In the indigenous art from the Bering Straits and adjacent villages, there is often seen hybrid figures, those of animals and humans and birds and sea creatures, all cohabiting the same corpus. One might see a seal with a human face, or a caribou turning into a salmon. In particularly spectacular examples, these are so skillfully executed that three or four different animals can be seen, only by turning the object around, upside down, side to side. One figure appears out of another. There is movement and morphing. This is all possibly understood through shamanism.

There are many stories in which a shaman must travel to another plane of reality, in order to plead with a particular spirit for the release, or health, of another. One must travel down to the place where the seal spirits live, or up to where reside the birds, in order to make the appropriate offerings. It is all a matter of communications, a form of prayer, but is conceived of as a physical experience of traveling. And in order for it to work, the shaman must have the capacity to change him or her self into whatever animal is naturally capable to execute the conveyance. The human becomes bird, or walrus, or tree, depending upon where he needs to go.

In art, then, there is often an expression of this process of becoming, of going. Figures are often shown in motion, usually flying, almost never running. In other cases, this is expressed in masks, which were used ritually by villagers, sometimes aiding the shaman on his journey, and at other times during potlatches, village gatherings where dances were performed, over a series of days of feasting and drumming. The masks are particularly interesting from this point of view as well, since they are, by definition, transformative. We become someone else when we wear a mask, covering the specificity of our own identities. For the shaman, or a native villager in general, the wearing of a mask is a universalizing gesture. The individual becomes all people, or becomes a spirit, connecting with the other spirits, upon which life depends.

So, that fact that Grandmother could fly made perfect sense. It also made perfect sense that the missionaries told them they could not, and therefore they stopped flying. For if one believes in a separate, fixed-entity deity, whole and intact, living in a Heaven that is attainable only after death, then one has no need to go anywhere in the current time and place. Life and death have inviolable boundaries to the Christian, and shamanism violates these laws, certain aspects of physics and other natural sciences. When the native villages were converted to Christianity, a process that is still being undertaken, Inupiat and Yup’ik people either stopped practicing shamanism, or were forbidden to do so, to the point where even dancing was not allowed, for its native power. Some villages have strongly returned to dancing practices in an effort to restore native traditions, but these are mostly performances, putting indigenous culture on display, an expression of techniques rather than attempts to travel across spirit-planes.

Still, my visit to Elim confirmed that the spirit worlds exist for them, and that there is no way to remain alive in the delicate balance with nature in such a climate and a remote, small community, without some deep respect and understanding of the environment which has always fostered human existence there. As such, there is little separation between what is considered a tool versus a decorative or fetishistic object. Functional objects, like hunting or fishing implements, are imbued with spiritual significance, because they need to be. When one is hunting, one might encounter an ancestor, inhabiting the body of a seal or walrus or caribou, and be thankful that they have come back to you, to help the family survive. Perhaps this was partly why Michael was so proud of his grandfather’s toolbox. It is a sign of continuity and wholeness, in a present so rife with scattering and disjunction.

Migration
In the popular imagination of remote southerners like myself (that is, those inhabitants of the Lower 48 American States), indigenous Alaskans such as the Yup’ik, Inuit and Inupiat are thought of as nomadic, seasonally hunting game, fowl, fish and sea mammals, and establishing temporary shelters throughout their journeys across vast stretches of terrain. While this is true, in part, what is not commonly understood is the strong identification with villages among traditional hunters.

Nomadism is a misnomer when describing those who venture forth in search of game. There is no wandering involved. All travel, especially during seasons when conditions are harsh, is purposeful and skillfully considered, following the accrued knowledge passed down through hundreds of generations. And, it is all centered on the common purpose of sustaining the extended family of the village. Nomadism would imply extended one-way movement.

In Alaska, travel is equally about the return, and has no other true purpose. Nonetheless, vast distances are traversed in order to meet the demands of hunting, and native villagers have developed sophisticated tools and techniques, refined by trade and the introduction of different materials, but well established since earliest times. One can say that these are cultures defined and revealed by their tools, in the purest sense. A villager’s toolbox will house every aspect of his identity, that of his village, and of his ancestors. All practical and spiritual matters are fused within it. With the highest degree of visual economy, an animal may be depicted on the very tool which is designed to hunt it, using its cousin’s bones. There is a startling level of distillation among such objects. But before discussing the visual and artistic qualities of such things, suffice it to say that hunting is the dominant activity that defines the life of Alaskan natives, to this day. In hunting, there is ancestral continuity, in the carrying out of essential practices passed down through families across centuries, and as a result, there is life, in every sense. In order to succeed, there must be travel and migration. So, naturally, migration plays a huge role in understanding native Alaskan cultures, back into Paleolithic times.

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