History of the Central Brooks Range: Gaunt Beauty, Tenuous Life
232
History of the Central Brooks Range: Gaunt Beauty, Tenuous Life
232Paperback
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| ISBN-13: | 9781602230095 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | University of Alaska Press |
| Publication date: | 10/15/2007 |
| Pages: | 232 |
| Product dimensions: | 7.10(w) x 10.00(h) x 0.60(d) |
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The History of the Central Brooks Range
Gaunt Beauty, Tenuous LifeBy William E. Brown
University of Alaska Press
Copyright © 2007 University of Alaska PressAll right reserved.
ISBN: 978-1-60223-009-5
Chapter One
Land of Traditional Times
In the central Brooks Range, the Arctic Divide splits descending waters to the Arctic Ocean and the Chukchi Sea or to the Yukon River and Bering Sea. Radiating from the mountain core, the rivers course through canyons and valleys. South of the mountains, boreal forest covers the lowlands and probes the slopes. But toward the mountain crests north winds warp and stunt the last struggling spruce trees. They disappear, replaced by the dwarf plants of the arctic tundra. Trending east to west, the Brooks Range blocks the northern drift of moist Pacific air and marks the transition to arctic deserts dominated by polar air.
The Gates of the Arctic region lies north of the Arctic Circle. Its major draining rivers trace the connections to adjacent regions-west-flowing Kobuk and Noatak, north-flowing tributaries of the Colville, southeast-flowing Chandalar, and south-flowing branches of the Koyukuk. Passes carved by ancient glaciers and eroding rivers allow transit across mountains and through the valleys, where, in summer, lakes of glacial origin reflect crowding peaks and towering clouds.
Each spring, following the natural routes of streams, passes, and portages, herds of caribou migrate north across the mountains from forested wintering grounds in the Kobuk, Koyukuk, and Chandalar drainages. They seek rich upland meadows in the northern foothills of the Brooks Range. There the cows assemble to calve. After calving, the bands concentrate, then disperse to range across the Arctic Slope-even to the coast 200 miles from the mountains. Finally they congregate again in preparation for the fall migration back through the mountains.
For at least 10,000 years, human hunters have seasonally posted themselves in the valleys and passes to intercept migrating caribou. At hundreds of lookout sites, the evidence of their vigils can be found-cores and flakes of stone, finely knapped projectile points and blades. They worked as they watched and waited-hammering, chipping, flaking with bone, antler, and stone-repairing weapons, making spare points, constantly attending to their tool kits. In the variations of form and substance that distinguish these artifacts, a succession of cultures can be inferred. The surface scatter and mixing of artifacts at the typical hilltop lookout station would confound dating and classification were it not for a few stratified sites in neighboring valley and coastal locations. At these fortunate finds, cultural layers reveal the ancient history of this land. A few names of generally accepted cultural traditions give a sense of this progression: American Paleo-Arctic, Northern Archaic, Arctic Small Tool, Northern Maritime, Athapaskan.
The people who made the artifacts and who lived and hunted at the places discovered by archaeologists were, to varying degrees, ancestral to the modern Indians and Eskimos of arctic Alaska. Population movements have been tracked using artifactual evidence-from Asia to Alaska, south to the interior of North America, east to Greenland. But dispersion of people and traits was not simply linear and one way. Five-thousand-year-old tools of the Northern Archaic Tradition, found at caribou hunting sites on the North Slope, could have been borrowed from Indians far to the south. Perhaps the wielders of these tools were Indians, as archaeologist Douglas Anderson suggests, who were attracted "back" to the Arctic by the unusually mild climate of that period.
Gaps and incongruities in the archaeological record hint at mysteries: people with distinct cultural traditions, seemingly unrelated to those who came before and after them-such as the Old Whalers of Cape Krusenstern, who came out of nowhere and disappeared in a few decades. And the cultural dynamism of some periods indicates the explosive force of new technologies and subsistence strategies-for example, the Denbigh people of the Arctic Small Tool tradition, who 4,000 years ago swept from Alaska to Greenland to pioneer the eastern Arctic. Sometimes called Paleo-Eskimos, the Denbigh people harvested caribou in the interior and seals on the coast with their highly adaptable tool kit (Anderson 1981).
