rearden, and Marie Meade, was 

published by the Alaska Native Language Center. 

Based on conversations with Yup'ik men and women 

living in the Kuskokwim River communities of 

Napaskiak, Napakiak, and Oscarville, this bilingual 

book details traditional knowledge surrounding the 

harvest and use of the six species of whitefish, as well 

as salmon, pike, burbot, and blackfish, on which people 

relied so heavily in the past and continue to harvest 

to this day. For Kuskokwim residents, successful 

harvesting of fish requires practical skills, including 

knowledge of fish migrations, when and where to set 

nets, and how deep to set them. Men and women must 

also act appropriately, both in the village and in the 

wilderness, to ensure a successful harvest. Although 

much has changed in southwest Alaska over the years, 

this distinctly Yup'ik view of the world remains. Elders 

who we spoke with firmly believe that Yup'ik youth 

today--as well as non-Native fisheries managers--need 

to understand these essential truths.

Our third book, Yungcautnguuq Nunam Qainga 

Tamarmi/All the Land's Surface is Medicine:Edible 

and Medicinal Plants of Southwest Alaska, by Ann 

Fienup-Riordan, Alice Rearden, Marie Meade, 

Kevin Jernigan, and Jacqueline Cleveland will be 

published this spring by University of Alaska Press. 

Close to one hundred men and women from all over 

southwest Alaska shared knowledge of their homeland 

and the plants that grow there. They speak eloquently 

about time spent gathering and storing plants and plant 

material during snow-free months, including gathering 

greens during spring, picking berries each summer, 

harvesting tubers from the caches of tundra voles, 

and gathering a variety of medicinal plants. The book 

is intended as a guide to the identification and use of 

edible and medicinal plants in southwest Alaska, but 

also as an enduring record of what Yup'ik men and 

women know and value about plants and the roles 

plants continue to play in Yup'ik lives.

PRIKLADNAYA ETNOLOGIIA CHUKOTKI

(APPLIED ETHNOLOGY IN CHUKOTKA: 

INDIGENOUS KNOWLEDGE, MUSEUMS, 

COMMUNITY HERITAGE), BY OKSANA 

KOLOMIETS AND IGOR KRUPNIK, EDS.

Press Pass, Moscow and Anadyr, 2020

Reviewed by Igor Krupnik

This 470-page Russian collection celebrates a rare 

anniversary. In spring 1895, 125 years prior to its 

publication, a small crew led by the newly appointed 

‘chief’ of the Anadyrskii district in northernmost 

Siberia, Nikolai L. Gondatti (1860–1946) started from 

the village of Markovo on the Anadyr River towards 

the Bering Strait. Gondatti, an educated colonial 

administrator and the former Secretary of the Russian 

Society of Lovers of Natural Science, Anthropology, 

and Ethnography in Moscow, was keen to explore 

his immense new domain and its Native residents. 

He made it all the way to Uelen on the Chukchi Sea 

shore (and back to Markovo eight months later), while 
70 ASC Newsletter

meticulously recording local population sites, economic 

production, cultural features, languages spoken in 

each village, and other notable details. This journey, 

the editors believe, was the beginning of the scientific

investigation of Indigenous people of Chukotka, five 

years prior to Waldemar Bogoras’ work in the same 

area for the Jesup North Pacific Expedition.

One hundred and twenty-five years later an international 

group of 18 contributors from Russia, U.S., and Denmark 

decided to return Gondatti’s name back to where his 

scholarly and administrative career had started, by 

publishing a collection of 23 papers dedicated to his 

legacy. These papers evaluate his contribution to applied 

ethnographic research in the North and his impact 

on modern studies of Chukotka Indigenous people. 

The volume is a joint publication of two area research 

institutions, the History Lab of the North-Eastern 

Interdisciplinary Research Institute (SVKNII) and the 

“Chukotka Heritage” Museum, both located in Anadyr, 

as well as of a diverse group of outside contributors from 

Moscow, St. Petersburg, Provideniya, Copenhagen, and 

Washington, DC. All volume authors—anthropologists, 

historians, linguists, educators, museum educators, and 

heritage professionals, including a strong contingent of 

area’s Indigenous researchers—have deep connections 

to Chukotka and are passionate about its history, local 

cultures, and languages.

Gondatti should be justly credited as one of the 

pioneers who introduced ‘applied’ research in 

Chukotka in the 1890s. He was a meticulous student 

of Native life that he observed in the field and 

documented from people’s memories and oral history. 

During his 1895 trip, he covered almost 3,500 km 

(1800 miles) traveling by dogsled, small boat, and 

steamer. The full story of his trip and its key scholarly 

outcomes are, for the first time, evaluated in the book’s 

introduction by volume editors, Igor Krupnik and 

Oksana Kolomiets. By selecting Gondatti as the 

book’s main ‘hero,’ the authors cover the fields that 

were key to his professional interests and legacy. 

Prime among them were Indigenous economies, 

traditional ecological knowledge, demography, and 

cultural history (seven papers in Part 1). Besides his 

administrative and research duties, Gondatti was also 

a trained museum collector as well as a thoughtful and 

committed documentor, as revealed in Part 2 (three

papers) dedicated to contemporary Chukotka museum 

and collection resources and Gondattti’s personal 

archival records, including unpublished diaries from his 

sojourns in Chukotka in 1896–1897. 

The book also credits Gondatti as a pioneer of ‘localscale’ (community-focused) research in aboriginal 

histories and local cultures in Chukotka. Part 3 (six 

papers) explores histories of specific Chukotkan 

communities, such as Markovo, Uelen, Dezhnev, 

several once populated sites around Cape Dezhnev 

(East Cape) and Provideniya Bay. The book concludes 

with four short essays dedicated to the renown 

Chukotka ‘heritage keepers’—Yupik educator and 

activist Lyudmila Ainana (Aynganga), Chukchi writer 

Valentina Itevtegina (Vek’et), the late Michael Krauss

(1934–2019) who was the leading expert on aboriginal 

languages of Alaska and Chukotka, and Russian Yupik 

linguist, Ekaterina Rubtsova (1888–1970).

The volume published in Moscow in 300 copies 

features almost 200 historical and modern 

photographs and an extensive list of sources in chapter 

bibliographies. 

It presents a 

useful collection 

of research, 

museum, and 

documentary 

resources for 

ethnologists, 

historians, 

preservation 

specialists, and 

Native heritage 

workers, as well 

as the wider 

ground of those 

interested in 

history, cultures, 

and contemporary 

life of Chukotka 

Indigenous 

people.

WHALE SNOW. IÑUPIAT, CLIMATE CHANGE 

AND MULTISPECIES RESILIENCE IN ARCTIC 

ALASKA, BY CHIE SAKAKIBARA 

The University of Arizona Press, Tucson, 2020

Reviewed by Igor Krupnik

This moving book written by geographer-turnedanthropologist Chie Sakakibara from Oberlin College 

and illustrated by Iñupiaq educator and artist Nasugraq 

Rainey Hopson is a must-read addition to an extensive 

set of studies on the North Alaskan Iñupiat people and 

their whaling culture. The main reason is that it is a 

different kind of book—personal, emotional, and very 

vibrant. It is filled with stories about individual men, 

women, and youth from North Alaska, with whom the 

author built personal connections over years of her 

Alaskan fieldwork. Though based partly on Sakakibara’s 

doctoral thesis she defended at the University of 

ISBN 978-5-6044362-7-1

Эта книга – сборник научных статей, эссе 

и документальных материалов – посвящена 

памяти пионера этнографического 

изучения Чукотки, второго начальника 

Анадырской округи Николая Львовича 

Гондатти (1860–1946). Мы видим свою 

задачу в том, чтобы вернуть имя Гондатти 

на Чукотку, оценить его вклад в развитие 

прикладных этнографических знаний 

и связь с современными исследованиями 

на Северо-Востоке России.

