3 Wandering in Place A Close Examination of Two Names at Nunivak Island

Nunivak Island is the second largest island in the Bering Sea, after St. Lawrence Island. Today it is home to a relatively stable population of about two hundred individuals, all of whom reside in the island’s sole village of Mekoryuk (Mikuryarmiut). Spanning 60° north latitude, the island is approximately equidistant, south to north, between the western tip of the Alaska Peninsula and the Bering Strait. It lies to the west of Nelson Island, which is, for all practical purposes, part of the mainland. Nunivak is volcanic in origin and, along with the central uplands of Nelson Island, stands in sharp contrast to the vast semi-saturated lowlands and riverine environs of the adjacent Yukon-Kuskokwim Delta. The island’s “geographic advantages” (Lantis 1984, 209) and rich terrestrial and marine environment provide an ideal setting for a thriving northern culture (Pratt 2009a, 146; USBIA 1995, 1:3–8; VanStone 1989, 2). Archaeologists believe that the island has been inhabited for at least 2,500 years (Griffin 2004, 33; Pratt 2009a, 105–108; VanStone 1989, 1; USBIA 1995, 1:87–89, Table 1:3). The population is thought to have been considerably larger in precontact and historical times than it is today (Pratt 1997; 2009a, 126–132), as evidenced by the many documented village and camp sites situated in all parts of the island, most now abandoned but some still in use seasonally (Drozda 1994; Hammerich 1954, 420; Lantis 1946, 162–163; 1984, 212–213; Pratt 2001, 41; 2009a, 126, 129, 154–182; USBIA 1995, 1:22).

The isolation and inaccessibility frequently associated with Nunivak is a perception based largely on the fact that, until about 1946, when regular air service began to operate, the island was physically cut off from the mainland for much of the year by the lack of solid ice formation in the Etolin Strait (Akularer) (Drozda 2010, 6; Griffin 2004, 29, 116; Lantis 1984, 209; Pratt 2009a, 214, 252; USBIA 1995, 1:6; VanStone 1989, 2, 42). The island is certainly remote, but not in the sense of its distance from the mainland, especially in comparison to other Bering Sea islands, such as St. Lawrence, St. Matthew, the Pribilofs, and much of the Aleutian chain. The Etolin Strait and the seaward (north, south, and west) margins of the island were purposely avoided by nineteenth- and early twentieth-century explorers and passing whaling ships (Griffin 2004, 82–86; Hammerich 1954, 404; Jarvis 1900, 34; Lantis 1984, 209; VanStone 1973, 33), but Indigenous travellers with their kayaks and umiaks were less deterred by hazards affecting larger ships (Hammerich 1954, 420) (Figure 3.3).

The exceptional stability and seaworthiness of the Nunivak kayak is well documented. VanStone (1989, 15, 41) noted that the Nunivak kayaks were the largest in southwest Alaska and their makers possessed such skills “that their boats could easily be sold or traded to mainland Eskimos.” Lantis (1946, 170) reported that in 1940 Nuniwarmiut still made summer trading trips by umiak to the Kuskokwim, although similar trips to the Yukon River had evidently stopped about twenty years earlier. She noted that a crew of four or five men “cooperated in manning the boat,” which “had no oarlocks or else rope oarlocks, had a rectangular sail made of matting or strips of walrus gut sewed together, and a paddle for a rudder.” Hammerich (1954, 420) observed in the early 1950s Nuniwarmiut were still making regular summer trips up the Kuskokwim, remarking that “it is a much greater risk to cross the twenty-two miles [35.4 km] of Etolin Strait in a modern motor-boat than it was in an old-fashioned skin-boat.”

Travel to and from the island was not easy, but obstacles to travel that are frequently cited as having insulated the Nuniwarmiut from outside contact might also have led to prolonged interactions with “strangers.” Early Indigenous travellers in search of resources or trade, others escaping overcrowding or warfare or simply exploring “new” territory, and/or those who had drifted and arrived by accident may have “discovered” Nunivak. Finding favorable living conditions, they might choose to stay or become marooned for extended periods of time. These possibilities, coupled with its central location on Alaska’s west coast, would allow a dynamic amalgam of Bering Sea languages and dialects to develop at a linguistic “crossroads” of sorts (Pratt 2001, 42). Such a view contrasts to portrayals of Nunivak as an isolated backwater and the minimizing of its language as “just a subdivision of Central [Alaskan] Yupik” (Krauss 1986, 3).

The Cup’ig language has, at least since the early 1970s, been presented primarily as a single uniform dialect, while subdialects have received little or no attention at all. As such, it is described either as a remnant of an earlier Eskimo language or dialect chain, or as an aberrant form of Central Alaskan Yup’ik that diverged from the language spoken on the mainland as a result of Nunivak’s geographic isolation (Hensel et al. n.d., i; Jacobson 1984, 627–628; Krauss 1973, 822; Lantis 1984, 209–210; VanStone 1989, 42). Expanding on these views, Anthony Woodbury (2001) added,

[Cup’ig] probably represents the endpoint of a relatively longer period of independent development [relative to mainland Yup’ik dialects]. It also may represent a relic of earlier linguistic diversity in southwestern Alaska which may have disappeared when Yup’ik spread over the large region that it now occupies. Thus, to preserve Cup’ig is to preserve a very ancient and unique piece of linguistic and cultural heritage.²

Dialect mixing naturally occurred on the mainland among Yup’ik speakers (see, for example, Miyaoka 1985, 62n12). But among the Nuniwarmiut the land also supported numerous local groups, each occupying a specific watershed-based area (see Pratt 2009a, 220–228; USBIA 1995). Some western Nunivak settlements were in fact quite isolated and the speech of their residents could have developed quite differently than that typically described as a homogeneous dialect of the Yup’ik language.

Published remarks regarding historic travel and prehistoric migration of Bering Sea peoples to and from Nunivak largely refer only to the region in which Central Alaskan Yup’ik is now spoken—an area stretching from Norton Sound, in the north, all the way south to Bristol Bay, including inland along the major rivers, as shown in figure 3.2 (Griffin 2001, 78; 2004, 71–74; Jacobson 1998, xv–xix; Lantis 1946, 164; Pratt 2009a, 252–256). Margaret Lantis (1946, 170), who conducted field research on the island in 1939–1940, noted that ”mainlanders rarely came to the island to trade.” However, she also reported that the oldest man on the island, whose memories stretched back as far as the 1860s, recalled that, in his youth, many men came to southern Nunivak from the Kuskokwim River area for purposes of trade. “They stayed a while and went back,” he said. “They came often, by kayak” (quoted in Lantis 1960, 5).

Other reported travels to Nunivak were associated with late nineteenth-century caribou hunting. These visits mostly involved Yup’ik-speaking groups living in adjacent coastal areas on the mainland, and largely Inupiaq-speaking groups from the southern Seward Peninsula (Pratt 2001, 37; VanStone 1989, 10). Of the period from 1890 to 1940, Lantis wrote, “The details of Nunivak life have been changed . . . more by contact with Eskimos from the Norton Sound region than by direct contact with [non-Indigenous] outsiders” (Lantis 1946, 161).

Few published accounts exist of travel to or from Nunivak involving areas beyond those just mentioned. Presumably referring to unrecorded comments he had heard from St. Lawrence Island elders, Willem de Reuse (1994, 298–299) wrote, “It is said on SLI that there have been contacts with Nunivak.” Louis Hammerich (1954, 420) had earlier reported that “Nunivakers have tales of crews, surprised by the breaking of ice in the spring, drifting as far as St. Lawrence Island or Asia, and coming back in the fall—at least some of them.” Hammerich (1954, 420) also noted a relatively large number of Russian loan words at Nunivak (recorded in 1950 and 1953). It seems likely that these borrowings reflect interactions between residents of the island and speakers of Yupik (from St. Lawrence Island), Inupiaq (from the Seward Peninsula and the northern Norton Sound area), or Sugpiaq (from the Alaska Peninsula), all of whom would have had more frequent contact with Russians than did the Nuniwarmiut. But Hammerich did not dismiss the possibility that some words were adopted via direct relations with Russian speakers.³ Interestingly, writing in 1950, Frank Waskey—a prospector and businessman from Minnesota who spent considerable time in western Alaska and whose Yup’ik was described by a fluent speaker of the language as “fairly competent” (Pratt 2012, 38)—noted, “Among the Yut [Yup’ik], the one people whose vocabulary includes distinctively St. Lawrence Island words are the Nunivaks” (Waskey [1950] 2012, 48).

In the nearly two hundred years since the Russian explorers A. K. Etolin and V. S. Khromchenko first recorded Cup’ig words at Nunivak Island (Jacobson 2012, 943; VanStone 1973, 72–75), the language has undergone much change. The first dedicated linguistic analysis, that of Hammerich, occurred after 1950 (Krauss 1986, 5, 13; Woodbury 1981, 14), at a time when major cultural changes had been taking place on the island for several decades, brought about by the arrival of Western education, Christian missionaries, commercial activities, and government institutions (Griffin 2004, 107–132; Pratt 2009a, 227–228; USBIA 1995, 1:16–17). These outside forces resulted in the consolidation of the island’s population from thirty or more villages in the late nineteenth century (figure 3.4) to just two by about 1950 and to a single village, Mekoryuk, by 1960 (see Pratt 2009a, 156–182, for a description of the original villages). In addition to the widespread adoption of English, this process of centralization led to a loss of linguistic variety. Given that dialectic differences can develop over relatively short distances, it is quite possible that residents of each of the earlier villages spoke their own subdialect of Cup’ig.⁴ At the very least, there were surely subdialects corresponding to clusters of villages or groups associated with specific geographic areas.

