Yupik Transitions: Change and Survival at Bering Strait, 1900-1960
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Yupik Transitions: Change and Survival at Bering Strait, 1900-1960
400Hardcover
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Product Details
| ISBN-13: | 9781602232167 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | University of Alaska Press |
| Publication date: | 11/15/2013 |
| Pages: | 400 |
| Product dimensions: | 7.30(w) x 10.00(h) x 1.40(d) |
About the Author
Michael Chlenov is professor at the Maimonides State Jewish Academy of Sciences in Moscow.
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Yupik Transitions
Change and Survival at Bering Strait, 1900—1960
By Igor Krupnik, Michael Chlenov
University of Alaska Press
Copyright © 2013 University of Alaska PressAll rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-1-60223-216-7
CHAPTER 1
Contact-Traditional Society, 1900–1923
An anthropologist anxious to portray a way of life that no longer exists becomes a historian by default. The historian's prime tools include written records, like early publications and documents, and also photographs and other objects stored in libraries, archives, and museums. These records have histories of their own, and their creation and subsequent reading is the product of time, ideology, and motivation of their collectors and interpreters. Thus, they reflect primarily the outsiders' vision.
Often historical records do not match, and the resulting picture resembles a grainy patchwork. It requires other sources to enhance its resolution and produce a more detailed and compelling narrative. One could tap this other body of knowledge via different means—in personal narratives, storytelling, memoirs, and biographies. Unlike written records, these oral forms of knowledge are remarkably fragile. Unless put on paper or preserved on tape or, today, on videotape, they remain fluid and unsecured. People's stories change, memories falter, and valuable information is often lost as well-informed narrators pass away.
Anthropologists also generate records of their own, such as genealogies, interview transcripts, kinship charts, maps with old place names, and the like. They become anthropologists' toolkits to construe a system that we cannot observe and to describe the relationships among people who are long gone. In our work among the Yupik, we relied upon all of these sources. We surveyed the archives, libraries, and museum collections, and interviewed dozens of Yupik elders born around 1900–1920. We then converted their narratives into genealogies, maps, charts, and lists. We learned quickly that our sources conveyed not one but several versions of a multifaceted virtual world. This chapter introduces one slice of that world, namely, the outsiders' vision of the Yupik land and its people drawn from the written records of the late 1800s and early 1900s.
"Old Society": The Official Myth
In early 1921, the chairman of the Kamchatka Province Revolutionary Committee, Ivan Larin, in advocating for the creation of a new Soviet administration on the Chukchi Peninsula, wrote the following: "its population [that of the Chukchi district] is comprised exclusively of half-savage aliens, who without proper supervision by the government are mercilessly exploited by Russian and American traders" (Borba za vlast' Sovetov 1967, 93).
That image of "half-savage aliens" was a pillar of the formerly color-blind vision of the old life of the Yupik and other indigenous people of Chukotka. It was for decades expounded upon in hundreds of Russian historical essays, including solid academic publications. In its canonical version, it contained but a few iconic elements: backwardness, illiteracy, and exploitation. It was the benevolent changes brought by the Communist Revolution of 1917 that saved the Native people of the Russian Arctic, illiterate, backward, and exploited, from imminent extinction. A quotation from an eminent Russian anthropologist illustrates a typical writing of the era:
The Great Socialist Revolution of 1917 led to a brilliant flourishing of national culture among all the peoples of the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics.... Before October [the Revolution], what were known as the "small" and culturally backward peoples, especially those of the Siberian Far North, were illiterate one and all. They had no written language, no schools, and no hospitals. Backwardness and poverty, lack of cultural sophistication, and ignorance had wound a solid nest among them (Zelenin 1938, 16).
For the Yupik (Asiatic Eskimo) people, the subjects of our book, the situation was in no way different:
Earlier the (Asiatic) Eskimos, one of the minority peoples of the North, had no literacy, and did not have a written language. They were brutally oppressed by the umiileks [big bosses], the masters of the land, the shamans, and Russian uriadniks [police officers], who took from the population valuable furs in the form of yasaks [pelts], and Russian and American merchants ... the people was dying out. Terrible epidemics raged, claiming the lives of hundreds, but there were no doctors and no one to treat the ailing.... Only the Great October Socialist Revolution gave the Eskimos the chance to build their culture, national in form and socialist in content (Menovshchikov 1977, 14–15).
Another source described the plight of the neighboring Chukchi people in almost the same words:
Previous to the victory of the Great October [Revolution of 1917], the Chukchi were most backward and unfortunate.... Their work implements were primitive, not always making it possible to catch animals in quantity adequate for subsistence. Inhabiting vast expanses of tundra, they were at a primordial stage. Ruthlessly robbed and persecuted by Tsarist government officials, suffering from the excesses of merchants, usurers, and foreign, mostly American, hunter-trappers, the Chukchi were doomed to degenerate and die out ... the victory of the Great October created all the conditions for the rapid development of the Chukchi (Krushanov 1987, 4–5).