К 125-летию поездки Н. Л. Гондатти 

на Чукотский полуостров в 1895 году

НАРОДНЫЕ ЗНАНИЯ, МУЗЕИ,

КУЛЬТУРНОЕ НАСЛЕДИЕ

ПРИКЛАДНАЯ ЭТНОЛОГИЯ ЧУКОТКИ
 ASC Newsletter 71

Oklahoma (OU) in 2007, it morphs into a multilayered narrative that combines history, contemporary 

anthropology, environmental science, dance and music, 

but first and foremost portraits and voices of Iñupiaq 

families, whaling crews, elders, knowledge experts, 

and environmental activists, primarily from Utqiagvik 

(Barrow) and Tikigaq (Point Hope).

The book’s poetic title, Whale Snow came from 

an earlier children’s book with a similar title, 

Uqsruagnaq|Whale Snow (2004) written by a whaler’s 

wife and the former president of the North Slope 

Borough School Board Debby Dahl Edwadson. Yet 

its constituent five chapters tell very serious stories 

about various 

challenges that the 

Iñupiat whalers 

and communities 

face in today’s 

world: supporting 

their economy and 

lifestyle (“Into the 

Whaling Cycle”); 

rapid climate 

change (”Our Sila

Is Changing”); 

self-government 

and indigenous 

empowerment 

following 

Alaska Native 

Land Settlement 

Claims (ANCSA) 

and protracted 

negotiations 

regarding 

whaling catch quotas (“The New Harpoon”); threats 

to Indigenous cultural heritage and home landscapes 

(“Our Home Is Drowning”); and the fundamental, 

if intricate, role that whaling continues to play in 

maintaining Iñupiat identity and cultural strength 

(“No Whale, No Music”). The book is illustrated with 

over 40 contemporary photos of whale hunting, daily 

family life, festivities, and other public events taken 

by the author and by Bill Hess, also by posters, pencil 

drawings, and Iñupiaq school materials.

Two features make this book special and useful to 

scholars and popular readers alike. First, Sakakibara 

has a detailed and intimate knowledge of today’s North 

Alaskan whaling culture, which is uncommon for a 

visiting anthropologist. She succeeded not only in 

getting close to some very knowledgeable Elders (what 

many anthropologists do), including powerful senior 

women and men, but she also built strong relations to 

several Iñupiat extended families and whaling crews. 

The Acknowledgments section in the book runs for 

11 pages and contains literally dozens of names, 

including those who became Sakakibara’s kin in two 

extended families that adopted her and let her hunt 

with them over several seasons. Second, the book is 

rich with data and personal narratives from two North 

Alaskan Iñupiaq communities—Utqiagvik (Barrow) 

and Tikigaq (Point Hope), with their distinctive 

histories and whaling traditions. Prior scholars usually 

focused on either the former (Robert Spencer, 

Barbara Bodenhorn, Ann Jensen) or the latter 

(Froelich Rainey, Tiger Burch, John Bockstoce, 

Tom Lowenstein), since it takes substantial effort to 

get versed in community’s intricate social network and 

gain acceptance into it. 

Sakakibara’s new book weaves her many experiences 

into a powerful narrative. Yes, rapid climate change is 

happening in North Alaska, and it poses new challenges 

to both the bowhead whales and the people who live 

with them by hunting them. Nonetheless, the Iñupiat 

face the future by being strong, confident, and proud 

of their culture and of their deep connections to the 

Whale built by the generations of their ancestors. They 

survived epidemics, missionaries, traders, zealous 

government teachers and administrators very much like 

the Whale survived the assault of commercial whalers. 

People’s strength is tied to their unbroken link to the 

sustainability of the Whale and, as Sakakibara argues, 

together they are certain to endure. 

ART AS A MIRROR OF SCIENCE—THE 

MUSEUM CERNY INUIT COLLECTION,

EDITED BY MARTHA AND PETER CERNY

Stämpflii AG. Bern. 2020

Reviewed by Igor Krupnik

Museum Cerny (formerly Cerny Inuit Collection) in 

Bern, Switzerland has long been on the ASC contact 

and travel map. It is a private museum of the Arctic, 

primarily of Inuit art, located in the heart of Europe 

where one could hardly expect to find a first-class 

collection of modern Inuit artworks by renown 

Indigenous artists from Canada and Greenland and 

now expanding into the Russian Arctic. We keep 

crossing with its Arctic displays run by its cheerful 

owner, Martha Cerny, at various Arctic meetings; in 

2018, I had a chance to visit the museum in Bern and 

enjoyed touring its public space and collections (ASC 

Newsletter 2019). 

In 2020, Museum Cerny, established by the collectorcouple, Martha and Peter Cerny, published its second 

illustrated 104-page thematic catalog. This volume 

is focused on the ways Indigenous artists reflect on 
72 ASC Newsletter

their vision and knowledge of the Arctic lands, sea, 

animals, spirits, and rapid changes brought to the 

region by the global warming. The catalog is filled 

with beautiful photographs of art pieces from Arctic 

Canada, Greenland, Alaska, and Northern Russia taken 

by photographer Severin Nowacki, but it also contains 

several short essays that help put Indigenous Arctic art 

into a more scholarly context reminiscent of several 

catalogs produced for ASC exhibits. Begun in the early 

1990s as a private collection of ca. 140 Inuit artworks 

from the Eastern Canadian Arctic, the Cerny collection 

has grown to more than 1400 objects. As it became 

circumpolar, thus more diverse over the past years, it 

enabled Museum Cerny to produce several thematic 

displays and travelling exhibits and to bring Indigenous 

art into the context of today’s global issues, such as 

climate change, the future of the Arctic, and how art 

and science may jointly address it.

Besides Martha and 

Peter Cerny, the 

catalog contains 

familiar names of 

other partners and 

friends to the ASC. 

Michael Bronshtein

from the Russian 

Museum of Oriental 

Art in Moscow 

explores in his essay 

how Indigenous 

art in Chukotka 

from ancient OBS 

(Old Bering Sea) 

and Punuk time to 

modern days reflects 

people’s relations to the changing natural world. Yvon 

Csonka, who hosted a panel at the 18th Inuit Studies 

Conference we organized in D.C. in 2012, addresses 

rapid climate change impact on other critical challenges 

that Arctic people—and their art—face today. 

Glaciologist Konrad (Konnie) Steffen, who tragically 

died last year on the Greenland icesheet, reviews 

scientific evidence of the dangerously accelerating 

Arctic meltdown that threatens ecosystems, animals, 

and people’s sustenance in the North. Martin Schultz, 

now the Museum Cerny curator and my partner on the 

study of the “Vega” expedition ethnographic collection 

in Stockholm (see ASC Newsletter 2020), considers 

how Indigenous art serves as a window to Arctic 

history and to the history of Arctic museum collecting 

in particular. Theresie Tungilik, an artist from Rankin 

Inlet, Nunavut, also art advisor to the Government of 

Nunavut, offers an Inuit vision to how climate change 

is affecting Inuit livelihood and arts. Thomas Stocker, 

climate and environmental physicist at the University 

of Bern reviews actions and decisions needed to 

constructively address the new challenge of global 

Corona virus pandemic. This gamut of perspectives 

interspersed with beautiful photos of Indigenous 

artworks produces a powerful message: the Arctic 

climate is changing, and so are people’s lives (and art), 

but the Arctic will endure—not the least because of the 

strength and creativity of its people. We salute Museum 

Cerny on putting this beautiful and thought-provoking 

catalog into the world.

ARCTIC CULTURE AND CLIMATE, EDITED 

BY AMBER LINCOLN, JAGO COOPER, AND 

JAN PETER LAURENS LOOVERS

Thames and Hudson and The British Museum, 2020

Reviewed by William W. Fitzhugh 

An important 

exhibition at The 

British Museum opened 

in October, 2020, 

in the midst of the 

Coronavirus epidemic 

and closed five months 

later in February, 

2021. For most of that 

time the museum was 

closed to visitors, its 

halls silent except for 

essential workers. The 

exhibit, full of wonders 

from the BM and other 

institutions, was in 

its own kind of deep 

freeze, and schedules 

did not allow it to be extended to be available when the 

doors may open again, hopefully this spring.