Although modern linguistic descriptions of Cup’ig—or NUN, as the Nunivak language is often abbreviated—portray it as the most divergent of Central Alaskan Yup’ik (CAY) dialects, perceptions of the scope of mutual intelligibility of the NUN and CAY dialects has varied significantly over the past decades. Hammerich (1970, 6; see also Hamp 1976) initially pronounced the Nunivak dialect and mainland Yup’ik dialects to be “mutually incomprehensible.” Since then, assessments of mutual intelligibility have ranged from “easy” (Krauss 1980, 102) to “generally mutually intelligible, though not always easily” (Jacobson 2003, vii–viii). Yet credible statements from others, including vigorous and unambiguous assertions from elders on the mainland whose first language is Yup’ik (specifically, the Yukon River dialect), contradict claims of cross-region mutual intelligibility (Polty et al. 1982; see also Pratt 2009a, 132–137).

Nearly thirty years elapsed between Hammerich’s work on the Nunivak language, in the early 1950s, and the early work of Steven Jacobson, of the Alaska Native Language Center (ANLC) (see Jacobson 1979a, b). Considering the rapid disintegration of Cup’ig that was occurring during the period, they were probably describing two considerably different language scenarios.

In 1984, the ANLC published Jacobson’s Yup’ik Eskimo Dictionary (YED). It was a groundbreaking work, the first of its kind for an Alaska Native language. In the YED, Jacobson summarized the main Yup’ik dialects, including NUN, and subsequently speculated that “two or more subdialects” existed on Nunivak Island (Jacobson 1985, 38n18). However, to achieve a goal of a unified writing system for the Yup’ik language region, specific and cumbersome rules for spelling and pronunciation were necessary for Nunivak forms included in the dictionary (Jacobson 1984, 37; 2012, 44). These rules, it would turn out, were unworkable for the Nuniwarmiut.

The most recent period of Nunivak linguistic research, which began in the mid-1980s, has been characterized by increased local interest in language preservation and documentation by the Nuniwarmiut themselves. From 1986 to 1991, under the auspices of the Alaska Native Claims Settlement Act (ANCSA) program of the US Bureau of Indian Affairs, major fieldwork was undertaken on Nunivak Island, with a view to documenting historical places and cemetery sites (see Pratt 2009b, 2–43; USBIA 1995). The BIA research generated an enormous body of historical, archaeological, and linguistic data. The linguistic material, which includes over 175 tape recordings of interviews conducted primarily with monolingual (or limited bilingual) Nunivak elders, ultimately led to the identification of at least one remaining subdialect of Cup’ig, which I call “western Nunivak.”

In 1986, the BIA contracted with Yup’ik language experts at the ANLC to produce full bilingual transcripts of ANCSA project tapes (Pratt 2009b, 42), including those from Nunivak. Irene Reed coordinated the effort for ANLC and began working with the Nunivak recordings later the same year. The recordings are not strictly narratives or monologues but also preserve dialogues, including cross-generational discussions. In this sense, as common discourse, their linguistic value is increased. The Nunivak recordings are, however, sometimes fragmented and difficult to follow, and they proved difficult for Reed and her staff, most of whom had little or no previous experience working with the Cup’ig language. The largest challenge was presented in the recordings of Andrew Noatak (pictured in the image at the opening of this chapter), one of the last fluent speakers of the Western Nunivak dialect (Drozda 2007, 102–105; see also Jacobson 2006 and Woodbury 1999).

To illustrate, the Noatak translations and transcriptions prepared by ANLC staff frequently credit a cadre of Yup’ik (and sometimes Cup’ig) collaborators working together on individual recordings. Despite this group effort, these works contain blank lines for words and phrases that were beyond even their combined knowledge and abilities. Transcribers sometimes added notes in the text to acknowledge the challenges they encountered, such as, “The translation of the previous paragraph and many other parts of this piece of narration is guess work” (Noatak 1986a, 36).

Other notes made by Reed, concerning somewhat less problematic Nunivak recordings, provide valuable information about particular narrators and their speaking style. For instance, she informed future readers that elders Kay Hendrickson (b. 1909) and his wife, Mattie (b. 1926), had been living in Bethel for some years and often spoke “using mainland pronunciation styles” (Hendrickson and Hendrickson 1986). Another elder, Jack Williams Sr., it was noted, commonly used Yup’ik endings on Cup’ig words, including place names, when he spoke in English (Williams 1986a). Reed’s comments provide a window into how the language of Cup’ig speakers varied in the 1980s and the ways in which speech was affected under different circumstances (see Fienup-Riordan 2000, 190; Hammerich 1952, 113; Hensel et al. n.d., i).

The Nunivak tapes exposed ANLC linguists and others to some of the limitations of previous work with the language (see Fienup-Riordan 2000, 190n176). Jacobson’s Nunivak research was secondary to that concerning the most widely spoken dialect, General Central Yup’ik; he later acknowledged that limitation (Jacobson 2006, 137). His Nunivak work did not involve elder speakers of the language and relied exclusively on a younger person living in the mainland community of Bethel. In 1990, he replied to a detailed inquiry from a linguistics graduate student who had expressed an interest in Nunivak: “I must confess that all my [Nunivak] research was based on one person, and I suspect that I didn’t get a very complete picture of everything that is going on in that amazing dialect” (Jacobson 1990b). Interestingly, in the same letter, he refers to a large (but unspecified) number of reel-to-reel tape recordings that Hammerich made while at Nunivak—tapes that have unfortunately been lost.

At about the same time (late 1980s), leaders and educators in the village of Mekoryuk began efforts to preserve and revitalize their Native language. In addition to Howard Amos and Muriel Amos, active in these efforts were Dorothy Kiokun, Ike Kiokun, Prudy Olrun, and Marianne Williams, no doubt along with others unknown to me. Eventually, with much effort, they convinced Lower Kuskokwim School District administrators in Bethel (headquartered 250 kilometres away) of the need for educational materials printed in the Cup’ig language (see Jacobson 2003, vii–viii; Nuniwarmiut Piciryarata Tamaryalkuti 2001). Previously, Native language educators at the Nuniwarmiut School spent countless hours modifying the district’s Yup’ik materials. For example, they changed orthography, vocabulary and translations to reflect the Cup’ig language; physically pasting these revisions over the existing Yup’ik texts.

This period also saw a major accomplishment with the publication by the ANLC of the Cup’ig Eskimo Dictionary [CED] (Amos and Amos 2003). The CED increased manifold the documentation of the lexicon of Nunivak language, which has “many words found nowhere else in Eskimo [languages]” (Jacobson 2012, 42). Still, the CED is a preliminary work. Much of the BIA material remains unexamined and, without accurate transcription and translation, largely inaccessible. These materials certainly include previously undocumented lexical items and could provide further insight into the structure and history of the Nunivak language and its dialects.

The corpus of documented Nunivak Island place names is relatively large, numbering about a thousand (Drozda 1994; Pratt 2009a, 154–156), yet few of them are included in either the CED or the YED.⁵ The names and associated narratives comprise a large geographical vocabulary, reflecting in part a relatively stable and ancient subset of the language. Treating the names as such and studying their components comparatively with those of other Bering Sea regions might provide further insight into past relationships between the various regional languages and groups.

By definition toponyms are rooted in landscape, as such they may be thought of as relatively stable or more persistent than other aspects of language (Hammerich 1952, 113; Schreyer 2005). But also, several Nunivak examples—including those on which the chapter focuses—reveal evolving names and/or meanings over time. The malleability is partly explained by dynamics such as language shift, dialect, memory, folk etymology, and changing land use patterns. Loss of names, their meanings, and the dilution of traditional knowledge associated with them are accelerated in contemporary times not only by the passing of elder culture bearers, but also by changing land use patterns and, in the case of Nunivak, by the endangered status of the language.

The intensive documentation of Nunivak Island place names relied primarily on elders of two generations, born between 1900 and the early 1920s. Some members of the older group were occasionally critical of the younger generations and spoke directly about the erosion of traditional knowledge. In some cases, same-generation elders also criticized one another for reasons that might reflect village social tensions rather than any lack of specific knowledge. In any case, place names elicited and re-elicited by researchers from multiple elders were overwhelmingly consistent, while place-based narratives (memories of place) showed more variation. Place names can serve as mnemonic devices (Drozda 1994, ix), but their capacity to summon to mind complex life events and learned stories requires an acute memory that often fades with time.

The remainder of this chapter focuses on two principal but geographically separate Nunivak Island place names, Asweryag and Asweryagmiut.⁶ Linguists may recognize their common base aswer- as a cognate of the word for “walrus” in other Eskimo languages, but in Cup’ig determining the correct gloss is not as straightforward. Apart from the two place names, aswer is not part of the modern Cup’ig lexicon. Translations by bilingual Cup’ig-English speakers differ from those of Yup’ik linguists, and these do not correlate with historical references, which are inconsistent and imprecise in their own right. Statements by elders regarding the antiquity and origins of the names, associations to other place names, and traditional stories suggest off-island origins and connections to places, languages, and cultural groups from further north, including those on the Seward Peninsula, on St. Lawrence Island, and on Russia’s Chukotka Peninsula.

