Eskimo traditions melt away with every generation (fwd)

[phil cash cash]

Eskimo traditions melt away with every generation
Marriages were far more complex than just saying, 'I do'

- Sarah Kershaw, New York Times
Sunday, August 29, 2004
http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?file=/c/a/2004/08/29/MNG108F47E1.DTL

Gambell , Alaska -- When it became clear that the elders in this
isolated Eskimo village on St. Lawrence Island in the Bering Sea
approved of the marriage, Clifford Apatiki's relatives did what was
required of them: They bought him his bride.

That meant, according to a fast-fading custom among the Siberian Yupiks,
a small but sturdy native Alaskan tribe that has inhabited this
treeless and brutally windy island since about A.D. 500, that Apatiki's
family would spend at least a year coming up with the payment. They
called on their relatives, here in Gambell, over in Savoonga, the other
Yupik village on this island 38 miles from the Chukchi peninsula in
Russia, and across Alaska, to send them things -- sealskins, rifles,
bread, a toaster -- a house full of gifts.

When the bride's family accepted the offerings, Apatiki, a skilled ivory
carver and polar bear hunter, did what was required of him: He went to
work for her family as a kind of indentured servant for a year, hunting
seal, whale and polar bear, and doing chores around the house.

The marriage between Apatiki, 30, and Jennifer Campbell, 29, a former
bookkeeper for the village tribal council, was formalized five years
ago, when traditional marriages such as theirs were still the norm
here. But now the couple worry whether their children will follow suit
because even in five years this and other centuries-old traditions in
this village of 700 have been slipping away, as one of the most remote
villages on Earth finally contends with the modern world.

"I'm sure people will continue to do it for a while," Jennifer Apatiki
said one evening in the living room of her one-story home in the
village. "If the tradition isn't in effect with some families, they are
whispered about. They will say about a girl, 'She was not bought.' "

Still, it is of great concern to the elders of Gambell that this
marriage tradition is disappearing in the face of whirlwind change here
over the last decade. Life has shifted so much in Gambell, where
satellite television, rising rates of alcoholism and a growing
rejection by the younger generation of the Yupik language and customs
have begun to chip away at tradition and at a hunting-and-gathering
subsistence lifestyle, that it is as if the world here is playing on
videotape stuck on fast-forward.

And fewer couples are getting married in the traditional way, despite
pleas from their parents and grandparents in this hard-working whaling
community. The rising tension between the old ways and the new ones,
between older generations and younger ones, is playing out in native
villages across this state, where 16 percent of the population is
indigenous Alaskan, comprising 11 distinct cultures and speaking 20
different languages. The Internet, much more regular airline travel and
other modern advances are connecting even the most remote Alaskan
villages to mainstream society.

"Gambell, it has changed quite a bit now," said Winfred James, 82, one
of the village's most knowledgeable elders, one recent evening in his
living room, where he was watching a CNN interview of Sen. John Kerry
and his wife. "Westernization is coming in."

James said he and other elders were deeply concerned about losing the
marriage customs, "but it probably will change with the next
generation."

"We try to teach them to do that, you know," he added. "So they can know
each other, so they can stick together."

Village residents say that more and more young couples are simply living
together and not pursuing the traditional marriage customs or that men
are working for the families of their fiancees for much shorter
periods, if at all.

"They work for maybe a month, and then I guess they forget," said
Christopher Koonooka, 26, who teaches at the village school in a
bilingual program. Koonooka said he saw many of his peers rejecting the
old traditions.

The Siberian Yupiks inhabit Gambell and Savoonga, a village of 700
people about 50 miles from here, and parts of the Siberian Chukchi
Peninsula, where about 900 Siberian Yupiks live.

Gambell was named after a Presbyterian missionary, Vene Gambell, who
came to St. Lawrence Island in the late 1800s. He was followed by other
missionaries, whose Western-sounding surnames made their way into the
lineage of the Yupiks.

The first working telephones were installed here in the 1970s, and
television was not readily available until about a decade ago; running
water became available to about half of the homes here about five years
ago. Before satellite television, Gambell residents watched the news at
least two weeks late on videotapes flown in with other supplies from
Nome, the closest city on the Alaska mainland, 200 miles away and
reachable only by small plane.

Almost every house has a satellite dish. The first cellular telephone
tower was built a few years ago, near the one-room trailer that serves
as the police station.

The people here generally welcome much of the technology even as the
village elders and others say television is a particularly disturbing
force.

For example, global positioning systems now provide great assistance to
hunters who might otherwise get terribly lost in the rough Bering Sea,
especially because some of the old knowledge about how to find the
whales, seals and walrus has been lost.

