Celebrating Yup’ik Histories

Calista Education and Culture director Mark John converses with Lawrence Edmund and Denis Sheldon on the lower Yukon River during a trip associated with the Yup'ik Historical Narratives project. Image courtesy of Ann Riordan. — Calista Education and Culture director Mark John converses with Lawrence Edmund and Denis Sheldon on the lower Yukon River during a trip associated with the Yup’ik Historical Narratives project. Image courtesy of Ann Riordan.

The NEH and the Alaska Humanities Forum have supported Ann Riordan’s work to document Alaska’s social and cultural history since the 1980s. In addition to supporting research on the interactions between Native Alaskan peoples and early white settlers, this support has enabled a partnership between Riordan and Calista Education and Culture, a Yup’ik organization that celebrates, promotes, and supports Yup’ik traditional culture. This work has supported the Yup’ik’s ability to preserve their language and oral traditions, while bringing that culture to a broader public.

In the 1980s, an Alaska Humanities grant sent Riordan to Nelson Island to undertake anthropological work. This experience was transformative, convincing Riordan to stay in Alaska and continue her work in Southwest Alaska. A few years later, NEH funding supported Riordan’s research into Yup’ik social and cultural history, and then work on her book, The Real People and the Children of Thunder: The Yup’ik Eskimo Encounter With Moravian Missionaries John and Edith Kilbuck (1991). She then worked with the Yup’ik and the Anchorage Museum to produce a traveling exhibition, The Living Tradition of Yup’ik Masks, which opened in Alaska and then toured the country, even spending time on display at the National Museum of Natural History in Washington, D.C. and the National Museum of the American Indian in New York City.

Since the exhibition, Riordan has worked with and for Calista Education and Culture, helping the organization secure grants from the NEH and the National Science Foundation to document and preserve Yup’ik traditional culture and lifeways. Through a grant to document Yup’ik historical narratives and traditional tales, the Calista Education and Culture’s expert translators transcribed, translated, and archived audio recordings of the last generation of fluent Yup’ik speakers. Together, Riordan and Calista created a website where 100 of the audio recordings are broadly accessible. They also published two bilingual books of historical narratives and traditional tales: Anguyiim Nalliini/Time of Warring and Qanemcit Amllertut/Many Stories to Tell. Both the website, where Yup’ik elders’ voices can be heard, and the books are in continual use.