Like all Eskimo languages, Cup’ig is polysynthetic. That is, words consist of an initial noun or verb base (or stem) often followed by a number of modifying suffixes called postbases, and an ending which indicates case, mood, person, and number. Such words can function as complete sentences.⁷ The Cup’ig name Asweryagmiut is analyzed as follows: aswer- (walrus) +yag- (many) +miut (village/residents of).⁸

The literal translations of Asweryag as “many walrus” (Jacobson 1998, 44; 2006, 148; 2012, 146; Reed in Noatak and Kolerok 1987, 18) and as “an abundance of walrus” (Woodbury, pers. comm., 16 January 2016) may reflect a historical meaning still preserved in some parts of mainland CAY. However, as we will see, these translations, while etymologically correct, no longer accurately represent the colloquial meaning of the name as understood by the Nuniwarmiut.

While the CED has no entry for Asweryag, it does list Asweryagmiut as a place name, with the base translated as “beached walrus.” It does not, however, have an entry for aswer; rather, the standard term for “walrus” among Cup’ig speakers is kaugpag (Amos and Amos 2003, 156–157, 532; Jacobson 1998, 144; 2006, 148; 2012, 146). In a review of dozens of Cup’ig-English bilingual transcripts that include some discussion of walrus in various contexts, “walrus” is always kaugpag, except, as noted, when associated with the translation of the Aswer- place names. In that context, some elders considered Aswer- to refer to a “dead walrus,” often presented in contemporary translations as a “beached walrus” (here, assumed dead). Relatively recent translations provided by Nunivakers vary, however, reflecting a lack of familiarity with the word. Translations include “sea mammals,” “walrus or whale” (Amos and Amos 2012; Drozda 1994, 83–84), “whales” (Amos and Amos 2013), and simply “walrus” (Amos and Amos 2003, 49; Howard Amos, pers. comm., 22 November 2016). Despite the inconsistency regarding the type of sea mammal, all of the translations from Nunivak Island include the modifier “beached.” By contrast, contemporary mainland meanings offer no evidence of the “beached” or “dead” qualifiers, which seem to have originated on Nunivak.

An example of the gap in understanding is illustrated in the transcript of an interview with Andrew Noatak and Robert Kolerok (1987), during which Howard Amos provided an oral interpretation in English. In the transcript, prepared by Yup’ik linguists at the ANLC, Amos’s use of the adjective “dead” was called into question: “she came to Asweryagmiut and found a lot of dead walrus in that place. That’s why it’s called Asweryagmiut. Aswer is dead [sic] walrus.” Hoping to identify the “correct” interpretation, I later put the question of the meaning of aswer to Howard Amos himself. He replied that his father, Walter Amos (a monolingual Cup’ig speaker born 1920) “always said aswer referred to dead walrus” (Howard Amos, pers. comm., 22 November 2016).

Commenting on an early draft of this chapter, Anthony Woodbury (pers. comm., 16 January 2016) noted that, for modern Cup’ig speakers (who may or may not be familiar with the CAY term asveq), the derivation of Aswer- place names presents a “bit of a puzzle.” He suggests that the Nunivak interpretation of aswer- as referring to a “dead/beached walrus” or, as I suggest, something “walrus-like” may provide clues as to how the meanings of the term have evolved on the island. The multiple interpretations reflected in the various translations and apparently shifting definitions do not necessarily constitute inconsistencies but are rather the result of contemporary speakers trying to make sense of an older, seemingly foreign name.

The few translations of NUN aswer found in the published literature offer a different interpretation than those presented above. The earliest word list for Nunivak was recorded in 1822 by Etolin and Khromchenko (VanStone 1973, 56, 74). Their list, comparing languages (and dialects) of the Bering Sea region, includes the following terms for “walrus”:

azibok: Nunivak Islanders

azyuk: Konyag

ayv-gyt: Stuart Islanders

kchikhpak: Aglegmiut

As linguistic evidence, early word lists such as this one are far from wholly reliable, in part owing to orthographic idiosyncrasies. Yet the term kchikhpak—recorded among the Aglegmiut (or Aglurmiut, as they are known today) may possibly be related to the Nunivak word kaugpag.

A century later, in his notes accompanying drawings of masks made by Nuniwarmiut in 1925, Knud Rasmussen referred to an “âsvarpaq,” which he described as

a kind of giant walrus which does not appear to breathe when it comes up out of the sea . . . while one hears ordinary walruses gasping for breath, one never hears this walrus gasp . . . It is as if it just sticks its gigantic head up – – it eats seals – – in contrast to other sea animals . . . when they catch a seal – – they first suck out the flesh – – and then afterwards eat the skin – – so strong – – – that they just suck it out. (Quoted in Sonne 1988, 162n27; punctuation as in the original)

Rasmussen’s notes were made from interpretations by Paul Ivanoff (Sonne 1985), who translated âsvarpaq as “giant walrus.” ⁹ By way of contrast, Sonne (1988, 149) offers descriptions, again based on Rasmussen’s notes, of walrus masks using the term kaugpag (written “kauxpax” and “kowggpuk” by Hammerich and Ivanoff, respectively). This demonstrates that at least as early as the 1920s Nunivakers made a distinction between kaugpag (an ordinary walrus) and aswer, which even then appeared difficult to define.

What appear to be older forms of aswer are also preserved in song lyrics recorded by Lantis (1946, 277), which include “ayuwi’a ma / ayu’wi’ama” and “ayuwi’aka,” both translated as “my young walrus.” In addition, Lantis (1946, 154, 162; see also 154 [map]) provided the first record of the place name “a’z·uwa’γăyă’γamiut” (Asweryagmiut), which she described as “formerly a year-round village, now abandoned.” The name was one of thirty she recorded in 1939 and 1940, and, while she was not always able to determine their precise meaning, she offered the following interpretation of “a’z·uwa’γăyă’γamiut”: “[from] a’z·uwax, walrus, specifically a mean old walrus bull; exact meaning of whole name not clear, formerly a year-round village, now abandoned.” Again, this is not a typical walrus. It is possible that the “dead walrus” in contemporary aswer translations may be a recreated meaning, the closest English term for a concept that does not easily translate, possibly representing an entity for which there is no recognized Western equivalent.

According to the Yup’ik Eskimo Dictionary, asveq (Cup’ig aswer) is “walrus”—but (again) not in Cup’ig, where “kaugpak (Cup’ig kaugpag) rather than asveq is used for walrus.” The entry further notes that, in the Nunivak dialect (NUN, that is, Cup’ig) asverpak—literally, “big walrus” (-rpak = big, large)—is a “‘rogue’ walrus, a dangerous walrus that attacks seals and boats, and asverrluk is ‘beached walrus carcass,’” with the postbase -rrluk signifying something that “has departed from its natural state” (Jacobson 2012, 146, 861).¹⁰ The first description is similar to and may be derived from Rasmussen’s âsvarpaq, while the second corresponds more closely to asweryag as defined by the Amoses.

Jacobson (1998, 144) identifies asveq (“walrus”) as “otherwise” (that is, other than in NUN) pan-Eskimo, but he includes kaugpak (NUN kaugpag) as an alternate term, suggesting that it is “a central coast innovation based on an obsolete [Yup’ik] word kauk, which is cognate to the Iñupiaq word for “edible walrus skin” (see MacLean 2014, 143). Jacobson also records the term kaugpak in environments beyond walrus habitat, such as upstream on the Kuskokwim River, where the meaning shifts to “thick edible layer of walrus skin” (Jacobson 1998, 144). This meaning, according to Jacobson, derives from “Nunivak people who took walrus skin upriver to sell.” ¹¹

As Jacobson (1998, 144) notes, the distribution and frequency of the use of the term kaugpak on the mainland also vary. An example of this fluid situation is nicely captured in an intergenerational bilingual recording (Kelly 1985) made in the Yukon Delta village of Emmonak. While Jacobson had only recorded asveq for “walrus” at Emmonak, the interview tape shows the use of both terms. More importantly, it shows that asveq is not recognized by at least one fluent Yup’ik speaker of the younger generation. The exchange between a father (the interviewee) and his son (interpreter) revolves around a mainland Yup’ik place name, Asvertuli:

Andrew (son): Augna-mi Asvertuli cauga? (What is Asvertuli?)

Anthony (father): Tua-w’ tamana kuiga. (That’s the name of that creek.)

Andrew: I mean camek atengqengqerta? (I meant what [does the] name [mean]?)

Anthony: Imarpigtaat-w’ tua-i. Asveret. (Those [that] live in the ocean. The walruses.)

Andrew: Asveq. Caulria-ll’ im’ asveq? (Asveq. What is an asveq?)

Anthony: Qaurpak. (A walrus.)

Andrew: Oh! Okay!

Anthony: Walrus-aanek-w’ pilaqait. Tauna tua-i taumek atengqertuq. (They call them walruses [in English]. That place has that name.)

Andrew [to interviewer]: This village is named after a walrus.

(Kelly 1985, 21)

Recordings such as this may provide insight into shifts in the standard lexicon and could be useful in augmenting Jacobson’s dialect study.

The Dictionary of Alaska Place Names (Orth 1967, 54) includes an entry “Ahzwiryuk Bluff,” listing as a variant “Azwiryak Bluff,” for a site on Nunivak Island located about a mile east of the village of Nash Harbor. The dictionary offers no etymological information, however, describing the term only as an “Eskimo name” obtained in 1949 by United States Coast and Geodetic Survey. The name appears on United States Geological Survey (USGS) maps as “Ahzirwuk” and clearly refers to the place known locally as Asweryag (about which more will be said below). Neither Asweryag nor Asweryagmiut (including variant forms) appear in the dictionary or on USGS maps. Orth (1967, 729) and USGS maps include a separate but relevant anglicized CAY term, “Osviak,” for a mainland settlement, now abandoned, that was situated on the north shore of Bristol Bay. The site, which was investigated by the BIA in 1986, is well known in the region as an ancestral village of present-day Togiak (Tuyuryaq). In the modern Yup’ik orthography “Osviak” is written Asvigyaq. Wright and Chythlook (1985, 14) offer the spelling “Asviryaq,” while ANCSA records identify the site as Asvigyarmiut. Orth (1967, 97) lists another variant spelling, “Azeviuk,” and includes a 1919 definition provided by G. L. Harrington, of the USGS, according to which the name means “walrus.”