During these thousands of years of migrations, cultural exchanges, and climatic and biotic variations, the inhabitants of northern Alaska perfected their myriad adaptations. Eventually they became the Indian and Eskimo peoples encountered by Europeans two centuries ago.
To survive and flourish for millennia, these people adjusted to each variable of the natural environment. They changed their habits and their habitats as necessary. If caribou failed, they hunted sheep or went to the coast for seals. They spread up the rivers and became expert fishermen. From the materials at hand they fashioned the implements they needed. They borrowed and traded ideas, tools, and raw materials with their neighbors. Their tool kits, both mental and material, allowed rapid shift s from one hunting mode to another, from one place to another. Knowledge of an animal, a place, or a technique, once learned, was held in reserve for the time when it would be needed. Always there was an alternative ready, for inflexibility in the spare and unforgiving Arctic meant famine or death.
Nor did these people-so intimate with their homelands-lack spiritual vision. Rooted as their lives and cultures were in the very bedrock of natural forces and powers, they conformed their individual and social practices to the sacred order of the landscape. From observation and meditation they saw both the obvious and the ineffable in the natural order. They created rituals to reveal and propitiate the powers that surrounded and sustained them. Even in the mute evidence of their abandoned tools, the blending of science and artistry illustrates the balance and vigor of their lifeways (Anderson 1981; Burch 1972; Gal and Hall 1982; Lopez 1984; Murie 1935; Williams 1958).
Until the late nineteenth century, the central Brooks Range remained terra incognita to Euro-Americans. Because the country was buffered by hundreds of miles of forest and tundra traversed by unmapped rivers, the Eskimos and Indians of this northern heartland experienced only indirectly the transitory effects of European explorations along Alaska's arctic coast, which began in the late eighteenth century. Location of Russian and British trading posts on the Yukon River in the 1830s and 1840s, followed by Yankee whalers and traders along the arctic coast in the 1850s, abruptly changed Native societies in these accessible regions. Although events on the Yukon and along the coast reverberated in the Brooks Range, a few more decades would pass before the full effects of Euro-American incursions reached inland peoples. Thus through the mid-1800s, the folk of the central mountains and upper rivers maintained their ways of life (Burch 1975a; McFadyen Clark 1974; Oswalt 1979).
Archaeological evidence shows that ancient Indians occupied both faces of the Brooks Range thousands of years ago, and that early Eskimos filtered into the northern part of the range from the coasts, displacing the Indians southward. In time, cultural regionalization produced a pattern in which the Eskimo inhabited the tundra, mountains, and coast while Indians adapted to life in the forests (Kunz 1977).
Ethnohistorical and historical studies describe a shifting boundary that placed Athapaskan Indians on the upper Kobuk and Noatak rivers and on the north face of the mountains in valleys tributary to the Colville River. Then Eskimo expansions forced the Indians east and south. War alternated with trade along these changing cultural boundaries (Kunz 1977).
Both Eskimo and Indian were hunter-gatherers. Oral traditions recorded a time in which all creatures appeared as human beings. Occasionally, some creatures donned animal guises. In such a cosmology, animals had souls, power, and the ability to suffer. Yet the hunter must kill the animal to feed and clothe himself and his family. Thus developed elaborate systems of taboo, intricate ceremonies to assure the animal's gift of itself to the hunter, and forms of courtesy to ease the suffering of and show respect for the taken animal. In this way its power would not turn malevolent, and its soul would come back in the guise of another animal, which in turn could be hunted. Disharmony and disease occurred when humans failed in their ethical duties, for example, by killing too many animals or failing to show proper respect. At such times, in one tradition, plants took pity on the hunters and offered themselves (Vecsey 1980).
