The objects in the Steven Michaan Collection are drawn from several Alaskan native cultures across many centuries. One can roughly divide them into two distinct cultural periods: that which is referred to as the Old Bering Sea, the earliest known ancestral period (c. 250 BCE – 500 AD), centered on Saint Lawrence Island and coastal Siberia (Chukotka), and to the Yup’ik and Inupiat cultures of mainland Alaska that were established slightly later.

These modern mainland artifacts date, for the most part, from the 17th, 18th and 19th centuries, in both pre-and post-contact periods, but the forms of these objects predate any influence of southerners or missionaries. What distinguishes the qualities of these two groups of artifacts, aside from their dates, is their materials. Old Bering Sea artifacts are almost exclusively carved from walrus ivory, an abundant material on St. Lawrence Island, a place largely devoid of trees. By contrast, many of the Inupiat and Yup’ik masks, dolls and tools are fashioned from wood, and decorated with ivory, shells, jet, earth pigments, animal fur and plant fibers, all materials more readily available on the mainland.

Where mainland villages are very far north, and along the coast, these materials were scarce, and in places like Point Hope, just as on Saint Lawrence, any wood utilized is usually some sort of driftwood washed up from distant southern locations. In any case, the utility of artifacts in the variety of locations is often the same, but expressed with slight differences relative to its choice of materials. This suggests a high degree of cultural continuity though people living across very wide expanses, and it can be argued that all native Alaskans descend from common ancestry dating back to Old Bering Sea times. And herein lies the source of the common mythology regarding nomadic practices among the Inuit of Canada: the fascinating act of the great migration of Old Bering Sea peoples across a stretch of land more than 3000 miles wide, within a three hundred year span.

There are many speculations on why this happened (warming trends in the 13th-15th centuries, the chase for game during famine periods, the introduction of new trade sources in the east, etc.), but the fact that it did helps us to realize that the Inuit of Canada and the Kalaallit of Greenland have common roots in Siberia. This fact alone is a remarkable reality when trying to understand a culture that survived into modern times using, basically, stone-age technologies and hunter-gatherer ways of life.

We southerners used to define these far-flung people collectively as Eskimo. The term has its roots in Canada, where the indigenous population in the far north is largely Inuit, and there the term is considered taboo today. However, there is no such taboo in Alaska, where in fact the term is preferred to Inuit, among villagers who might be Inupiat, Yup’ik, Siberian Yup’ik (those of St. Lawrence Island) or Chukchi (more specifically, Anqallit, those indigenous to the maritime coasts of the Chukchi Peninsula, that land mass reaching out to nearly touch the Bering Peninsula across from it, which together formed the ancient land bridge of which so much legend is supposed).

All of the major indigenous groups of the far north have common language roots and can be loosely understood amongst each other, albeit with some significant structural differences and local dialects that vary between villages and regions. To generalize, then, west to east, those we came to call Eskimo or Esquimaux in the 18th century can be broadly understood under the classifications of Chukchi (Anqallit) in coastal Siberia, Siberian Yup’ik on St. Lawrence Island (there may be no ethnic difference, in fact, between these two groups), Inupiat and Yup’ik in large regions of coastal Alaska, Inuit in Canada, and Kalaallit in Greenland.

Interestingly, and unsurprisingly, each of these groups’ names mean, in translation from their respective languages, “the People,” or “the Real People.” And, as noted above, broadly speaking these groups can all claim common ancestry from those Paleo-Eskimo villagers who inhabited the Bering Straits in earliest times, who flourished on St. Lawrence Island in the center of it, and who around 250 BCE began creating some of the finest artifacts of artistic accomplishment anywhere in the world. That they did so under arctic conditions makes their achievement all the more compelling.

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