What we have instead is the exhibition catalog—and 

a marvelous one at that! The editors and exhibition 

producers, conservators, designers, and authors have 

created a beautiful book that will do well to record 

the exhibition that few could see. Our ASC Newsletter 

production schedule does not permit the full review 

this book deserves. It is full of wonderful images and 

fine texts by noted scholars. The broad synthesis casts 

a sweeping net centering the circumpolar environment, 

the changing Arctic, and the cultures and peoples 

who have lived there for more than 30,000 years. 

Subsistence, climate, archaeology, history, art, and 

contemporary times and themes are woven into a 

panoramic view documented in essays and shorter 

pieces by scholars and Indigenous experts. While we 

lament the circumstance requiring the exhibit, like us, 
 ASC Newsletter 73

to ‘socially isolate’, you will enjoy a publication that 

celebrates the Arctic, marking a time of momentous 

change. While looking back, around, and within, this 

book also leads us toward a new and exciting Arctic 

Future.

TIBETAN SILVER: GOLD AND BRONZE 

OBJECTS AND THE AESTHETICS OF 

ANIMALS IN THE ERA BEFORE EMPIRE, BY 

JOHN VINCENT BELLEZZA 

Bar publishing, 169 pp., 2020

Reviewed by William W. Fitzhugh

Earlier this year I 

asked John Bellezza

to write a short piece 

on his historical and 

archaeological work 

in the Upper Tibetan 

Plateau. He began with 

the obvious question: 

“Why the topic of Tibet 

in a newsletter devoted 

to Arctic studies?” 

Flip back a few pages 

and you can read his 

answer. His question 

reminded me of one 

I asked twenty years 

ago about Mongolia 

and the Arctic after 

first seeing Mongolia’s Bronze Age deer stones. My 

answer became the first chapter in a book (Fitzhugh 

et al. 2005). Mongolia’s Bronze Age deer stones 

and Early Eskimo art display similar beliefs and 

iconography about spirit transformation also found 

in Eurasian Animal Style (EAS) art of roughly the 

same or slightly later period: masking, multi-iconic 

forms, spirit-transformation, predator-prey symbolism, 

and shamanic ritual. Tibet’s links with Mongolia and 

northern Eurasia are not based just on geography and 

climate; they are also linked by Bronze Age ties to 

EAS art and burial ritual. Like Bellezza’s other books, 

Tibetan Silver and Besting are packed with literary, 

linguistic, historical, and philosophical discussion. I 

confine my comments to parts of each dealing with 

northern connections.

Tibetan Silver documents hundreds of animal figures 

seen in silver and gold objects (bowls, plaques, votive 

figures, and others) and in rock art. One day perhaps 

archaeological finds will allow inclusion of data from 

Tibetan perishables from dry caves or permafrost. 

Even so, it is difficult to move from gold and silver 

objects (many from the private collection of Jeremy 

Pine) or bronze castings to rock art: the former from 

elite craftsperson and latter produced by hunters and 

herders and have suffered ravages of the elements that 

make interpretation of their form somewhat subjective. 

Bellezza is not insensitive to issues of looting, 

trafficking, private collecting, and museum acquisition 

that attend his objects. He draws on a wide variety of 

literature to support his thesis that pre-empire Tibet was 

not a geographically isolated cultural entity. Tibetan 

history and culture has always been open to trade and 

external connections, receptive to new styles, materials, 

inventions, especially so during its pre-empire history. 

His voluminous, highly documented, referenced, and 

foot-noted study shows 

Tibet participated in 

and in some cases 

probably influenced, 

the cultural life of 

northern neighbors. But 

the stronger influence 

was from northernderived EAS at least 

until the middle of the 

Iron Age when Tibetan 

insularity began, perhaps 

hastened by herding 

decline and cooling 

climate. It is reasonable 

that assimilation of 

northern ideas not 

cultural or demographic 

replacement dominated culture change in the BCE era. 

Of particular interest to me was the existence of animalthemed trapezoidal openwork bronze plaques dating ca. 

5th century BCE, reminiscent of shield-like ornaments 

on Mongolian deer stones. This volume represents a 

major step forward in studies of EAS art and its regional 

expression in Inner Asia and northern China.

BESTING THE BEST: WARRIORS AND 

WARFARE IN THE CULTURAL AND 

RELIGIOUS TRADITIONS OF TIBET, BY 

JOHN VINCENT BELLEZZA

Lumbini International Research Institute, Lumbini 

2020

Reviewed by William W. Fitzhugh

Whereas Tibetan Silver by John Bellezza investigates 

Tibetan culture and belief through the lens of animal art, 

Besting the Best reconstructs Tibetan history from the 

pragmatics of politics and power, drawing on ancient 

traditions, religious literature, performance art, martial 

tradition, and material culture. Archaeological and rock 
74 ASC Newsletter

art evidence is used in the second half of the book to 

illustrate weapons, technology, and martial imagery in 

vessels and rock art. Disquisition on theories of war 

and archaeological seriation provide anthropological 

context for a work that is deeply invested in knowledge 

of Tibetan, Lamaist, and Buddhist thought, mythology, 

ritual, and literature. Too little is known of Tibetan 

archaeology (other than Aldenderfer research) to gain 

much much understanding yet of northern connections 

other than EAS art. However, during the Bronze and 

Early Iron Age a megalithic complex called the ‘Long 

Stone Grid’ necropolis appears, known only from 

surface features and rare isolated finds and 14C dates. 

Its tall, square-walled tombs are flanked to the east with 

parallel lines of hundreds of unmarked vertical slabs. 

These structures bear no specific resemblance to the 

mound burial traditions of Inner Asia and Xinjiang but 

do remind one of 7th-8th century Turkic bal-bal memorial 

structures with square boxes, human figures, and lines of 

stone slabs. If ritual sites display few signs of northern 

connection, this is not the case with military hardware 

like horse gear, bows, arrows, and spears—all similar 

to Inner Asian forms. The other northern connection 

is found in rock art, for which Bellezza provides a 

fine sampling showing weapons, dress (including 

‘mushroom’ headdress figures and bi-triangular bodies), 

chariots, combat scenes, and the central role of horses. 

Most of these images date to the Bronze and Iron Age. 

Besting the Best is a cornucopia of knowledge and 

together with its companion volume provide readers with 

an incomparable treasury of knowledge about a place 

still largely unknown to archaeology.

AN EXPLORATION OF PREHISTORIC 

ONTOLOGIES IN THE BERING STRAIT 

REGION, BY FENG QU

Cambridge Scholars Publishing, 2021. 229 pp.

Previewed by William W. 

Fitzhugh

This book is a revision 

of the author’s PhD 

thesis at the University 

of Alaska investigating 

the arts, symbolism, and 

underlying religious 

and ritual frameworks 

of Bering Strait Eskimo 

cultures of the past 

2000 years, drawing 

on archaeological and 

ethnographic data, and 

anthropological and 

social science theory. Available later in 2021.

BOOKS ON NORTHEAST GREENLAND

Reviewed by William Fitzhugh

THE WAR IN NORTH-EAST GREENLAND, BY 

JENS ERIK SCHULTZ. 103 p. Xsirius Books. 2020. 

Rønde, Denmark. ISBN 978-87-994555-3-9. 

KONG OSCAR FJORD: PÄ PODAGELSE I 

NORDØSTGRØNLAND / DISCOVERING 

NORTH-EAST GREENLAND, by Peter Schmidt 

Mikkelsen. 151 p. Xsirius Books. 2020. Rønde, 

Denmark. In Danish and English. ISBN 978-87-

994555-5-3. www.xsirius.dk

During a memorable 

cruise around Greenland 

several years ago I had 

the pleasure of meeting 

Peter Mikkelsen and 

learning about his 

experience as a member 

of the Danish NorthEast Greenland Sirius 

Sledge Patrol in 1977-

79. Before reading 

Schultz’ The War in 

North-East Greenland I 

was familiar only with 

20th century events from 

the 2005 biography of 

Willie Knutsen, Arctic Sun on My Path: The True Story 

of America's Last Great Polar Explorer, written by his 

son, Will C . Knutsen, describing Willie’s attack on 

German weather stations by US Navy-recruited Boston 

fishermen. Unlike Knutsen’s American vantage point, 

Schultz describes the Germans’ repeated attempts—

with some success—to install meteorological stations 

documented in German and American war archives for 

1942-44. The main character in the story is Hermann 

Ritter, whose pacifist leanings caused him to make a 

futile attempt to avoid WWII by becoming a fur trapper 

in Svalbard and Northeast Greenland. Nevertheless, he 

ended up being put in charge the German ‘invasion’ of 

East Greenland in 1943. The conflict between Ritter’s 

personal views and his military duties becomes a major 

theme in the story of how war was conducted by ‘good’ 

and ‘bad’ individuals in a vast, remote, winterized land. 