Embedded in the rituals and oral history of these lifeways were the knowledge and techniques of survival. Stories contained the science of place, season, and animal behavior. They described techniques of hunting, travel, and cold-weather shelter. Languages geared to infinite descriptive detail conveyed every nuance of dynamic and dangerous environments.
The traditional societies of the central mountains and upper rivers in 1850 included mountain- and tundra-dwelling Eskimos, who ranged across the northern part of the Brooks Range and through the foothills and valleys bordering the Colville River; the forest-dwelling Kobuk River Eskimos; and the groups of Athapaskan Indians living in the upper Koyukuk and Chandalar drainages.
Anthropologists of the 1940s and 1950s identified cultural distinctions between coastal Eskimos (Tareumiut) and inland or riverine Eskimos (Nunamiut). Aside from location, the distinctions were based upon the different lifeways and social arrangements resulting from primary dependence upon marine resources on the one hand and terrestrial or aquatic resources on the other. The Eskimos of the Brooks Range-both traditional and contemporary-are generally called Nunamiut. Ernest S. Burch, Jr., cites a multitude of reasons for dropping these terms as cultural distinctions and group names, maintaining that the Eskimos themselves use the words solely in a spatial sense, i.e., any group farther inland than another group would be Nunamiut, or, going the other way, Tareumiut. Burch makes the further point that the imposed Nunamiut/Tareumiut dichotomy disregards the idea of an inland/coastal continuum, for the Brooks Range Eskimos could move to the coast and hunt sea mammals when caribou failed to support them in the mountains. Conversely, people based on the coast forayed inland to hunt caribou as a regular part of their subsistence strategy and in emergencies when sea mammals were scarce (Burch 1976a).
In this volume, the Eskimos of the northern Brooks Range-Colville River area will be described simply as mountain or inland Eskimos, except when terms coined by the people themselves, e.g., the Ulumiut (People of the Ulu Valley) are more appropriate.
One final caution about cultural perceptions-most visitors from temperate regions have described the homelands of northern Indians and Eskimos as cruel and barren wastelands. The people themselves were seen as enduring stoics, constantly at the margins of survival, socially undeveloped, and too primitive and isolated to know enough to choose a better place and way of life. Students who have lived long enough with these people to share their celebrations of life on the land, to enter at least the foyers of their respective societies, have found a different reality. A burgeoning Native literature in recent decades has made this reality available to all.
The northern world is one of great beauty, at times "nurturing and easy" (Nelson 1983, 33). The very demands of its difficult seasons forged compensatory social systems distinguished by intricate kinship ties, visiting, and seasonal rounds of ceremonies, feasts, games, and dances. Trading fairs and potlatches combined all of these, serving as reunions that brought relatives and friends together from across the length and breadth of the country (Burch 1975a; VanStone 1974).
* * *
For at least several hundred years, the central mountains and upper rivers have been places of shifting cultural frontiers between Indians and Eskimos. The long-term cultural evolution of a given group in a given place cannot be assumed, especially given the acceleration of population movements during the last century of Native contact with Euro-Americans (Hall 1984; see also Burch 1976a; Burch 1981; Kunz 1977).
Despite these qualifications, the ties of memory and material remains do allow an approximate reconstruction of traditional societies, locations, and lifeways in 1850. Though there were territorial surges and retreats by various groups of mountain Eskimos and Athapaskans, the broad pattern of recent centuries indicates a demarcation based on the Brooks Range (Kunz 1977).
The situation is somewhat different on the upper Kobuk. Here, Eskimos adapted to inland/riverine life penetrated the fringe of the forest environment and mingled frequently with Koyukon Indians from the upper Koyukuk. Early visitors recorded a bilingual people in this area who blended Eskimo and Indian lifeways (Foote 1966).