Contact-Traditional Society
The image of the Russian Yupik around 1900 as "primitive bands of half-savage aliens" was nothing but a myth, an ideologically skewed legend propelled by the stream of motivated sources. Perhaps the most compelling proof to the contrary came from the old garbage heaps that we examined at the abandoned Yupik sites from the same era. They contained a little of everything: shards of porcelain dishes, ruined American gramophones with broken records, remains of sewing machines, broken Winchester rifles, cartridge cases, bottles, American tobacco boxes, and a wide range of jars that once held various imported food, from biscuits to olive oil. All of these objects came from the markets in San Francisco, Seattle, Anadyr, and Nome; they were part of village deposits mixed together with rotten walrus hides, seal bones, broken wood, iron harpoon points, pieces of clay oil lamps, stone scrapers for working skins, and other Native artifacts of everyday use.
Viewed through the lenses of its garbage pits and early photographs, the Yupik society was a community in transition. Apparently, the agents of the outside world had invaded its life swiftly and inundated it with a profusion of new goods and materials (Figs. 1.1, 1.2). Elements of the old lifestyle became oddly interspersed with new forms, material and ideological, introduced by the larger world. In this respect, the Yupik people of Russia experienced the same (or similar) sociocultural transitions as befell their Inuit kinsmen in Alaska, in the Canadian Arctic, and in Greenland.
Numerous earlier studies have examined the transformation of Arctic peoples' life brought about by the American, Anglo-Canadian, and Danish colonial powers. For this reason we are not likely to impress the reader with another story about the incursion of the outside world and its many agents—explorers, whalers, missionaries, and traders—into yet another indigenous group in the Arctic. Our specific purpose is to assess how an aboriginal society fared and how its social system evolved in collision with a particular ideology of contacts: Russian and, later, Soviet.
The Chukchi Peninsula, formerly a part of the Russian empire, indeed offers a different story compared to the American side of the Bering Strait, Arctic Canada, or Greenland. Up until the year 1900, the area populated by the Russian Yupik had no permanent European settlements with colonial administrators, military, police, or trade posts, and no whaling shore stations with sailors hired from around the world. Nor did Christian missionaries, with the ideology of active transformation, have any visible presence on the Russian side of Bering Strait up to that time. One may reasonably assume that under this very peculiar Russian rule the Yupik (Asiatic Eskimo) were able to maintain their internal order and way of life albeit under some altered form (Figs. 1.3, 1.4).
Of course, by 1900 no Yupik community remained untouched by contacts—which justifies calling these communities "contact-traditional." The term was first introduced almost fifty years ago (Helm and Damas 1963) and not all of its original criteria apply to the Russian Yupik. In this book, we apply the following criteria to term an aboriginal community as contact-traditional. Such a community had accumulated extensive experience of contacts with the outside world (Figs. 1.5, 1.6); remained attached to its traditional land; had direct and continuous access to outside artifacts and goods via trade or exchange; and did not have Europeans living among or next to its local people on a long-term basis (cf. Damas 1988, 106–111). In the latter case, a critical milestone is not the presence of resident outsiders, such as individual teachers, missionaries, or traders (the latter often married to local women and raising mixed families), but rather the appearance of stable social units, like small groups or families of newcomers, living according to the standards of their own.
From this point of view, the period around 1900 and the two decades that followed was still a time when the Yupik way of life and the influences brought by contact remained relatively balanced. As before, hunting for whales, walrus, and seals remained the staple of the Yupik economy and supplied the basic food to the people. The old system of settlement based on many historical villages was intact, albeit in an altered form. Many elements of material and spiritual culture inherited from the old days were in place: clothing and dwellings, personal decoration, native language, lore, rituals, and religion. Excerpts from elders' narratives, as well as numerous historical photographs known from the era and used in this book, confirm such a vision.
As we argue, many institutions that people created themselves continued to regulate the social order that governed Yupik life, albeit in forms often modified by contact. Accordingly, the contact-traditional social system remained the main mechanism ensuring people's response to the changing conditions. Concerted efforts to integrate the Yupik and other indigenous people of the Chukchi Peninsula into the Russian and, later, Soviet administrative and economic system became the basic thrust of government policy in the 20th century. The complete collapse of the previous aboriginal social life, both Yupik (Asiatic Eskimo) and Chukchi, and the creation in its place of a new social order were the main outcomes of this transition. In the following chapters, we are to document the functioning and the demise of the contact-traditional Yupik society in full detail.
Agents of Change: Commercial Whaling
By the early 1900s, the Yupik people had already lived side by side with commercial whaling and whalers for fifty years; they had also endured the impact of Russian military and colonial expansion for almost 200 years (chapter 7). In the early 1800s, Yankee whaling ships from New England, seeking new hunting areas, had moved into the northern part of the Pacific Ocean. In 1845, they appeared in the northern Bering Sea, and in 1848, the American whaler Superior passed via the Bering Strait into the Arctic Ocean (Bockstoce 1984; 1986; 2006; 2009). In the same year, HMS Plover, a British naval vessel, wintered in Provideniya Bay, in the heart of the Yupik land (Hooper 1976 [1853]; chapter 7). It marked the first prolonged encounter of the Yupik with the Western world system represented by a British Navy crew. Over the next decades, dozens of American ships whaled off the Chukchi Peninsula, while periodically putting in on its shores.