Shultz’ personal knowledge of Northeast Greenland 

and his acquaintance with key players adds depth to 

the account. The book has some issues with English 

translation and storyline but is packed full of photos, 

illustrations of war records, letters, and maps. As far we 

can tell, there is no connection between the Eli Knutsen 

who was murdered by one of the German Nazis and 

the American Willie Knutsen who helped destroy the 
 ASC Newsletter 75

TRANSITIONS

DR. STANISLAV CHLÁDEK (1937–2020): A 

BRIGHT-EYED MARINER

By Stephen Loring

“Believe me, my young friend, there is nothing—

absolutely nothing—half so much worth doing as 

simply messing about in boats.” 

Water Rat’s sage advice 

to Mole in Kenneth 

Grahame’s The Wind 

in The Willows plays as 

a leitmotif of sorts for 

those of us in collections 

management catering 

over the years to the 

whims and inquiries 

of an eccentric—but 

passionately inspired—

cadre of scholars, 

students, researchers, 

technicians, artisans, paddlers, and river rats drawn to 

the Museum by the legacy of ancient canoes, umiaks, 

and kayaks sequestered in dark halls in defiance of 

the passage of time. I remember my own youthful 

wanderings in the attic of the Natural History Museum 

(NMNH), stumbling upon the “boat room” where birchbark canoes and brittle Alaskan kayaks lounged in dust 

and obscurity. The dimly lit place had about it the air 

of an undiscovered tomb, no doubt enhanced by the 

presence of a huge linen-wrapped mummy of an ancient 

Egyptian bull that shared the attic eyrie. I remember it 

as a place that defied the logic of time and place and 

destiny, that of all their brethren—the thousands and 

thousands of their predecessors and kin—that these 

few watercraft should survive the depredations of 

neglect, the destruction of rapids, ice and storms—was 

something quite remarkable. Alas (maybe but not really) 

the otherworldly ambiance of the old “boat room” is 

no more. With renovations to the NMNH preceding the 

construction of the Ocean Hall, and with the building of 

the Museum Support Center, the old museum storage 

places in the attic have been emptied and the boat 

collection relocated to a state of the art conservation 

facility, each boat with its own custom-crafted aluminum 

cradle and brace.

Museum collection repositories attract all types of 

researchers, but boat people are a different sort all 

together. They have an attention to form and function 

that goes far beyond the measurements they take with 

calipers, tapes and cameras. Their thoughts seem 

attentive to different matters—resiliency, buoyancy, 

maneuverability, stability—to a reality far removed 

Germans’ first attempt to establish a weather station in 

southeast Greenland, other than their same (common) 

last names. 

Kong Oscar Fjord is a very different production whose 

large format, coffee-table format introduces Northeast 

Greenland through Mikkelsen’s personal travel, 

photographs, maps, and memories. Part diary, part 

gazetteer, and part historical atlas, the book is based on 

Mikkelsen’s three years on the Sirius Sledge Patrol and 

subsequent visits over forty years. The story unrolls 

from place to place, documenting spectacular vistas, 

landforms, historical sites, and modern settlements. 

One of my favorite mini-chapters, “Nyhavn,” includes 

Mikkelsen’s 2007 photo of “Washburn House,” which 

is seen strapped to the ground by heavy steel cables to 

avoid being blown away in violent storms. This house 

is where the American geologist A. Lincoln Washburn 

lived with his family studying “floating soil” and 

permafrost while on the Boyd Expedition of 1955 (see 

Morse-Washburn story in this NL). The book includes 

a brief history of Northeast Greenland, the geography 

of the King Oscar Fjord region, photo-essays on fjord 

locations, with special attention to historical sites like old 

Norwegian trapper huts of the 1920-30s, and the Sirius 

patrols cabins of the 1950s. This book is a photo-journal 

complement to Mikkelsen’s more scholarly works on 

Northeast Greenland: One Thousand Days with Sirius 

(2005) and North-East Greenland 1908-60: The Trapper 

Era (2008).
76 ASC Newsletter

from the pages of academic journals and books, they 

sense with a weather eye. 

No one better epitomized this eccentric breed, nor 

brought a more finely honed appreciation of the 

museum’s Aleutian collections, bidarkas included, than 

Dr. Stanislav Chládek, a singularly well informed, 

audacious, and indominable sea-kayaker who passed 

away at his home in Colorado this past November. 

He was 83. A native of Czechoslovakia, Dr. Chládek 

conducted biochemical research at the Czechoslovak 

Academy of Science prior to moving to the United 

States in 1969 as a professor at Texas A&M University, 

and later as a researcher and a professor at the Michigan 

Cancer Foundation and Wayne State University.

A born adventurer and kayak enthusiast, Chládek was 

an accomplished whitewater racer, and with his wife 

Ema competed as part of the Czechoslovak National 

team. (One of their daughters—Dana—won the bronze 

medal in whitewater slalom in the 1992 Barcelona 

Olympics and the silver medal at the 1996 Atlanta 

Games.) As much a force of nature as a man, Chládek’s 

enthusiasm for sea-kayaking took on ever increasing 

challenges with audacio-fearless trips to the North Sea, 

Antarctica, and the South Shetland Islands. In 1999 he 

and a companion became the first to circumnavigate 

Easter Island in the South Pacific in kayaks.

Beginning about twenty years ago, I along with my 

Anthropology Department colleagues Bruno Frohlich

and Dave Hunt, began to entertain increasingly longer 

and more detailed telephone inquiries from Stan about 

all aspects of Aleutian (Unangan) history, culture, and 

archaeology. These conversations led to subsequent 

visits to the museum so that he could research and 

photograph the museum’s singularly impressive 

Aleutian collections. Stan knew intuitively that the 

ancient Aleut were without doubt the most skillful 

and intrepid small boat watermen the world had ever 

known, as revealed by the practical aspects of their 

material culture–tools and clothing, biadarkas and 

paddles, as well as the sacred masks and mummies. 

Stan’s interest in the Aleutian collections was 

singularly informed by a series of boldaudacious seakayak expeditions he conducted to the eastern and 

central portion of the archipelago, including a trip to 

the Islands of the Four Mountains where he was able 

to visit and document the current conditions of some of 

the burial caves that had been previously collected—

some would say looted—in 1936 by the Smithsonian’s 

infamous “bone doctor,” Aleš Hrdlička. 

Stan’s infatuation with the Aleutians, his explorations 

in museum archives and collections, as well as the 

encapsulation of his several kayak expeditions as told 

in his 2016 publication Po Stopách Lovců Velryb v 

Severním Pacifiku (In the footsteps of whalers in the 

North Pacific), published by Pavel Mervart: Červený 

Kostelec, Czech Republic, 2016), a stunningly beautiful 

book, sadly, for most of our readers only available in 

Czech. The volume revives discussions of Aleutian 

hunting prowess, mortuary practices, and shamanistic 

beliefs that are deeply informed by Chládek’s immersive 

experiences in and about the ‘birthplace of winds’.

I should mention as a quick aside that Stan’s 

archaeological proclivities in extreme environments 

were not limited to northern seas. Working in 

close association with North and Central American 

archaeologists, Stan visited and photographed many of 

the ancient Mayan ritual caves in Mexico, Guatemala, 

and Belize which are documented in his Exploring 

Maya Ritual Caves: Dark Secrets from the Maya 

Underworld (AltaMira Press, 2011).