Annette McFadyen Clark, in Koyukuk River Culture (1974), compares the precontact habitats and lifeways of the Koyukuk, Kobuk, and mountain peoples. Her comparative study, with emphasis on the Koyukon Athapaskan Indians, provides a starting point for the discussion that follows. The works of J. L. Giddings (Kobuk River Eskimo, 1961), Nicholas J. Gubser (Nunamiut Eskimo, 1954), and Robert A. McKennan (Chandalar Kutchin, 1965) provide similar depth for their respective subjects. The upper Noatak people are subsumed in the treatment of mountain, or Nunamiut, Eskimos (Giddings 1952, 1961; Gubser 1954; McKennan 1965).
The similar environments of upper Kobuk and upper Koyukuk, as well as the neighboring Chandalar country, contain a mix of swampy, lake-dotted lowlands and meandering, forest-lined rivers that head as swift mountain streams flowing out of constricted canyons and valleys. Rising above all, craggy alpine peaks overlook mountain lakes and valleys carved by the glaciers that dominated these highlands not so long ago. Intricate vegetative mosaics in the lowlands, terraces, and valley slopes reflect such factors as permafrost and soil conditions, wind exposure, and successional stages in the active floodplains and on the burned areas left by summer storms. Tundra prairies cover large expanses of exposed lowland; open muskeg bogs punctuated by stunted black spruce occupy poorly drained areas over shallow permafrost. Larger white spruce and birch grow on well-drained slopes and on natural levees that parallel the rivers. Willows and alders pioneer disturbed areas, both upcountry burns and river bars and beaches, and cottonwoods colonize the more stable stream banks.
Significant fauna in the lowlands and foothills include species such as caribou, moose, brown and black bear, porcupine, beaver, muskrat, and snowshoe hare. The white sheep of the northlands seldom stray from the high mountains, thus forcing extended hunting trips. Predatory fur bearers include wolf, lynx, fox, mink, marten, and otter. Resident ptarmigan and grouse provide variety and emergency food, and migratory ducks and geese arrive just in time to supplement failing winter food supplies.
Despite the fact that this forested upriver country is north of the Arctic Circle, the climatic regime is Interior Alaskan, more subarctic than arctic, except at higher elevations. The Interior climate has short, relatively warm summers and still, cold winters nearly eight months long. Rapid transitions between these two seasons bring breakup of frozen water in May and freezeup in October.
According to Clark, there are three major differences between the upper Kobuk and the upper Koyukuk: (1) the Kobuk has a greater supply of salmon; (2) until recently, the Kobuk had fewer caribou; and (3) the Koyukuk has more moose than the Kobuk, at least since the contact period. As a result of these differences, the Kobuk Eskimo have relied upon salmon fishing supplemented by caribou, while the Koyukuk Indians subsisted upon salmon, moose, and caribou in roughly equal parts. Both groups supplemented their diets with small game and berries (McFadyen Clark 1974; Giddings 1952; McKennan 1965; Nelson 1983).
Except for occasional forays south of the divide to hunt, trade, and gather wood, the Nunamiut, or mountain Eskimos, lived in a treeless environment. They led a highly mobile lifestyle in search of caribou-their main source of food, clothing, and shelter. Sheep, bear, marmot, and ground squirrels, along with migratory birds and lake fish, supplemented the Nunamiut diet, but caribou provided the key to existence for these people. When caribou were unavailable, starving times loomed, and the people scattered to the forest edge south of the divide or went north and west to the coast (McFadyen Clark 1974).
(Continues...)
Excerpted from The History of the Central Brooks Range by William E. Brown Copyright © 2007 by University of Alaska Press. Excerpted by permission.
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Table of Contents
IntroductionChapter1: Land of Traditional Times
Chapter 2: Early Exploration: 1700-1900
Chapter 3: Early Mining and Klondike Overflow
Chapter 4: Far North Camps and Communities, 1900-1930
Chapter 5: The Civilization of the North
Chapter 6: Robert Marshall’s Koyukuk
Chapter 7: Still a Homeland
Chapter 8: Creation of the Park
Epilogue
End Notes
Bibliography
Index