Claire Houmard

Many Arctic societies are already experiencing the effects of the current climate disruption (including rising temperatures, extreme weather events, rising waters, and coastal erosion). They have shown resilience in the face of these socio-climactic upheavals by reasserting their identity, particularly through their tangible and intangible heritage.

In 2016, I had the opportunity to work in southwest Alaska, where I came to discover the Yup’ik lifestyle. The Yupiit (singular: Yup’ik) have been settling on either side of the Bering Strait (Siberia and Alaska) for the last millennium. Relatively sedentary and hierarchical, they live primarily on salmon fishing and moose hunting. The area has a particularly strong crafting tradition based on driftwood and moose antlers. A joint project between the Yup’ik community in Quinhagak, Alaska, and the University of Aberdeen, Scotland, was set up to preserve the remnants of the Nunalleq archeological site known as “the old village”. This site has been well documented for many years and is deeply rooted in oral tradition, but is now under threat due to coastal erosion. Forming a direct record of the successive intertribal conflicts that occurred during the Little Ice Age (1350–1860) in southwest Alaska, it was abandoned around 1675 after suffering an especially violent attack.

The close collaboration between archaeologists and residents—the latter of whom continue to uphold their oral tradition and age-old knowledge—has led to the creation of the Nunalleq Museum in Quinhagak. This institution strives to help the communities preserve their heritage within these ancestral lands for years to come, as opposed to a “museum-sanctuary,” far removed from the actual sites of discovery. The symbolic scope of this project is important, even though the village and its museum will eventually be forced to relocate due to rising water levels. The French project “Yup’ik” now takes over to explore the resilience, past and present, of this population.

The site of my residency will be the village of Quinhagak, a hub of field research and archeological study, as well as a site of memory for the Yup’ik descendants who live some three miles from the “old village”. In the Arctic, it is extremely seldom that these three pillars of heritage all come together within one location. My residency represents a unique chance to reconcile past and present, and to contribute to the (re)appreciation of this Arctic community’s cultural identity. The populations who depend largely on traditional means of survival are under particular threat of economic globalization and climactic disruption.

In collaboration with the University of Aberdeen and with the support of Villa Albertine and the French Ministry of Europe and Foreign Affairs, I will resume the fieldwork suspended in 2018, attempting to document Nunalleq while resituating this site in its cultural and environmental context, as well as expanding the scope of study through prospecting and surveying the immediate surroundings. I hope to gain a better understanding of how the Yupiit have withstood current and past changes, specifically during the Little Ice Age, which compromised their access to natural resources. Throughout this era, Nunalleq inhabitants remained in their homeland for over 200 years despite ever-escalating conflicts. Using sediment analysis, I will seek to assess how plant and animal resources fluctuated during that time, hoping to gain a better understanding of 17th-century Yup’ik customs. In this way, I will compare the oral tradition against the evidence left by archeological remains.