Like the Asweryag names at Nunivak, the original meaning of Asvigyaq is also apparently lost among contemporary speakers of the Bristol Bay dialect. Evidently, the base asvig- exists there today only in the place name. BIA transcripts and associated place name lists (Reed 1984, 1989) contain statements such as “etymology unknown,” “analysis uncertain,” and a speculative “from asveq ‘walrus’??” An interactive map produced by the Bristol Bay Native Corporation suggests that the name Asvigyaq is “possibly related to stabilize; to be solid.” This seems to me a questionable interpretation, no doubt based on asvaite-, “to be solid, to be stable; to be immovable” (Jacobson 2012, 146).¹² Assuming that Harrington’s 1919 definition is correct, it seems likely that the name originally referred to “walrus,” but the meaning as well as the pronunciation has changed over time. In language surveys at Togiak and Twin Hills, the two contemporary villages closest to Osviak, Jacobson (1998, 144) recorded the Yup’ik word asveq for “walrus.”

The St. Lawrence Island / Siberian Yupik Eskimo Dictionary (Badten et al. 2008, 100, 762–763) lists the name of an old village site, located on the northwestern tip of St. Lawrence Island just east of Gambell as Ayveghyaget literally, “many walrus,” (Walunga 1987, 16). The residents of this village were called Azveghyagmiut; the CAY and NUN equivalents are Asveryagmiut and Asweryagmiut, respectively.¹³

Jacobson (2006, 148; 2012, 146) and other Yup’ik scholars note that the CAY name for St. Lawrence Island is Asveryak; its residents are accordingly Asveryagmiut (“Asviryagmiut” in John 2003, 510–511; and in Mather 1985, 41). Yup’ik elder Andrew Tsikoyak (Ciquyaq, b. ca. 1901), of the lower Kuskokwim region tundra village of Nunapitchuk (Nunapicuaq) stated:

Nunivaam neglirnera qikertartangqellinilria. Asvigyamek aipaa-wa Ukiivik.

We have discovered there are other islands north of Nunivaaq [Nuniwar, Nunivak Island]. One is called Asvigyaq [St. Lawrence Island] and the other Ukiivik [Ugiuvak, King Island]. (Tsikoyak 1988)

Note that Tsikoyak’s pronunciation Asvigyaq matches that recorded for Osviak in the contemporary Bristol Bay dialect at Togiak. The other spellings cited above (Asveryag-, Asviryag-, Asvigya(g)-) probably reflect minor dialectical differences or individual idiosyncrasies.

One St. Lawrence Islander wrote: “The Ayveghyagmiit . . . had a village [on St. Lawrence Island]. Some mainland Alaskan Eskimos still refer to us as ‘Ayveghyags’” (Apassingok, Walunga, and Tennant 1985, 5; English plural s in “Ayveghyags”). Evidently such references were not restricted to Alaska Native peoples. The Russian biologist Lyudmila Bogoslovskaya remarked that “18th and 19th century Europeans referred to the [Siberian/St. Lawrence Island] Yupiks as ‘the walrus people’” (Bogoslovskaya et al. 2016, 80).

In the entry for Asveryak, Jacobson (2012, 146) also refers to the St. Lawrence Island village:

There is a particular site on St. Lawrence Is. called Ayvəʀyaɣət [Asveryaget], ‘(place with) lots of walrus,’ by the people there, and this may be the actual source of the Central Yup’ik word [Asveryak], indicating that Central Yup’ik familiarity with St. Lawrence Islanders was through people of that particular place.

If Jacobson’s statement is accepted, it opens the possibility that the cognate Nunivak place names also originated with people from St. Lawrence Island. Speaking in English, Nunivak elder Peter Smith (b. 1912) (figure 3.5) stated:

You know the same name [is] down in the St. Lawrence Island [. . .] Gambell is called Asweryagmiut, the same name. It means ‘lots of walrus.’ [. . .] I don’t know [why they called the Nunivak site Asweryagmiut], that’s how I heard the name, I never heard the meanings. [. . .] must be one man he found the walrus, a live one. (Smith 1986a)

Smith’s evident uncertainty about the meaning of the name underscores the general lack of familiarity with the term Asweryag at Nunivak.

Viewed from the other side of the Bering Strait, Orth (1967, 826) quotes Joseph Billings (commander of a 1790–1792 Russian expedition to Alaska) as reporting that “the Chukchi natives of Siberia call this island [St. Lawrence Island] E-oo-vogen,” which Billings also spells Eivoogiena. Other variants include Eivugen (from G. A. Sarichev, a member of the same expedition); Eiwugi-en (Krauss 2005, 165); and Eiwugi-nu (Merck 1980, 194). Hughes (1984, 276) reports that the Chukchi name for the island’s people is Eiwhue’lit (generally written in English as Eiwhuelit) and goes on to note: “There is evidence that this term traditionally designated only one of the groups living in Gambell, the (now small) u γá·li·t clan whose ancestors founded and therefore ‘own’ the village” (Hughes 1984, 277, citing Collins 1937, 18; Hughes 1960; Moore 1923). Hughes (1960, 252) also glosses u γá·li·t as “Ualeit (‘people living at the north end’—of Gambell).”

According to de Reuse (1994, 410), the Chukchi name Eywelət (his spelling of Eiwhuelit, he notes) means “SLI [St. Lawrence Island] Eskimos” and is “probably related to Ch. Aywan.” He links the term Aywan, “Eskimo,” to the Chukchi word eygəsqən, “north,” through CSY aywaa- and aygugh-, both meaning “north, to go north.” (For further discussion, see Fortescue 2005, 18–19). Although the resemblance may be coincidental, it seems probable that Eywelət is also related to CSY ayveq (walrus), as seen in St. Lawrence Island place names with the stems Ayvegh- and Ayvigh-. One might see a relationship between the Chukchi sound written “ei,” as in eivug, eiwug, eivoog, and eiwhue, with those of CSY, CAY, and NUN written in the current orthography of those languages as “ay” as in ayveq, “as” as in asveq and aswer. It should be noted that the phoneme “z” as represented by the letter “s” in CAY often alternates with the “y” sound (de Reuse 1994, 355n5; Jacobson 1990a, 278).

Similar names or cognates alone do not necessarily indicate a direct connection between the places. Linking comparable place names (or vocabulary) across languages or dialects is problematic, especially when names were recorded by individuals whose language skills were limited. De Reuse (1994, 321) makes this point with respect to eighteenth-century word lists: “As with all such early lists,” he writes, “the translation of many words is inaccurate, the spelling is inconsistent and difficult to interpret, and typos are very common.”

Analyses and comparison of the above names yield intriguing associations relevant to Nunivak in light of other reported links between the two islands. Connections include additional place names and abandoned Nunivak historic sites attributed to “northerners” in general and, according to one elder, to St. Lawrence Islanders specifically. In any case, Nuniwarmiut refer to these people and two of their documented settlements at Nunivak not as Asweryagmiut, as might be expected on the basis of the CAY ethnonym, but instead as Qaviayarmiut.

Asweryag (USGS Ahzwiryuk Bluff) is a steep bluff situated on the northwest coast of Nunivak Island immediately east of the historic village of Ellikarrmiut (Nash Harbor) (figure 3.6). The area on top of the bluff was identified by elder Jack Williams (b. 1911) (figure 3.7) as a burial site consisting of one or more mass graves. According to Williams (1986b), the grave(s) contain the remains of a group of Qaviayarmiut—for now, let us just consider them “northerners”—who had previously settled at two eastern Nunivak sites which will be discussed later on (Williams 1991a, 1991b). The exact location of the reported mass burial(s) is unknown, and the oral accounts presented by Williams sometimes appear confusing or contradictory. Williams was the only elder to describe mass graves at the site and to associate them with the Qaviayarmiut. Andrew Noatak (b. ca. 1900) simply described the area of Asweryag as “the one with a lot of graves” (Noatak 1986b, 25; USBIA 1995, 3:97–99). Two large rock features that could be interpreted as burials were located in the vicinity of Asweryag (see USBIA 1995, 3: 95–120) (figures 3.8 and 3.9).

To the east of Ellikarrmiut, in the vicinity of Asweryag (USGS Ahzwiryuk Bluff), are two rock features that could be interpreted as large burials. The features were identified and described in two separate BIA ANCSA surveys (USBIA 1995, 3: 95–120). The Cup’ig name of the bluff was applied to the report covering the further east of the features, which consists of a solitary mound of rocks about 1 meter high and measuring 3.5 metres in diameter at the base (USBIA 1995, 4:135) (figures 3.8 and 3.9).