Stan was such a delight to talk with (true, exasperating 

some times) but his was a wonderful heart filled with 

unrestrained enthusiasm. I am sure Water Rat would 

agree. I find as we grow old(er) that for many of 

us life's dreams are exchanged for memories; Stan 

dreamed bigger than most, as are our memories of him. 

His wife Ema is fond of saying that life with him was 

not always easy, but it was never boring.

I thank Ema Chládek for assistance with biographical 

details.

REMEMBERING SELMA HUXLEY 

BARKHAM (1927–2020) 

By Oriana and Serena Barkham 

Published in People, 18 Jun, 2020 (edited and reprinted 

with permission) 

Selma Huxley Barkham

(March 8, 1927–May 3, 

2020) was a historian 

and geographer of 

international standing 

in the fields of Basque 

and Canadian maritime 

history.

The yellow tent was up 

and straining on its guy 

ropes in the Labrador 

wind. The black flies 

were viciously biting. Rain poured down. They were 

cold and soaked to the bone. But Selma Huxley 

Barkham, with her two youngest children in tow, was 

ecstatically happy. She had found what she was looking 
 ASC Newsletter 77

for: eroded pieces of red roofing tiles scattered on the 

shores, in vegetable patches and in gardens.

The locals of Red Bay, Labrador, called the red tile ‘red 

rock’, and some, as children, had used it to write on 

school slates. But Selma knew that the tiles had been 

brought in ships across the Atlantic from the Basque 

Country in the sixteenth century. On the way over to 

Terranova, the New Found Land, the tiles were used as 

ballast. On the return journey, the ships’ hulls were filled 

with barrels of whale oil, and sometimes with dried or 

green salted cod. The tiles were left in Terranova where 

they were used to construct roofs over shelters and the 

ovens where whalers rendered blubber into whale oil.

Selma’s excursion to Labrador in the summer of 

1977, funded by the Royal Canadian Geographical 

Society, to identify Basque whaling sites in the 1500s 

and 1600s, was a great success. In each port she had 

so painstakingly identified as having been used by 

the Basques, she had found tiles. Years of interest, 

meticulous research, and grueling hours in archives 

had paid off. Selma had been told that most archives 

along the Spanish Basque coast had been burnt during 

the Napoleonic wars, but she soon discovered that for 

400 years, legajos (books of notarial documents) from 

towns across the province of Gipuzkoa, had lain in 

the attics of the 1543 University of Oñati. Don José 

María Aguirrebalzátegui, one of the village priests, 

had rescued many over the years, filling three huge 

university rooms with legajos. Most of the documents 

had to do with local problems, but a few referred to The 

New Found Land, ‘Terra Nova’. When she presented 

her work to the Public Archives she was given 

contracts to collect and microfilm documents referring 

to Canada in archives throughout the Iberian Peninsula.

The information she gathered provided Selma with 

knowledge on individuals, families, homes, movements, 

ships, voyages, and towns along the Spanish Basque 

coast in the 16th and early 17th centuries. In parish 

records, Selma found records of births, deaths, marriages 

and baptisms. In insurance policies in Burgos, she 

found insurances of ships and their voyages; in notarial 

archives, she found contracts, wills (some written in 

‘Terra nova’), powers of attorney, loans, donations, 

policies, proceedings, agreements. In lengthy lawsuits 

in other archives, she learned of disagreements between 

crew members, claims made by widows of fishermen 

who had died in ‘Terra Nova’, and ships that had sunk 

on the other side of the Atlantic.

Selma began to write articles on her discoveries. Given 

the breadth of her research, she wrote on various 

topics: women’s lives in the 16th century, merchants, 

trade routes, corsair activity, early Labrador ports, 

toponymy, etc. In People magazine, in 1973, she wrote, 

“Mercantile community in inland Burgos.” v. 42(2): 

106-113; in 1977, “First will and testament on the 

Labrador coast.” v. 49(9): 574-581.

The year after Selma’s 1977 excursion to Labrador, 

Parks Canada sent a team of underwater archaeologists 

to look at the places where she found ships had sunk 

in Chateau Bay, Red Bay, and other locations. Her 

research was so exact that a diver found one of the 

wrecks the first day of diving in Red Bay. 

Selma’s research was groundbreaking in many ways. 

She received the gold medal from the Royal Canadian 

Geographical Society (1980), the first woman to 

receive this medal. Then followed the Order of 

Canada (1981), the Lagun Onari (2014) from the 

Basque Government, the Order of Newfoundland and 

Labrador (2015), various honorary doctorates, and 

the International Prize of the Sociedad Geográfica 

Española (2018), among other honors, for her 

exceptional work, which was described as ‘a classic 

piece of historical-geographical research’.

While the 16th and 17th centuries became alive for 

Selma because of her research, the present was also 

equally interesting to her. She started exchanges of 

Basques with Newfoundlanders, of Basques and 

Mi’kmaq, and groups of them began visiting each 

other’s countries. She worked up and down the coast 

of Labrador and Newfoundland with locals talking 

about their villages’ links with the Basques, about 16th 

century wills written on their shores, about contact 

between Basques and Inuit and Montagnais, and other 

First Nations, about shipwrecks. She helped them put 

up historical plaques in their villages. She organized 

conferences for eleven years on the Northern Peninsula 

of Newfoundland, bringing in experts in different 

fields to talk about local history, ecology, geology and 

cartography. She keenly felt her historical research 

could help the local economy—and it has. Historical 

tourism now brings many visitors to Newfoundland 

and Labrador because of her work. Red Bay is now a 

UNESCO World Heritage Site.

Selma Huxley Barkham’s work has been used by 

archivists, historians, cartographers, topographers, 

anthropologists, archaeologists, conservators, 

museographers, linguists, and more. Albaola is rebuilding the San Juan, which she located by piecing 

together information from documents from three 

different archives, and by working in different countries 

on early maps to find where the port of Buttus was, and 

then by looking at depths and prevailing winds to find 

where it had sunk. Selma’s work, her 50 publications 

in Spanish, English, French and Portuguese, her many 

lectures, and her generous sharing of her research, has 
78 ASC Newsletter

led to a wide variety of further work. Unfortunately, 

she has not always been duly credited.

Selma’s work is seminal. As the citation for the 

gold medal of the Canadian Geographical Society 

states: ‘This medal is an occasional award intended 

to recognize a particular achievement in the field of 

geography, also to recognize a significant national 

or international event. In this case, the Society felt 

Barkham deserved this recognition on both counts.

MEMORIES OF CHIAPAS AND ROBERT M. 

LAUGHLIN (1934–2020)

By John Cloud

I'm a relatively new 

Research Collaborator in 

Anthropology at NMNH, 

but I knew Bob and 

Mimi Laughlin since the 

early 1970s, when I first 

lived in the highlands of 

central Chiapas, “sikil 

osil” in Tzotzil Mayan, 

“cold country”. Everyone 

converged in the original 

capital of Chiapas, now 

called San Cristobal 

de Las Casas. San Cristobal, “Saint Christopher,” was 

and is the patron saint of travelers, and everybody in 

Chiapas travels—for work, for love, to see the world, or 

at least Mexico City, whatever. The “de Las Casas” part 

references Fray Bartolome de Las Casas, who was a 

major Spanish defender of the Indigenous people in the 

early Spanish Empire. Even though the city is over half a 

millennium old, in Tzotzil, the bowl-like valley the city 

sits within is still called “Jobel”, the genus-level name 

for tall perennial grasses in the genus Muhlenbergia. It 

was and is the best grass for thatching roofs.

Bob Laughlin (1934–2020) became a “Z”, a 

functioning member of the Zinacantecos, one of the 

Tzotzil peoples of the highlands. Zinacanteco men wear 

cotton tunics (pok’ ku’u’ul) and women wear cotton 

shawls (pok’ mocebal) all woven by the women on 

backstrap looms, using very thin stripes of white and 

red mercerized cotton thread, rendering the cloth bright 

pink. Zinacanteco men wear broad hats with cascades 

of brightly colored ribbons, “the flowers of the hat”. On 

trails in the mountains, even in fog and rain, one can 

spot Zinacatecos from hundreds of yards away. 