And the Internet has not only allowed greater access to information, but
ivory carvers, who would otherwise have to wait for the occasional
tourist or birder, use it to advertise and sell their wares. (Only the
hardiest birders make the trek out here from Nome, and tourists arrive
only once in a while, on cruise ships that sometimes stop on the shores
of Gambell.)

"Technology has had a big impact, in good ways and bad ways," said
Mattox Metcalf, high school program art coordinator for the Alaska
Native Heritage Center in Anchorage and a Siberian Yupik who was born
in Gambell. "Some of my relatives have said they are competing hard
with what's on TV.

"The younger people are seeing stuff on TV, and they are slowly
realizing that what they do is different from what other people do in
the U.S.," said Metcalf, 24, who travels here frequently to visit
relatives. "And they want to be like them. The older people are trying
to fight for their minds and fight for their attention. It is kind of
at a stalemate right now."

Carol Zane Jolles, an anthropologist at the University of Washington in
Seattle who has studied the people of St. Lawrence Island and recently
published a book about her research, said she had seen radical changes
here, even since she first visited in the late 1980s. Returning in the
last few years, Jolles was struck, she said, by how children were
speaking English first with each other, rather than Siberian Yupik, the
main language of their parents, and that she saw major shifts in the
marriage customs and in family structure.

In a society still structured around clans, the recent construction of
modern houses has shifted the emphasis from the extended family to the
nuclear family, she said.

The newer homes, prefabricated and shipped here, replaced the small
driftwood and walrus hide houses that still stand in the older part of
the village, where dozens of people live and there is no running water.

"Everyone now has access to the way the rest of the world lives," Jolles
said. "They are American citizens and they have the same interests and
values."

She added, "They are watching how other people live on television, the
modern movies, and there is a great impact on young people."

As much as things have changed in Gambell, there are some constants, and
on a recent summer afternoon, life, on the surface anyway, was
unfolding much as it has for hundreds of years.

Split walrus skins, used to cover and waterproof the sea hunting boats,
were stretched across wooden planks, drying under the sun. Some of the
women were picking greens up on the mountain, preparing to soak them in
tall buckets of mountain spring water and store them for the winter. In
the winter, the rocky mountain is bare, except for gravestones and
above-ground coffins in the village cemetery and piles of snow. There
are greens and berries to be harvested here in the summer, and sea
fruits wash up on the beach in the fall, but no fruits or vegetables
can be found in the winter.

Other women were picking through the cache of meat carved from a 40-foot
bowhead whale caught last April, contemplating dinner. The meat is kept
in hand-made freezers dug out in the still frosty tundra, on a foggy
landscape scattered with giant whalebones, prized trophies laid across
the black gravel. Later that night, the women sliced up the whale
blubber and served it on a large tray, along with bits of smoked seal
and walrus flippers, a delicacy, at a party for a couple celebrating
their 17th wedding anniversary.

The men, meanwhile, including Kenneth James, 24, the grandson of Winfred
James and an up-and-coming hunter of whales, walrus and reindeer, were
checking their nets for salmon and trout, zooming back and forth
between their one-story wooden houses and the beach on all-terrain
vehicles that, in the summer, replace snowmobiles as the only mode of
transportation in this roadless village. Others were buffing and
polishing their intricate walrus ivory carvings.

Kenneth James, perhaps one of the last to abide by the marriage
tradition, will soon begin working for his girlfriend's family, once
his grandfather gathers an acceptable amount of goods for them.

He was stoic about his duty.

"I will be going to work soon," James said late one evening, as the sun,
which does not set here in the summer until 2 a.m., was still lighting
up the village.

He was eager to hop on his all-terrain vehicle and check his salmon
nets.

"It's what I will do," he said.

This evidence that some young people are still keeping the marriage
tradition makes many elders happy.

Perhaps the Gambell resident most concerned about what the village is
facing these days is Edmond Apassingok, 41, president of the Indian
Reorganization Act Council, which, along with the Gambell City Council,
governs the village.

Apassingok, a whale hunter who caught a 50-foot whale last January (the
meat is shared among all the residents and catching a whale is cause
for a huge, emotional celebration) is deeply concerned about the rising
temperatures in Alaska, he said. The annual mean temperature has risen
in Alaska 5.4 degrees over the last 30 years, and the climate change
has shortened the season for whale hunting because the ice that
provides the right conditions for whales has begun to melt earlier in
the spring.

But Apassingok has other worries, as well.

"Every generation is losing something," he said.