Citing the testimony of Williams, the BIA report on Nunivak Island implies that the Qaviayarmiut were killed by the Nunivakers in apparent “retribution for [their] wasteful and disrespectful treatment of the island’s caribou” (USBIA 1995, 3:97). It is true that Williams and other Nunivak elders spoke about the mistreatment of animals on Nunivak and elsewhere at the hands of the Qaviayarmiut. Olie Olrun (1991) reported, for example, that his grandfather used to talk about the Qaviayarmiut destroying caribou and that they “apparently severed many of their heads.” Yet Williams (1986b) also provides another explanation for the massacre of those buried near Asweryag (Griffin 2004, 74). According to Williams, after the Qaviayarmiut established their Nunivak settlements (or camps), a pair of Nelson Island men arrived one spring to hunt caribou. The Nunivak people considered the Nelson Islanders allies and welcomed them as friends.

But the Qaviayarmiut killed both men at Triangle Island (Qikertar), just off the northeastern coast of Nunivak. When the Ellikarrmiut heard about the killing, they feared that they would be next and took action to circumvent that possibility.

Other elders recounted the story of a dual homicide at Triangle Island differently. Walter Amos (1991) said that it was Nunivakers who were responsible for killing two “mainlanders” as the latter prepared to escape with stolen goods (Pratt 2001, 39n18). Kay Hendrickson (Hendrickson and Williams 1991) recalled that two successful hunters from the Kuskokwim River were camping overnight at the island prior to crossing back to the mainland with their caribou meat. They were discovered and killed not by Nuniwarmiut but by two men from the Yukon River (who may or may not have been considered Qaviayarmiut). As it stands, it is difficult to reconcile the differences in these versions of the story. The events occurred before any of the elders who recounted them were born, so it is possible they remembered or heard elements of the story differently. It is also possible that inadequacies in the existing translations contribute to some of the discrepancies.

In a published account based on the Williams (1986b) transcript, Ann Fienup-Riordan (Fienup-Riordan and Rearden 2016, 69) further complicates the issue by reporting that Williams identified the people who killed the men from Nelson Island as “Qaviayaarmiut (Iñupiat) from the Seward Peninsula.” Actually, despite his limited command of English, he clearly describes them as St. Lawrence Islanders: “People was killed down there at the Nash Harbor by some kind of against each other [sic] from Saint Lawrence Island people. The long time ago they coming and they call them Qaviayarmiut” (Williams 1986b).

Williams (1991a) retold the story five years later, at which point he was eighty years old. This time he did not mention why the two Nelson Islanders were killed, but he recounted the circumstances of their death in the same way and again specifically mentioned the burial site of Asweryag. This later narrative was primarily in Cup’ig interspersed with some English (I have edited the translation slightly for the sake of clarity):

These Qaviayarmiut, I don’t know the real reason as to why they were killed. I have heard from sources that they were taken to Ellikarrmiut [Nash Harbor]. They were trapped in a huge net [seal net]. They died from hypothermia. Some elderly person may know something about that. I’m not from west Nunivak Island, so I don’t know. Messengers went to go get them [from their eastern settlements] in winter as far as I know. They let them enter the hot qasgir [men’s community house at Ellikarrmiut] and plugged up the porch with lots of, a pile of wood; nobody can go out. Then they placed the net over the skylight, using a huge net. That is how it is. Some made an attempt to exit, but when snared in the net they re-entered.

When they all died, they were buried below a high place and covered with large flat stones, a big pile of rocks. That is where they’re buried, below a place called Asweryag. It looks like there is something there in pairs, next to one another, flat rocks piled up there, if erosion hasn’t taken them down. I reckon those are Qaviayarmiut people. (Williams 1991a)

Asweryarmiut is a former habitation site located on the southwest coast of Nunivak Island. Like many of the island’s settlements, it was established at the mouth of a stream associated with a sheltered estuary. The BIA report (1995, 2:286) noted a general “lack of knowledge about Asweryagmiut among Nunivak elders,” suggesting the abandonment of the site before the end of the nineteenth century (Pratt 2009, 175). Despite the lack of specific site information, the name is remembered, together with fragments of stories regarding its origin. Two Nunivak elders, Andrew Noatak and Robert Kolerok (figure 3.10), identified Asweryagmiut as one of at least ten prominent former habitation sites on the western and southern coast of the island that were originally named by an ancestral woman. Both men believed that she named the sites in the distant past, “during the time there weren’t that many people” (Noatak and Kolerok 1987, 29) or “before people came to the land” (Kolerok and Kolerok 1991a, 26). Interpreting for Noatak, Howard Amos explained: “He thinks that woman was one of the first people on Nunivak Island, because when people were not very many she started going on the coast and started naming the inlets and bays and so forth” (Noatak and Kolerok 1987, 29).

The names that the ancestral woman gave to particular places are descriptive and are based, it is said, on her experiences or observations at each place. The most thorough tally of the sites she named was provided by Robert Kolerok (Kolerok and Kolerok 1991a). Dorothy Kiokun, a fluent speaker of both Cup’ig and English, provided an oral interpretation of part of his narrative¹⁴:

That lady named those places. First she came to Talungmiut and the reason why she named Talungmiut is because the river was going crooked, going that way, and that’s when they start calling the place Talungmiut, because that river was all curled up, I guess, or something like that.¹⁵ Then she went to Qayigyalegmiut. She saw spotted seals. Then they used to call those spotted seals qayigyat.¹⁶ So that’s when she named that place Qayigyalegmiut. Then she went to Carwarmiut and she couldn’t cross the river, so she put two driftwoods together. She got onto those and she was trying to go across, but she floated all the way down and landed across, way far down, and that’s when she called it Carwarmiut. That’s how she named that place Carwarmiut, because the current was so strong. So that woman named those three places. (Kolerok and Kolerok 1991a)

Kolerok continued and sequentially identified seven more places (west to east) originally named by the woman. These names, along with those mentioned below by Noatak, are listed in table 3.1, moving counter-clockwise from Iqugmiut, the westernmost site on the island. Together, the sites span a range of 120 kilometres, and their locations are marked on figure 3.12 (below).

Noatak (Noatak and Kolerok 1987, 28) was less specific, stating: “I don’t know exactly where she started from. Probably from Iqug (‘the end’ of Nunivak). She named them all on one side (of the island) on down to Iqugmiut down there.” Howard Amos then interpreted: “He does not have a definite location of where that woman started naming the spots in this coast, but he thinks she started off from Cape Mohican (Iqug) all the way probably to Cape Mendenhall (Cingigglag)” (Noatak and Kolerok 1987, 28). Noatak’s list begins at a point further west and does not extend as far east as does Kolerok’s list.

Noatak (Noatak and Kolerok 1987, 30) provided brief biographical information about the woman: “They tell stories (univkangssi) about that one,” he noted.¹⁷ He said her parents resided at Kangi’irerrlagmiut (also known as Kangiirlagmiut), a site on the northeastern coast of Nunivak Island located well outside the range of the places she reportedly named. It may be significant that other elders, as well as place name records, indicate that one of the two Qaviayarmiut settlements is located in very close proximity to Kangi’irerrlagmiut. A field map (Hansen n.d.) also includes a faded annotation, “where couple lived,” attributed to Nunivak elder Lily Jones (b. 1898).¹⁸ The note is placed precisely at the Qaviayarmiut settlement located by several elders a short distance upstream of Kangi’irerrlagmiut. The “couple” might refer to the parents of the woman who named places, although the reference could be to some other couple associated with a different traditional Nunivak story.

Lantis’s oldest informant offers what is probably among the earliest recorded memories of a Nunivaker. “Once when people came from the mainland,” he recalled, “a Nunivak woman fell down a cliff on the west side and was killed. The mainland people helped Nunivak people bury her on top of the cliff” (translated and quoted in Lantis 1960, 5–6). A recently uncovered narrative, which has yet to be fully investigated, provides another interesting twist to the story. In an interview conducted in 1987, both Andrew Noatak and interpreter Howard Amos (Noatak and Kolerok 1987, 21–22, 29–30) referred to the murder of the daughter of the couple living at Kangi’irerrlagmiut, who was evidently pushed off a cliff near Asweryagmiut by her husband (USBIA 1995, 2:293). Noatak (Noatak and Kolerok 1987, 22; see also Noatak 1986c, 22) described the aftermath of the woman’s death:

I don’t know about it because it happened so long ago. But her parents lived over there at Kangi’irerrlagmiut. When they heard that she [her body] hadn’t been brought back up [to the top of the cliff], they went traveling through back there and went to bring her up. When they brought her up, they placed her on top of it [the cliff] and placed an antler on top of her grave.

The murder reportedly happened at a coastal cliff known by the generic name Penat (“cliffs”), at the base of which is a small beach named Qaugyit (“sands,” “their sandy area”) (Amos and Amos 2012; Drozda 1994, 84). As described in the BIA’s Nunivak report (USBIA 1995, 5:113), the cliff—“nearly vertical” and about 30 metres in height—rises above a terrace adjacent to the beach, which consists of “a band of boulders below which is a broad expanse of sand.” The site is located only 3.6 kilometres west of Asweryagmiut (see figure 3.4). Pratt identified the site as a spring and summer camp used by residents of Asweryagmiut for bird hunting and egg gathering by a technique known as “cliff-hanging” (Pratt 2009a, 140, 175). In 1986, BIA archaeologists found what was apparently a grave containing an antler, at the top of Penat very near the cliff edge (figure 3.11) (USBIA 1995, 2:294, 4:152).¹⁹

An intriguing bit of lore from St. Lawrence Island reveals a possible link to the Nunivak story of the woman who named places and her origins. Elder Bobby Kava (b. ca. 1910), of Gambell, had a relative named Aghnangiighaq—the older sister of Kava’s great-grandfather. In the mid-nineteenth century, her family came to Southwest Cape, on St. Lawrence Island, from a village on the southern coast of the Chukotka Peninsula not far from Avan (figure 3.13). As Kava recalled, “We heard tell of a person by the name of Aghnangiighaq who lived on Nunivak Island a long, long time ago. We have that very same name in our clan” (Apassingok, Walunga, and Tennant, 1985, 7, quoting Kava).