Laughlin’s great work was his Great Tzotzil Dictionary 

of San Lorenzo Zinacantan (https://repository.si.edu/

handle/10088/1360). It was, and remains, a remarkable 

achievement, evoking the sheer poetry of Mayan 

speech and song, and the astonishing vocabulary of 

Tzotzil-speaking people. There are precise words for 

the sound of a tortilla when it is flipped from its first 

cooked side to the other, and the various sounds of corn 

farts of dogs. And there are prayers and chants that 

bridge the Spanish peasant Christianity imposed on 

Mayans starting with “El Encuentro”, back to classic 

Mayan cosmology and rituals. Tzotzil is the language 

of Tzotzil Venik, “the People of the Bat”. To this day, 

the limestone landscape is dotted with sacred caves.

A memorial for Bob Laughlin, Chiapas-style, would 

involve pine needles scattered on the floor, candles, 

lots of copal incense smoke. In Tzotzil, the congealed 

resins of plants in the genus Bursera, closely related to 

incense plants in the Old World in the genus Boswellia; 

frankincense and myrrh, is called, amongst other names, 

pom riosh which translates as “god's honey”. Plus, there 

would be lots of “posh”, bootleg rum from up in the hills, 

but all the distilleries in Ivy City can suffice for that.

In Tzotzil, there's no “hello” or “goodbye”. When one 

leaves, you say “Ta shi bat” which means “Now I’m 

going”. The response: “Batan!” “Then go!” And so, 

Bob Laughlin: Batan! You have earned your rest. 

BYRON MALLOTT (1944–2021)

By Mike Sfraga 

As Alaska emerges from 

another long, snowy, 

yet aurora-filled Winter, 

into the sights and 

sounds of spring, it is 

with sadness that I write 

to share the news of a 

leader, friend, mentor, 

and former Lieutenant 

Governor of the State of 

Alaska, Byron Mallott. 

The scholars, staff, and 

fellows of the Polar 

Institute send their deepest condolences to Byron's wife, 

Toni, their five children, ten grandchildren, and two 

great-grandchildren.

Byron was born and raised in the small Southeast 

Alaska village of Yakutat during World War II, where 

his early days were shaped by the peaks and glaciers of 

the St. Elias Range, and expansive waters of the Gulf of 

Alaska. In 1965, at the age of 22, he was elected Mayor 

of his hometown. Twenty-nine years later, in 1994, he 

was elected Mayor of Juneau, Alaska's capital city. His 

commitment to the people of Alaska went beyond twice 

serving as Mayor and included a host of important and 

influential roles such as aide to U.S. Senator Mike Gravel
 ASC Newsletter 79

(D-AK) on the path-breaking Alaska Native Claims 

Settlement Act, director of the Rural Alaska Community 

Action Program, and Alaska's first commissioner for the 

Department of Community and Regional Affairs.

Indeed, Byron's service to the state knew no bounds. He 

held positions as president and chief executive officer 

of First Alaskans Institute, executive director and thenchairman of the Alaska Permanent Fund Corporation, 

president, chairman, and chief executive officer of 

Sealaska Corporation, president of the Alaska Federation 

of Natives (one of the most consequential Indigenous 

peoples' organizations in the world), founding director of 

the Alaska Commercial Fisheries and Agriculture Bank, 

and long-term director of the Alaska Air Group.

Byron served the KwaashKiKwaan clan of the 

Raven tribe of Yakutat, as well as Indigenous peoples 

throughout Alaska, the Arctic, and beyond by 

simultaneously leading in two worlds; one committed 

to his people and traditional culture, and the other 

advancing governance and social justice policies and 

institutions. His unmatched gift of storytelling and 

oratory elevated every issue on which he chose to place 

a spotlight. In 2014, while running as a Democratic 

candidate for Governor, Byron partnered with 

Republican Gubernatorial candidate Bill Walker to 

form the “Unity Ticket,” and he was elected Lieutenant 

Governor of Alaska.

Beyond the elected offices, board appointments, and 

executive positions, he was a man who welcomed all 

with open arms and a smile—if you offered an open 

mind and open heart. His commitment to Indigenous 

peoples everywhere is well known, celebrated, and 

irreplaceable. Those who worked with Byron remember 

his passion was fueled by a deep sense of justice and 

injustice, and a passion for Indigenous culture and rights. 

His commitment to the people of Alaska and the Arctic 

were inexhaustible; it's who he was and why many of us 

were drawn to him, learned from him, and will miss him.

Byron and I shared a number of interests including 

a passion and admiration for ancient Polynesian 

navigators. He would always greet me with a bear hug 

and then a handshake, in that order. And we departed 

company with the same hug and handshake. And in a 

nod to those Polynesian navigators we so admired, we 

would say—almost in unison—“sail on” and go our 

separate ways.

Byron was known to his people as Dux̱ da neik, K'oo 

ta' in Tlingit: “a person who would lead us into the 

future.” He has departed this earth but left a legacy of 

knowledge, compassion, leadership, mentorship, bear 

hugs, handshakes, and smiles. He has certainly led us 

into the future... Sail on, Byron.

DALE GERARD KENNEDY 1957–2017

By William W. Fitzhugh and Saltwire.com

Dale Kennedy, 60, a 

vocational archaeologist and 

historian of northwestern 

Newfoundland, Canada 

passed away July 28th, 

2017, in St. Anthony, 

Newfoundland. In addition 

to being a gifted musician, 

he spent years documenting 

the history of his community. 

His interest in local 

archaeology led him to cofound the Bird Cove-Plum 

Point Archaeology Project 

which for many years was 

one of the most successful 

locally-run, communitybased archaeological programs in Newfoundland. I got 

to know Dale when he asked me to confirm the identity 

of an unusual Maritime Archaic (MA) site he had 

found deep in the forest east of Plum Point. Previously, 

MA sites had always been found near the shore, in 

situations like Port au Choix. 

But here was a settlement site with diagnostic Maritime 

Archaic chipped and ground stone tools on an old 

raised beach far from the shore. Dale assembled a 

mixed team local and professional archaeologists and 

investigated this and several Dorset sites at Bird Cove. 

He created a local history and archaeology museum 

and with Selma Barkham hosted an annual conference 

for several years that attracted a large and boisterous 

clientele of locals, professionals, and bureaucrats. For 

his outstanding community efforts and archaeological 

work, he was awarded the James Pendergast Award, 

the highest honor an avocational archaeologist can 

receive in Canada. 

THE S. A. MORSE DIARIES: RECOLLECTING 

LINCOLN WASHBURN

By Stearns A. Morse

In August 2020 I received a remarkable letter from 

Nuna (Washburn) MacDonald in upstate New York, 

enclosing part of an old letter from me to her mother 

Tahoe Washburn, widow of the Polar scientist Lincoln 

Washburn, with a hand-written response to me from 

her just after his death, trailing off at the end and never 

sent. It had to do with a photo of their daughter Nuna

and me on skis in the Ford Sayre Ski Program in 

Hanover not far from the Washburn home. This surprise 

brought forth a flood of remote connections about 
80 ASC Newsletter

our scientific and personal careers that were mostly 

divergent but that ended up in rejoiced contact. What 

I did not know at the time of the ski program was that 

their father, Linc, had been a member of the Dartmouth 

Ski Team, a major in geology (as was I), and member 

of the 1936 Olympic Ski Team, performing in Slalom 

and other events in Garmisch-Partenkirchen, Germany.

The ski program was the second effort I was greeted 

with on return from the Army. (I had been at language 

school in Oberammergow and worked and lived 

bilingually to some degree.)

When I returned to Hanover the Professor of 

German Language 

and Literature, Herr 

Stephan Schlossmacher, 

encountered my 

father downtown, and 

pronounced “Tony is back! 

He speaks Bavarian!”). 

The first was to fly to 

Labrador to measure the 

temperatures in the two 

major Labrador fjords—

Hebron Fjord and Nain 

Bay—that were under 

study by the Blue Dolphin 

Labrador Expeditions. 