The arrival of American whalers radically changed the previous system of contacts between the Yupik and the outside world. Until the mid-1800s, the Chukchi Peninsula was the most distant and forgotten fringe of the Russian empire, literally the "end of the world." Russia had abandoned its earlier efforts in the 1700s to annex this area after a series of unsuccessful military campaigns against the local people, particularly the warlike "reindeer" Chukchi (Bogoras 1975; Nefyodkin 2003; Vdovin 1965; chapter 7). For more than a hundred years, between 1770 and 1876, the physical presence of the Russian state in the Yupik land was limited to rare visits of small teams of Russian paramilitary servicemen (Cossacks) and a handful of naval expeditions of discovery. The first came by sleds in wintertime; the latter arrived in Navy ships in summer. Both stayed for a few weeks, even days, and had but a cursory interaction with the locals. Russian settlements in the Kolyma River valley and the seasonal Aniuy Fair on the Omolon River some 1,500 kilometers (900 miles) west of Bering Strait remained the sole Russian outposts in this part of Northeast Siberia.
Nonetheless, Russian goods—tobacco, beads, briquette tea, side arms, metal dishes—became a part of Yupik daily culture in the 1700s. They circulated via local exchange networks over the Chukchi Peninsula and even farther east to Alaska. The flow of goods led to the formation of an intercontinental trade network across the Bering Strait and Native people were fully in control of this network on both of its sides (Bockstoce 2009; Bogoras 1975; Burch 2005; Hunt 1975; Vdovin 1965). This all-Native trade functioned without Russian involvement, except for the supply of Russian goods at its starting points.
After the arrival of the American whalers in 1850, the physical presence of outsiders became a constant factor of Yupik life. Between 1849 and 1870, some fifty to eighty whaling ships with many hundred sailors passed annually via Bering Strait into the Arctic Ocean (Bockstoce 1986; Bockstoce and Botkin 1983). This concentrated influx of foreigners and interactions with them rather quickly led to noticeable changes. As early as 1856, sailors from the USS Vincennes surveying the Yupik area to the north of Cape Chaplin noted that the language of the locals contained words of pidgin English that the Natives used to converse with the outsiders (Heine 1859). The interactions were not limited to linguistic borrowing. New goods appeared in Yupik villages: rum, American chewing tobacco, rifles, ammunition, and metal articles. Whalers exchanged these for the furs, walrus ivory, and baleen that became the chief trade commodities (Bockstoce 1986; 2009).
American whaling vessels usually set forth to their Arctic hunting grounds in early spring, starting from Hawaii or from San Francisco (Bockstoce 1986; 2009). By the beginning of May, they would be touching the Asian shore at Cape Chaplin, the first ice-free point on the Chukchi Peninsula. Here they traded, exchanging imported goods, and hired local hunters, often taking them along into the Arctic Ocean for the summer whaling season (Bockstoce 1986; Hunt 1975; Vdovin 1965). Some of them were to return months, even years later, and their paths could take them through Nome, Seattle, San Francisco, and occasionally even more distant lands.
Initially the main centers of interactions with the whalers were secure anchorage sites at the two largest bays on the Chukchi Peninsula, Plover Bay at the entrance to the large fjord of Provideniya Bay, and Lavrentiya Bay. Soon, the whalers shifted toward the large Native villages on the open shore, especially the Yupik communities of Ungaziq on Cape Chaplin and Nuvuqaq (Naukan) on Cape Dezhnev and the nearby Chukchi community of Uelen.
Contacts, exchange, and new trade goods were but a fraction of the changes introduced by the arrival of whalers. Less visible, though a more lasting outcome, was the overhunting of marine mammal stocks in the northern Bering Sea and the adjacent sections of the Arctic Ocean. Between 1849 and 1900, the total estimated commercial catch was over 16,000 bowhead whales and almost 150,000 walrus (Bockstoce and Botkin 1982; 1983). The removal of so many animals upon which the Yupik and other Native people depended was devastating. Famine, population losses, and the abandonment of many indigenous communities soon followed (Bockstoce 1986; chapter 2).
(Continues...)
Excerpted from Yupik Transitions by Igor Krupnik, Michael Chlenov. Copyright © 2013 University of Alaska Press. Excerpted by permission of University of Alaska Press.
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Table of Contents
1. Contact-Traditional Society, 1900-19232. The “Olden Times,” 1850-1900
3. The Yupik Social System: A Model
4. Along the Shores of Yupik Land in Asia
5. Community Affairs
6. Family and Kinship
7. “Upstreaming”: Lifetime of the Yupik Social System
8. The New Life Begins, 1923-1933
9. Collective Farm Era, 1933-1955
10. The End of “Eskimo Land,” 1955-1960
Epilogue
Appendices
Glossary
References
Index