Nunivakers do not recall the name of the person who named the sites, referring to her simply as arnar (“woman”). When Howard and Muriel Amos questioned Nunivak elder Ida Wesley (b. 1929) about the woman’s name, however, she told them that she had heard it in the past but that it was not a Nunivak name. In Cup’ig, Aghnangiighaq is pronounced (and spelled) Arnangiar. According to Howard Amos, “Ida Wesley made a statement that Arnangiar departed from Nunivak Island to somewhere up north, she doesn’t know where she relocated. She only heard of her in stories, therefore we are assuming that Arnangiar departed before she [Ida] became aware” (Howard Amos, pers. comm., 15 November 2016). Amos also said that Wesley did not know of or mention Arnangiar’s association with a particular site or area on Nunivak. As he pointed out, though, the information that Arnangiar moved from Nunivak to a place further north made them realize that she “may very well have been the same person [mentioned] by the St. Lawrence people” (Howard Amos, pers. comm., 15 November 2016).

Finally, a St. Lawrence Island elder from the village of Gambell, Willis Walunga (b. 1924), said in an interview that his parents, who came to St. Lawrence Island in 1922 from Siberia, had told him stories about a group of people who had arrived at Pugughilek (Southwest Cape) many years earlier (figure 3.13).²⁰ Walunga did not know how long ago it was, but he thought it might have been the 1600s or 1700s (Drozda 1999). Eventually some of them returned to Siberia, while others stayed at St. Lawrence Island. A third group went south, but how far south or precisely to where his parents did not know. Listening to what Walunga said, elder Melvin Seppilu, of Savoonga, added that he also heard stories that Nunivakers were from St. Lawrence Island (Drozda 1999).²¹

The 1821 journal of V. S. Khromchenko includes a curious statement according to which the residents of Golovnin Bay, on the southern coast of the Seward Peninsula, were related to three tribes descended from “three women and three stallions of various colors. They multiplied and are the Ukivokmut [Ugiuvak, King Islanders], Aziagmut [Sledge Islanders], and Nunivokmut [Nuniwarmiut, Nunivak Island people]” (Pierce 1994, 320–325).²² King Island and Sledge Island are located in the Bering Sea, off the southwest coast of the Seward Peninsula.

Aside from the above legend, a nineteenth-century southward migration of Inupiaq peoples from the Bering Strait region is well documented in the literature. Loss of or severe decline in the Seward Peninsula caribou population is considered the main impetus for this migration, which began in the 1860s (Pratt 2001, 37; Pratt et al. 2013, 43–44; see Ganley 1995). Lantis (1946, 173) reported that hunters came to Nunivak from Norton Sound or southern Seward Peninsula communities to hunt the thriving Nunivak herds but that caribou “disappeared from the island” in the 1880s. Pratt (2001, 42) cites census records from 1900 that show that Inupiaq families occupied Nunivak “for relatively significant amounts of time in the second half of the 19th century” and that at least four individuals identified as “Kavaigmiut” Inupiat were reportedly born on the island between 1874 and 1881.

From the linguistic and geographic perspective, it seems logical to associate or even equate the Nunivak Qaviayarmiut with the Seward Peninsula “Kavaigmiut” (Qaviaraġmiut, in the Inupiaq orthography). The similarity of the names is unmistakable, and the ethnographic evidence that Pratt and Griffin cite seems persuasive. All the same, we cannot be certain that those referred to by Nuniwarmiut as Qaviayarmiut are the same as those identified by others as Qaviaraġmiut.

Both the CED (Amos and Amos 2003, 274) and YED (Jacobson 2012, 546) refer to a site on Nunivak called Qaviayarmiut and identify its former inhabitants in general terms as “native people from northern Alaska.” The YED also includes the Yup’ik names “Qaviayarmiu[t]” and “Qaviayak” (attested in the Yukon and Bristol Bay dialects of CAY, respectively), peoples defined more specifically as “Inupiaq Eskimo.” ²³ Jacobson does not associate the two terms with a specific Inupiaq group or place, but an association is implied by his derivation of the Yup’ik terms from Inupiaq “Qawiažak” (written “Qawiaraq” in MacLean 2014, viii). In the opinion of Woodbury (pers. comm., 10 August 2017), it is “very possible that the SP [Seward Peninsula] Iñupiat who now call themselves ‘Qaviarmiut’ were Yupik speakers [of some sort] a century or more ago” (see also Ray 1984, 285).

Pratt (2001, 38) suggests that the use of the term among the Nuniwarmiut probably refers to people, primarily caribou hunters, from Seward Peninsula, but he also allows that St. Lawrence Islanders may have been included among them (USBIA 1995, 1:20–21). Griffin (2004, 74) states simply of the Qaviayarmiut that their “true origin is unknown.”

At least eight Nunivak elders interviewed from 1986 to 1991 spoke about the Qaviayarmiut at Nunivak Island. In addition to St. Lawrence Island (Williams 1986a, 1986b, 1991a, 1991b), other locations mentioned, if very speculatively, as the group’s homeland included Kotzebue (Hendrickson and Williams 1991, 8) and the southern Seward Peninsula “near Nome” (Noatak 1990, 15). Contrary to Williams, Edna Kolerok said they were from the mainland, somewhere “above Nome,” and specifically not from St. Lawrence Island (Kolerok and Kolerok 1991b, 7–8).

Elders agreed that the Qaviayarmiut arrived and left sometime before they themselves were born. Robert Kolerok said that perhaps it was when their “fathers were little boys” (Kolerok and Kolerok 1991c). Kay Hendrickson described the time as “way in the past,” saying they came to hunt caribou and used the same areas and hunting shelters in the island’s interior as the Nuniwarmiut (Hendrickson and Williams 1991, 7). Indeed, Nuniwarmiut blame the Qaviayarmiut for the disappearance of caribou on Nunivak Island (Griffin 2004, 80; Pratt 2001, 37–39; USBIA 1995, 1:21).

Peter Smith (1986b) did not use the name Qaviayarmiut, but he said that, before his father was born, caribou became scarce on the mainland and many people came from far away to hunt at Nunivak. Smith reported that people came from the adjacent mainland areas of the Kuskokwim River, Hooper Bay, Goodnews Bay, and Nelson Island, but also from further north—Unalakleet, St. Michael, the Yukon River—and included five families from the village of Teller, on west edge of the Seward Peninsula.²⁴ Pratt (2001, 37) notes that, at the time these events apparently took place, the village of Teller did not yet exist and that the reference is probably to the general area of Port Clarence.

It bears repeating that Williams alone identified the Qaviayarmiut as St. Lawrence Islanders. In particular, he recalled his conversation with a St. Lawrence Island elder in which they discussed the Qaviayarmiut:

Old man-am-ggur taum Savoonga-neg Gambell-am-llu kangirrluagneg egkuani kiani wiitania.

The old man said that their settlement was located in the estuary for Savoonga and Gambell bay. (Williams 1991b, 11)

As Pratt (2001, 38) points out, no settlement with a name equivalent to Qaviayarmiut has been identified on St. Lawrence Island. In the quotation above, Williams states that the settlement was “in” the estuary, presumably situated between the modern villages of Savoonga and Gambell. He uses the common Cup’ig geographic term kangir, meaning “estuary” or “bay.” Not surprisingly, several place names on Nunivak Island contain this base, including Kangi’irerrlagmiut—reported by Nunivakers to be the location of a Qaviayarmiut settlement and also the place that Noatak identified as the village of the parents of the woman who named places. In addition, one of the places she named is Kangirtulirmiut.

Maps of St. Lawrence Island (Crowell and Oozevaseuk 2006, 6; Krupnik and Chlenov 2013, 22) show a settlement named Kangii (var. Kangi, Kangee) located between the villages of Savoonga and Gambell. In this connection, it is perhaps worth noting that St. Lawrence Island elder Willis Walunga gave Kangii or Kangighmitt as other names for the Gambell-based Amigtuughet clan, also known as the Qelughileq or Qelughileghmiit clan (see Krupnik and Krutak 2002, 222–224). The Kangii site is identified as both a permanent settlement and a “seasonal and herding camp” (Krupnik and Chlenov 2013, 112, 120n18), with a population of six according to the 1910 census. It is tempting to suggest that some of the Nunivak Qaviayarmiut originated from this St. Lawrence Island village.