The Project directors, Cdr. 

David Nutt and Larry 

Coachman, had taught me 

how to do the sampling 

in previous summers in 

Labrador. The trip, supported by the Office of Naval 

Research, was successful and I guess qualified me to be 

an oceanographer.

Instead I became an igneous petrologist, one who 

studies old rocks crystallized from the molten 

condition–and in my case, relatively deep in the Earth 

and Moon. Linc Washburn, however, practiced his 

geology as a geomorphologist, with special interest 

in Arctic regions and ice. His first encounter with that 

science was in the remote fjords of East Greenland 

in the Boyd Expedition. With other Americans and 

Canadians, Link founded the binational Arctic Institute 

of North America, based in Montreal and became 

its first full-time Director. Out of this came the new 

journal Arctic. It was in that magazine years later that I 

published my obituary of David Clark Nutt, who with 

his wife Barbara made us part of their family and our 

strong connection to Labrador.

The second AINA Director was Max Dunbar. While I 

was doing my graduate work at McGill, we frequently 

had Friday beer and music at the Institute, and Max and 

I traded folk songs with guitars. There also were Don 

Foote and eventually Tony Williamson. Don married 

Berit Arnestad, who on learning I was about to begin 

a NSF-supported study of the Kiglapait Layered 

Intrusion in Labrador, asked my wife, Dorothy, are you 

going too? And to my horror she replied “I don’t know. 

I haven’t been asked.” She was then asked and said 

“yes,” and we switched from tents to a house and began 

raising daughters in the wilds of Labrador.

Tony Williamson worked on McGill’s winter climate 

station in western Labrador, spent a winter in Nain, 

Labrador learning the Inuk language and huntingfishing subsistence with the help of the Moravian 

minister, my close friend 

Fred Grubb, and went 

west to help Don Foote, 

Berit, Les Viereck, 

and many others shoot 

down the proposed 

making of an unwanted 

harbor in northwest 

Alaska with nuclear 

bombs. Tony returned to 

Newfoundland-Labrador 

for a career in enabling 

distant groups of native 

people communicate their 

desires and needs and 

became a rare, dear part 

of our family (his brother 

Jed Williamson married 

Dorothy’s sister Perry. 

Tony, like Fred and Don, 

died young, leaving great holes in our lives.)

Like Tahoe and Link Washburn, Dorothy and I raised 

children who knew the Arctic. A middle daughter has 

paddled seven of the far north Canadian rivers (and the 

Wild Ammonoosuc below our family’s farm). Long 

before that, with NSF help we built a 51-foot research 

vessel with greenheart sheathing for work in ice. 

Dorothy cooked and steered, called out the ice ahead, 

and took care of the daughters for several summers. 

We used this ship, named Pitsiulak, in Labrador for ten 

years and then gave it to the Smithsonian Institution 

for their Arctic archaeology studies under William 

Fitzhugh. Bill took the ship to Baffin Island where for 

several summers our youngest daughter Sophie served 

as Operations Officer.

Sophie eventually became Master of the famous 

Arctic and Cape Verde Island schooner ErnestinaMorrissey, the historic State Ship of Massachusetts, 

presently being rebuilt in Boothbay, Maine. This is 

the ship that took young David Nutt for four seasons 

with Captain Bob Bartlett in the Far North. That 

Lincoln and Tahoe Washburn in Yellowknife in 1936. 

Photo from Nuna MacDonald
 ASC Newsletter 81

experience qualified him to be a navy officer during 

WWII. He became the youngest Commander, retired 

from active service, bought the schooner Blue Dolphin, 

and sailed it to Labrador for many seasons studying 

oceanography. When the Blue Dolphin encountered big 

glacier ice off Labrador and dropped pieces into water, 

it sizzled. David Nutt told the polymath biologist Pete 

Scholander that the ice was getting rid of its captured 

atmosphere. Pete then measured it for CO2

 and showed 

that the Greenland ice retained a climate record many 

thousands of years old. That’s where it started, offshore 

Labrador!

As young newlyweds Dorothy and I moved from 

Montreal to Hanover 

Center, New Hampshire, 

while I finished my 

Ph.D. thesis. To make 

ends meet, I became a 

member once again of 

the U.S. Army Corps of 

Engineers charged with 

purchasing an X-ray 

diffractometer suitable 

for work at 40 degrees 

below zero, centigrade. 

The institution that hired 

me was the Cold Regions 

Research and Engineering 

Laboratory (CRREL) 

that gained its name 

from SIPRI (Snow, Ice 

& Permafrost Research 

Institute) when it moved from Illinois to Hanover. 

The whole deal was instigated by Linc Washburn and 

many others, including David Nutt, John Sloan Dickey

(Dartmouth’s President) and the Canadian Arctic 

professor, Trevor Lloyd.

Unfortunately, the lab space designated for that X-ray 

instrument burned up during construction. Instead 

of working at the Laboratory, my boss sent me to 

study and make experiments at Dartmouth. There I 

was welcomed to use the instruments in the Geology 

Department. With the skills of the Physics Machine 

Shop (a place of wonder and delight) we built a cold 

housing for the Geology X-ray diffractometer, placed 

a glass slide at liquid-nitrogen temperature with a coat 

of water, put it into the diffractometer, and made a 

conventional X-ray diffraction pattern.

A pleasure of being in the ice business at that time 

was acquaintance with Wilford F. Weeks, a practical 

student of ice at CRREL and adjunct professor at 

Dartmouth Earth Sciences. Among other things, he 

had spent parts of three winters in Hopedale, Labrador 

to determine the physical properties of sea ice. This 

research was published in 1958 in Arctic. That same 

year he published “An experimental study of strength 

of young sea ice” in EOS, the Transactions of the 

American Geophysical Union, with his second author 

Don L. Anderson. In due course I became an officer 

of the American Geophysical Union, at a time when 

Don Anderson of Caltech was AGU President. We were 

good friends for a long time. He was a seismologist and 

wrote The Theory of the Earth and won seven medals.

Linc kept up research in Greenland, Canada, and 

Antarctica while I began teaching petrology and 

mineralogy at Franklin and Marshall College in 

Pennsylvania. The Department was first-class and 

greatly supportive; the 

Chair, John Moss and his 

wife Margey, rented us 

a house to live in on their 

farm, and in due course 

we built a TechBuilt 

house on another corner 

of their farm. While 

we were at our college, 

Linc and Tahoe moved 

to the University of 

Washington and built 

a model Quaternary 

Research Center where 

many groups of faculty 

could work together. 

While there, Linc also 

established another new 

journal, Quaternary 

Research. He published his own research for 60 years, 

including a Geological Society of America Memoir 

22, and another, Memoir 90. My own GSA Memoir, 

published eight years after my Ph.D. research on the 

Labrador Kiglapait Intrusion, was number 112 (1969).

In due course I became increasingly involved in annual 

meetings of the AGU and, to a lesser extent, the GSA. 

At their annual receptions I eventually found many 

old friends, including Linc and Tahoe Washburn. Well, 

never was there such a pleasant re-connection. Hence 

in the end there came the final correspondence that only 

reached us in the dry August 2020 of Swiftwater, New 

Hampshire, in the form of a letter from their daughter 

Nuna, which spurred this small memoir. Her memories 

enrich ours and extend the Linc Link.

Postscript: Glaciologist and Polar scientist Lincoln 

Washburn is particularly notable for working in Arctic 

winters and summers with the help of his remarkable 

wife, Tahoe. In the above I have generally spelled his 

common name as ‘Linc’, which is what his wife Tahoe 

wrote in later correspondence. But Tahoe also wrote a 

wonderful book about their early lives in Arctic Canada 

Lincoln and Tahoe in Resolute, with summer ice in the 1980s. 

Photo from Nuna MacDonald
82 ASC Newsletter

2020 ASC STAFF PUBLICATIONS

Fitzhugh, William W.