The Qaviayarmiut are associated with two sites on Nunivak Island, each bearing the name of the group. One is situated on the northeast coast in the vicinity of Kangi’irerrlagmiut and the other further south on the coast near the village of Am’igtulirmiut (see figure 3.13). Notably, of the nearly one hundred recorded settlement names on Nunivak with -miut endings, Qaviayarmiut is the only one that repeats. Elders referred to the Qaviayarmiut sites and their residents in different ways. Some spoke of the settlements without naming them but instead located them in relation to other places and by means of a complex system of demonstratives (see Charles 2011, 209–212; Jacobson 2012, 965–966). Others named the sites but did not use the ethnonym Qaviayarmiut when referring to the inhabitants, describing them in other ways (such as Robert Kolerok’s “hunters from far away,” in the quotation below). Yet, despite their different ways of speaking about and remembering the Qaviayarmiut, elders were characteristically able to locate the group’s settlements with relative geographic precision. A few examples:

There is an old village there further in the bay . . . further in from Am’igtulirmiut at the cove’s point. It does not bear the name from this island. People from Nunivak did not establish the place. Those hunters from far away established the village. (Kolerok and Kolerok 1991d, 30)

So he [my grandfather, Qiawigar] has talked about the people who arrived from out there, the Qaviayarmiut. There’s a little old site above Am’igtulirmiut in a little cove. They say they stayed there in the winter and hunted. (Olrun 1991)

Those Qaviayarmiut cannot stay in one place since they left their own area [up north]. This story is true, I saw the cabin on the other side of Mekoryuk [in the Kangi’irerrlagmiut area] and down in that Am’igtulirmiut area. I reckon those people were living down there, divided by two. (Williams 1986b, 1; see also Williams 1991b, 3)

Noatak (1990, 14–16) reported that the Qaviayarmiut spent two winters on Nunivak Island and were led by a nukalpiar (a great hunter) named Qengaciar. He confirmed Williams’s statement that the newcomers divided into two groups and settled in the vicinities of Am’igtulirmiut and Kangi’irerrlagmiut. At Am’igtulirmiut, Noatak said, they settled upstream on a point of land called Taklir (the “cove’s point” mentioned by Kolerok), where they built a house and “were recognized as Takliaremiut” by Nuniwarmiut. Williams (1986b, 5) also referred to a site upstream from Am’igtulirmiut on a point of land named Taklir where Qaviayarmiut lived a “long time ago.” He said (speaking in English) that “old Qaviayaq people coming from St. Lawrence Island, they [were] living right there.” In this instance Williams did not specifically name the place Qaviayarmiut, referring to it instead as part of a general area associated with Am’igtulirmiut.

Regarding those who settled at Kangi’irerrlagmiut, Noatak (1990, 16) said, “I don’t know the exact location of their settlement.” Here again other elders described the location relative to a fixed point, such as “upriver from Taprarmiut is the old village of Qaviayarmiut” (Shavings and Shavings 1986, 20). Taprarmiut is located directly across a small outlet stream from Kangi’irerrlagmiut. In some contexts, all three sites—Taprarmiut, Qaviayarmiut, and Kangi’irerrlagmiut—may be referred to collectively by the latter name.

Curiously, one elder—Peter Smith (b. 1912)— did not mention Qaviayarmiut (village or people) by name. It seems unlikely that he did not know the ethnonym.²⁵ He offered the following account (which I have edited slightly for clarity):

Five families from Teller lived down there at Am’igtulirmiut. They got another village there in the inner bay at Am’igtulirmiut. The Teller people lived there for five years. A daughter of one of the families who lived there, when she was an old lady I met her in Kwethluk, a village [on the Kuskokwim River] above Bethel. She told me her family lived down in that place in five years. She’s kind of an old lady, and I was pretty young when I saw her. Her parents hunt for caribou, five years, from Teller. She said there were five families. Our people never mentioned how many families were there, but this lady she told me five families live there, from Teller, for caribou hunting. And after five years they move from island back to some other place. (Smith 1986b; see also Smith 1991)

In another interview Smith (1988, 17) identified a mountain in the Nunivak interior as the location of “Teller caribou hunter’s camp.” The mountain was later identified by the name Elliurruw’ig (Drozda 1994, 82). Smith said the name meant “put it right there.” The place name itself does not appear in the CED, but it evidently relates to the word elliwig, glossed “shelf” in the dictionary (Amos and Amos 2003, 108). The CED also includes the base elli-, “to put, to set down,” which would seem to conform more closely to the meaning put forward by Smith.

Elliurruw’ig shares a common base with llivelghaq, in the St. Lawrence Island dialect of CSY (Badten et al. 2008, 231) and, in the Qawiaraq dialect of Inupiaq, with illwik, both of which are glossed “shelf.” In CAY, ellivik is also “shelf,” but, according to Jacobson (2012, 253), in NUN it refers specifically to an elevated cache. Some of the residents of the village of Teller are speakers of the Qawiaraq dialect (Fortescue, Jacobson, and Kaplan 2010, ix; MacLean 2014, viii). Given the field map notation “Teller caribou hunters camp,” as well as Smith’s definition, it seems likely, or at least possible, that the name Elliurruw’ig was introduced by Qawiaraq-speaking people from the vicinity of present-day Teller.

Oral accounts concerning Asweryag, Asweryagmiut, and the Qaviayarmiut probably relate to more than one historical episode of peoples from northern areas migrating to Nunivak Island, probably most often in search of abundant and reliably obtained subsistence resources. These new arrivals might have established settlements and certainly would have interacted with existing populations. No doubt some would remain longer than others, and presumably some would remain permanently. Many, if not most, would have spoken different languages or dialects. Perhaps this linguistic intermixing contributed to the development of specific local dialects of Cup’ig.

With respect to Yup’ik dialects, Jacobson (1998, xi) suggests that it would be “interesting to endeavor to reconstruct the general situation as it was at various times in the past.” The challenges involved with investigating just two Nunivak place names leads me to the related conclusion that it would be interesting and worthwhile as well to begin a comprehensive comparative study focused strictly on Indigenous place names in the region of the Bering Sea. The BIA ANCSA records—including site reports, oral histories, and field maps—include thousands of place names. These documents are indispensable for further study, yet they remain virtually untapped in terms of the analysis of dialects, and the toponyms embedded in them have not been surveyed in a systematic or comprehensive way.

This chapter contains much that is speculative. Some of my statements are provisional, and the evidence I cite is open to other interpretations. To some degree, this uncertainty reflects the difficulty of working with material originally in Cup’ig that has been transcribed and translated by linguists and others who are not fluent speakers of the language. I have deliberately resisted the impulse to attempt to reconcile what appear to be conflicting statements in the oral histories, in large part because I am conscious of the need for more complete transcriptions and more careful interpretations of many of the recordings.

This chapter does not pretend to offer a comprehensive report on the two Asweryag place names or a new theory regarding the Qaviayarmiut. Rather, in the course of my research into these two Nunivak place names (and I feel I have just scratched the surface), I was drawn down many interesting paths. Some led to discoveries that surprised me, others proved to be more like reaching a cul-de-sac precisely where I had hoped there would be more, and some were left unexplored, at least for the present. The further along I travelled, the more connections I discovered to other places and peoples, connections that were not apparent on the surface or simply in the literal translations of names. Many of the links are speculative and/or only vaguely defined, pending further research. Nonetheless, they can serve to remind us of the interconnectedness of language, memory, and landscape and the dynamic relationships among them.

Thanks to the elders of the village of Mekoryuk, past and present, whom I have had the privilege to know. Thanks also to Steven Jacobson for deepening my understanding of the Nunivak language and to Howard and Muriel Amos for sharing their knowledge and so much more with me. Finally, I thank Tony Woodbury and Ken Pratt for constructive comments and criticisms on earlier drafts of this chapter.

1. 1 Cup’ig names and words set in italic conform to an orthography developed for the language by Muriel Amos and Howard Amos, with the support of Irene Reed and Steven Jacobson of the Alaska Native Language Center (ANLC). The co-compilers of the Cup’ig Eskimo Dictionary (2003), the Amoses were raised with Cup’ig as their first language but also experienced the impacts of its rapid decline. Their consequent dedication to the preservation of the language and the reconstruction of older components of it has added immeasurably to the study of the language (see Jacobson 2003, vii–x). The Nunivak elders quoted in this chapter were in fact among the last generation of monolingual Cup’ig speakers.
2. 2 Woodbury is the author of the definitive study of Cup’ik (Woodbury 1981), one of the two subdialects of the Hooper Bay–Chevak dialect of Central Alaskan Yup’ik (CAY), which is spoken in the mainland village of Chevak, situated on the west coast of Alaska some 150 kilometres north of Nunivak Island. Despite the similarity of name, Cup’ik is closer to CAY than it is to Cup’ig. Speakers of both Cup’ik and Cup’ig typically substitute an initial c (pronounced like the English “ch”) for the initial y of CAY. In connection with the preparation of the Cup’ig Eskimo Dictionary, Woodbury (2001) commented that “reading through it convinced me of how highly distinct Cup’ig was from Cup’ik or Yup’ik.”
3. 3 Hammerich (1954, 420) relates a tale he heard of a failed attempt by Russians to establish a herd of wild horses on Nunivak, although this is something that I have never heard from Nunivakers. The Russian and Cup’ig words for horse are, respectively, loshad (Hammerich 1954, 410) and luussitar (Amos and Amos 2003, 186). There are no horses on Nunivak today.
4. 4 Woodbury (1981, 3, 8) determined, for example, that what is now known as the Hooper Bay–Chevak dialect of Central Alaskan Yup’ik consists of two subdialects, spoken in two villages (Hooper Bay and Chevak) that are separated by only 27 kilometres. On Nunivak Island, Mekoryuk (Mikuryarmiut) and the second-longest surviving village, Nash Harbor (Ellikarrmiut), are separated by about 46 kilometres, and their residents, or former residents in the case of Ellikarrmiut, report two distinct subdialects of Cup’ig. Other pre-1960 villages were considerably farther apart or less accessible, especially given that travel between them would probably have been most often by kayak, along coastal routes.
5. 5 Ken Pratt and I began working with the community of Mekoryuk in 1986 to document traditional and contemporary geography as part of the BIA ANCSA historical places and cemetery sites project. The work resulted in the mapping of about a thousand Cup’ig-language place names, many of them verified in the field with Nunivak elders, along with a draft manuscript, “Qikertamteni Nunat Atrit Nuniwarmiuni: The Names of Places on Our Island Nunivak,” initially compiled in 1994, with major revisions in progress.
6. 6 Both sites were investigated in 1986 by archaeologists associated with the BIA ANCSA 14(h)(1) historical places and cemetery sites project (USBIA 1995). As the crow flies, the sites are approximately 40 kilometres apart, but the distance is about 100 kilometres by the coastal route. The degree of geographic separation is significant because, given the similarities of the names, it would be logical to assume a closer geographical relationship, based on known patterns of naming seen in some Cup’ig and Yup’ik place names, especially those including habitation sites with -miut endings (see Pete 1984, 51).
7. 7 Woodbury states that there are polysynthetic languages that have little or no suffixation. But he describes Cup’ig, Cup’ik, and Yup’ik, in which words are formed almost entirely through suffixation, as “exuberantly polysynthetic” (Woodbury 2017b, 536; see also Fienup-Riordan and Rearden 2016, 115; Reed et al. 1977, 8).
8. 8 The postbase -miu means “inhabitant of,” the plural form, -miut is found in all Eskimo languages and refers, variably, to the residents of a place or region or to members of a group (Jacobson 2012, 808; Fortescue, Jacobson and Kaplan 2010, 455). At Nunivak Island the people identify themselves as Nuniwarmiut (residents of, or people of Nuniwar). In the Central Alaskan Yup’ik language, as well as in Cup’ig, -miut, when used to form a place name, has come to mean “village.” At Nunivak Island virtually all settlements include the suffix -miut and this is understood to refer not only to the inhabited (or formerly so) place, but also to its residents. In this way the addition of -miut tells us that it is not only a place, but also that it is, or was, a place where people congregated or settled. Fienup-Riordan (in Fienup-Riordan and Rearden 2011, xliii) implies that the inclusion of -miut in Central Alaskan Yup’ik place names is more or less at the discretion of the speaker, this is certainly not the case among the Nuniwarmiut. The inconsistency that Fienup-Riordan identifies with respect to CAY may be a more recent innovation, and in part reflect changes in the language stemming from the longer separation of mainland Yup’ik from their respective historical settlements. It may also reflect the adoption of abbreviated anglicized forms in use among “English speakers” (Ray 1971, 20), as well as the influence of geographers and cartographers who found the -miut ending repetitive and unnecessary (Baker 1902, 16–17; Ganley 1995, 106; O’Leary 2009, 209).

At Nunivak I have found that the naming of settlements and associated geographic features (most notably streams and estuary/bay systems) is formulaic and predictable, precisely as reported by Dorothy Jean Ray (1971, 1) for the Seward Peninsula region, where she referred to “constellations of place-names.” Both Ray (1971, 29) and Mary Pete (1984, 51) contend that, once settlements were abandoned, the -miut ending would be dropped, leaving in most cases just the name of a geographic feature, although this is clearly not the case at Nunivak today. In this chapter, I use -miut to refer to both settlements and inhabitants of places, depending on the context.

1. 9 Ivanoff’s spelling of Cup’ig words (adopted, in turn, by Rasmussen) appears in some respects to reflect the Yup’ik that Ivanoff spoke more than the Cup’ig spoken on Nunivak—as, for instance, in the use of Yup’ik velar stops (final k or q) as compared to Hammerich’s Cup’ig endings (voiced fricatives, such as g or r). Thus the spelling of the postbase as +paq, rather than as the Cup’ig +pag. Ivanoff, who was of mixed Russian-Inupiaq descent, came from the Norton Sound area, and his endings reflect the mainland influence, be it Inupiaq or Yup’ik. Further, he was just twenty years old when he interpreted for Rasmussen and had not spent much time at Nunivak Island. Ken Pratt (pers. comm., n.d.) points out that “outsiders essentially treated Ivanoff (an outsider himself) as the islanders’ spokesperson in many instances.” Those evaluating Rasmussen’s Nunivak vocabulary should thus be skeptical of the spellings that Ivanoff provided and likewise of his translations (see also Himmelheber 1993, 3, 7; Jenness 1928, 3).
2. 10 The spelling asverpak corresponds to the CAY pronunciation. Jacobson’s notes (1979), however, include the spelling asverpag and also imply that this walrus had “dark tusks.” I want to reiterate that no form of asver- occurs in the Cup’ig Eskimo Dictionary.
3. 11 Jacobson’s survey data (responses to questionnaires) appear limited with respect to “walrus.” See Jacobson’s discussion of the methodology and limitations of his study in his introduction to the Yup’ik Dialect Atlas (Jacobson 1998, viii–xxii).
4. 12 BBNC Web Map, Bristol Bay Online! Native Place Names Project, accessed 28 June 2022, https://bbonline.bbnc.net/placenames/. Woodbury (pers. comm., 10 August 2017) raised another possibility related to the postbase “-vig-” meaning, “place to” or “place for” or “place where.” When combined with the base at’e- (“to put on clothing; to don”), it becomes ayvik or asvik (“place to put on clothing”).
5. 13 Note that contemporary orthographies used for Central Siberian Yupik (CSY), for Central Alaskan Yup’ik, and for Cup’ig differ slightly. Also, here the y/z spelling discrepancy may be a typographical error with both spellings occurring in the same work, but also y/z commonly shift in both CSY and CAY.
6. 14 Kiokun was, at the time of the interview, a bilingual teacher at the Nuniwarmiut School. She was also an advisor to Irene Reed of the ANLC on matters relating to the Cup’ig language. She had direct knowledge of the Western Nunivak dialect or perhaps an intermediary dialect spoken at Nash Harbor (see Pratt 2009a, 282). The Native language portions of the Koleroks’ recording have not been fully translated or transcribed. The existing transcript is riddled with blank lines and question marks where the highly fluent and experienced Yup’ik translator lacked the knowledge to adequately translate the Cup’ig language. Although Kiokun did not interpret all of Kolerok’s narrative at the time of interview, her English renderings are much more useful than the patchy ANLC draft translation.
7. 15 The meaning of the name Talungmiut has yet to be firmly established; its base, talung-, appears to be unique to Cup’ig. Lantis (1946, 162) derived the name from talu’q, a word meaning “windbreak,” While linguists relate the name to Proto-Eskimo *talu-, “partition” or “screen” (Fortescue, Jacobson, and Kaplan 2010, 356; Jacobson 1984, 355, 592). The Cup’ig Eskimo Dictionary (Amos and Amos 2003, 307) includes the term talung, “a natural projection that blocks view of village from the sea,” and the related talurte-, “to disappear over a hill.” The immediate physical geography of the site itself includes a prominent boulder-strewn spit that separates the habitation area (Talungmiut) from the sea. Therefore, each of these interpretations, including Kiokun’s reference to the river “going crooked,” seems plausible, but the exact meaning is unknown.
8. 16 Kiokun’s statement reflects the fact that spotted seals are now called suuri in Cup’ig, probably a fairly recent change adopted from CAY issuri, itself said to be borrowed from Aleut. Qayigyar (“spotted seal”) is otherwise a virtually pan-Eskimo term and may remain in the place name as a remnant of a proto-Eskimo language (see Fortescue, Jacobson, and Kaplan 2010, 301).
9. 17 Noatak’s statements about the woman who named places were not made in a storytelling context but rather as asides while recording place names. It is unfortunate that the stories were not elaborated on further, as now they are mere fragments of what must have been a rich oral narrative.
10. 18 Lily Jones (Elluwagar) was interviewed by Susan Hansen on September 11, 1975 (Jones 1975). The interview tape has not been fully transcribed or translated, in part due to poor sound quality. Apparently, the bulk of the narrative is a Nunivak traditional tale referred to by Hansen (1979) as “The Deceitful Husband.”
11. 19 The BIA report (USBIA 1995, 2:293, 2:318, 5:113) does not identify the woman who was pushed from the cliff and also cites a separate account (Noatak 1986e, 23) of a man who fell at or near the same location and was subsequently revived by a shaman.
12. 20 Krupnik and Krutak (2002) report, “The dialect of the Southwest Cape people is supposed to be quite pronounced and the people are very much for themselves, (and) are not in favor of bringing into their homes Eskimos who do not belong to their particular tribe.” [See also Otto Geist Collection, box 4, folder 94, Alaska and Polar Regions Collections and Archives, Elmer E. Rasmuson Library, University of Alaska Fairbanks].
13. 21 Woodbury (pers. comm., 10 August 2017) reports that he also used to hear this in Chevak.
14. 22 Much thanks to Matt O’Leary for bringing Khromchenko’s remark to my attention.
15. 23 Here Qaviayarmiu (singular) and Qaviayak are not toponyms but rather ethnonyms. The Yukon and Nunivak dialects use the same term. The author is unaware of any mainland Yup’ik sites that have a similarly derived place name. Also, like speakers of CAY, Nunivakers use the term Qagkumiut to refer to “northerners” in general.
16. 24 Similar accounts have been recorded on the mainland. For instance, Hooper Bay elder Dick Bunyan (1984) recalled that, before the “kass’aqs” (Caucasians) arrived in the area, many people “from all over” travelled to Nunivak to hunt caribou. Bunyan did not identify any specific places, however, other than his own village of Hooper Bay.
17. 25 Elder Peter Smith was a principal contributor to the documentation of Nunivak Island historical places and Cup’ig place names (Drozda 1994). He was bilingual: the BIA ANCSA collection includes forty-four tape recordings of interviews with him, only two of which involved an interpreter. He preferred to be interviewed in English, but his narratives are not always easy to follow and require careful interpretation.

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