2020 Visualization and Spatial Analysis of 

Archaeological Landscape Ritual in the Mongolian 

Altai. In: Proceedings of the 13th Annual 

Mongolian Studies Conference, edited by SaruulErdene Myagmar and W. Fitzhugh, pp. 13–21. 

Arlington, Va: Mongolian Cultural Center. (by D. 

G. Cole and W. Fitzhugh)

2020 Kettle Head and the Inuit of Grand Isle: 

Basques, Boulder Pits, and Excavations on 

the Quebec Lower North Shore. Provincial 

Archaeology Office 2019 Annual Review,

Government of Newfoundland and Labrador, pp. 

61–70. St. John’s.(W. Fitzhugh, M. Mlyniec, I. 

Chechushkov, and B. Loewen)

2020 The Gateways Project 2019: Excavations at 

Hart Chalet, Grand Isle, and Bonne Esperance. 

201 pp. Arctic Studies Center, National Museum 

of Natural History, Smithsonian Institution. 

Washington DC. (W. Fitzhugh with contributions 

by I. Chechushkov, M. Mlyniec, and A. Piegols)

2020 Bark and Skin Boats of Northern Eurasia. 

276 pp. Smithsonian Books. Washington DC. 

(by H. Luukkanen and W. Fitzhugh; by E. 

Anichtchenko)

2020 Horse Sacrifice and Butchery in Bronze Age 

Mongolia. Journal of Archaeological Science: 

Reports 31. 102313. (by W. Taylor, M. Fantoni, C. 

Marchina, S. Lepetz, J. Bayarsaikhan, J-L. Houle. 

V. Pham, and W. Fitzhugh) 

2020 Early Pastoral Economies and Herding 

Transitions in Eastern Eurasia. Nature Scientific 

Reports, 10:1001. (W. T. T. Taylor, W. Fitzhugh, 

and 28 others) 

2020 Treasures from the Earth: Echoes of the Past. 

In Yua: Spirit of the Arctic. Highlights from the 

Thomas G. Fowler Collection, by Hillary Olcott, 

M. Robb (Ed)., pp. 42–67. San Francisco: De 

Young Fine Arts Museum.

2021 From adaptation to niche construction: 

Weather as a winter site selection factor in 

northern Mongolia, the Quebec Lower North 

Shore, and the southern Urals. Journal of 

Anthropological Archaeology 61: 101258, (by I. 

Chechushkov, I. Valiakhmetov, W. Fitzhugh)

in the 1930s to 1941, Under Polaris: an Arctic Quest 

(1999, University of Washington Press), in which she 

writes: “This book is dedicated to my husband, Link, in 

gratitude for sixty-three marvelous years, including our 

numerous travels in the lands of my childhood dreams; 

and also to all our beloved friends of the North.” 

In this book she wrote his name ‘Link’ throughout. 

Well, whether ‘Linc’ or ‘Link’, it’s all the same, and a 

wonderful man.

[Editor’s note: I too have a Linc-link, in my case, 

through my father’s association with him as a 

Dartmouth ’35 classmate. I met Linc first as a 13-

year old visitor to their Hanover home with my father. 

I reconnected when planning my Labrador research 

and kept in touch with him over the years. One time 

I visited his home after he had moved to Yale and 

found him boning up—with some frustration—on 

new computational methods that were creeping into 

geology. And there’s more. My son Benjamin Fitzhugh 

joined the University of Washington and, like Linc, 

became director of its Quaternary Research Center. 

For more on “Link” see his obituary in Arctic: https://

journalhosting.ucalgary.ca/index.php/arctic/article/

view/63315/47252. This report is adapted from an 

original publication in the Littleton Courier, NH OctDec 2020.]

Resolute, 1990s. Photo from Nuna MacDonald
 ASC Newsletter 83

Contact Information

Arctic Studies Center

Department of Anthropology

Natural History Building, MRC 112

Smithsonian Institution

P.O. Box 37012

10th and Constitution Ave. N.W.

Washington, D.C. 20013-7012

(202) 633-1887 (phone) (202) 357-2684 (fax)

ASC Anchorage Office

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625 C Street Anchorage, AK 99501

(907) 929-9207

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https://naturalhistory.si.edu/research/anthropology/

programs/arctic-studies-center

For ASC publications visit: https://repository.si.edu/

handle/10088/36085/browse

Magnetic North–ASC Blog: http://nmnh.typepad.com/

arctic_studies/

ASC Twitter Account: @arcticstudies

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Arctic-Studies-Center/133066950060693

ASC Anchorage Sharing Knowledge website: http://alaska.

si.edu

Dawn Biddison

(DVD set) Material Traditions: Weaving a Yup’ik 

Issran (Grass-Carrying Bag). Directed, filmed 

and edited by Dawn Biddison. Smithsonian Arctic 

Studies Center, 2020 

Krupnik, Igor and Aron L. Crowell, editors

2020. Arctic Crashes; People and Animals in the 

Changing North. Smithsonian Scholarly Press, 

Washington, D.C.

Crowell, Aron L.

2020 The 1960s–1970s Harbor Seal Crash in 

Alaska: A Historical and Ecological Perspective. 

In Arctic Crashes; People and Animals in the 

Changing North, edited by Igor Krupnik and Aron 

L. Crowell, pp. 317–335. Smithsonian Scholarly 

Press, Washington, D.C.

2020 Living Our Cultures, Sharing Our 

Heritage: An Alaska Native Exhibition as 

Indigenous Knowledge Nexus. Alaska Journal of 

Anthropology 18(1):4–22.

2019 The Ethnoarchaeology of Ambush Hunting: 

A Case Study of ≠Gi Pan, Western Ngamiland, 

Botswana. African Archaeological Review 36:119–

144. doi.org/10.1007/s10437-018-9319-x. (by 

R. Hitchcock, A. L. Crowell, A. S. Brooks, J. E. 

Yellen, and J. I. Ebert)

Krupnik, Igor

Prikladnaia etnologiia Chukotki (Applied 

Ethnology in Chukotka: Indigenous Knowledge, 

Museums, Cultural Heritage. Celebrating 125th

Anniversary of N.L. Gondatti’s 1895 Trip to the 

Chukchi Peninsula). Oksana P. Kolomiets and 

Igor Krupnik, eds. (in Russian). Moscow and 

Anadyr: ‘Heritage of Chukotka’ Museum Center, 

470 pp. 

Studying “Arctic Crashes”: Human–Animal 

Relations in a Time of Rapid Change. In Arctic 

Crashes: People and Animals in the Changing 

North, Igor Krupnik and Aron Crowell, eds., 2020, 

pp.3–21.

Pacific Walrus, People, and Sea Ice: Relations 

at Sub-Population Scale, 1825–2015. In Arctic 

Crashes: People and Animals in the Changing 

North, Igor Krupnik and Aron Crowell, eds., 

2020, pp.351–374.

Uwelellet – Social Organization of the Uelen 

Chukchi Community in the 1920s and 1930s. 

N.I. Vukvukai, V.K. Itevtegina (Vek’et), Igor 

Krupnik. In Applied Ethnology in Chukotka. 

Oksana P. Kolomiets and Igor Krupnik, eds. 

Moscow and Anadyr. pp. 370–401.

Avatmiit: History of the Native Residents of the 

Provideniya Bay Area. In Applied Ethnology 

in Chukotka. Oksana P. Kolomiets and Igor 

Krupnik, eds. Moscow and Anadyr, pp. 299–326.

First Native Residents of Anadyr (according 

to N.L. Gondatti’s census of 1896). In Applied 

Ethnology in Chukotka. Oksana P. Kolomiets 

and Igor Krupnik, eds. Moscow and Anadyr, pp. 

269–280.

Beginning of Applied Ethnology in Chukotka 

(Introduction). In Applied Ethnology in 

Chukotka. Oksana P. Kolomiets and Igor 

Krupnik, eds. Moscow and Anadyr, pp. 11–31.
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G-94

This newsletter was edited by William Fitzhugh, 

Igor Krupnik, Stephen Loring, Aron Crowell, Dawn 

Biddison and Nancy Shorey. 

Designed and produced by

Nancy Shorey, Fiona Steiwer, and Igor Chechushkov