Joan Naviyuk Kane
How many Eskimo words are there for white people? How many Eskimo words are there? How many Eskimo?
*
My mother told me to attach a string to a claw, then the other end of the string to a scrap of wood: “take the claw and put a string with a little piece of wood.” I must have asked her something or paused for her to continue. Or she paused, and then continued.
“You swing it and try to put the wood through the claw.” I asked her what kind of crab claw. “Crab from King Island.”
*
There is a game my mother perhaps invented but certainly became adept at, as a girl, in King Island Village. With a string, dried stem, or sinew, you attached a crab claw to a smithereen of wood (even driftwood being not easy to come by) and tried to catch the claw on the small wooden stick. I asked her what kind of crabs. I think she said something about king crabs or kinds of crab, but she definitely said the words “King Island.” I asked my husband later that day where he thought she got the wood. The thing upon which the crab claw balanced; not pierced or punctured.
*
How many miles from the nearest tree is King Island? How many Eskimo words for tree are there? How many Eskimo words? How many Eskimo? How many?
*
The evening following this conversation with my mother also followed an evening when my husband, children, and I joined my parents for dinner at Mexico in Alaska—an Anchorage restaurant we'd chosen to frequent for forty-one years. I asked her where she was when she played this game. “King Island.” Then I asked her where she got the wood. “It was around,” she explained.
*
She remembered another game involving crab claws. If it landed one way, it was a seal. If it landed another, it was a polar bear. What do you mean? I asked. I meant, which way does it have to land for it to be a seal? For a polar bear? And what does that mean? She repeated, word for word: If it landed one way, it was a seal. If it landed another, it was a polar bear. Does this mean a hunter would get a seal or a polar bear? As in, stalk and harvest and bring back to store up or share with others? Or that the crab claw held the innate inua of a niqsaq or a nanuaq? Asking these question in English substituting three Inupiaq words for three English words didn't prompt any further explanation or conversation. Is the use of Eskimo words an event?
*
There are two modes of narrative in the tradition of Inupiaq literature: quliapyuk and unipkaaq. Yaayuk Alvanna-Stimpfle translates quiliapyuk as story and unipkaaq as legend. Larry Kaplan, director of the Alaska Native Language Center and a linguist fluent in the King Island dialect of the Inupiaq language, explains that the former “includes oral history and personal reminiscence, usually relating something the storyteller or someone he knows has experienced,” and that the latter “is an ancient myth,” one that “tells of events, often with supernatural aspects, which occurred long before anyone can remember.” My mother and most of my other relatives have the habit of speaking about experiences on King Island in the third-person past tense, which, aside from being accurate (most King Islanders left the island in 1959, no one has lived on the island year-round since 1965, and the number of surviving King Islanders born after 1974 who have been to the island could probably be counted on two hands) always troubled me with its emphasis on fixing hundreds or thousands of years of habitation of the island in the distant and impersonal and irrecoverable past.
Part of this has to do with the suffix -guuq, which translates most passively into English as “it is told” or “it is said.” In the context of a conversation, or storytelling session, to hear this verbal terminative would be a way to reaffirm the preceding utterance's legitimacy by having the authority of its assertion rest outside of the subjective and limited perspective (and perhaps motivations) of the speaker. It would be a way for the speaker to remind the listener that these words were spoken. They happened. They are real, and connect the listener to some kind of truth. They're not an invitation to historicize, to impel the speaker to use an active voice, to needlessly distort or omit.
*
There are two books I need to mention as long as I seem to have your attention: Joseph Senungetuk's Give or Take a Century and William Oquilluk's People of Kauwerak. The former can be read as a memoir of the author's formative years in Nome, Alaska, and his family's history and engagement with the land around Wales, Alaska. It was published in 1971 and I could not imagine being a writer without this book. The latter was published in 1973 and I would not be alive without this book, without the events it chronicles. It recounts with vivid and verifiable detail the five historical disasters the Inupiaq people have survived and continue to survive.
I was, along with my children and husband, once at Oquilluk's house in Homer. While there I proudly spoke the Inupiaq language with my sons, Joe and Ron, who had learned it as young men in Nome. “The kind of Inupiaq your grandfather spoke,” Oquilluk told me, “was like Shakespeare's English.”
Oquilluk, along with my maternal grandmother and her two sisters (and hundreds of other Inupiaq children), was orphaned in the 1918 influenza pandemic and raised by Ursuline nuns at a Catholic orphanage on the grounds of Pilgrim Hot Springs on Alaska's Seward Peninsula. The virus traveled from village to village with postal delivery from Nome. Death letters. All the orphans raised in the orphanage became fluent in English: a full bilingualism. And then, French. German. Latin. Other (e)vocables. Locutions. Things overheard. And things to read.
*
Back in the last century, I was one of the first employees of the Alaska Native Heritage Center, where we were given a script that was written (by a white anthropologist) for us to deliver in the third-person past tense to an audience that consisted largely of cruise-ship tourists. Paradoxically, the Heritage Center, owned by a regional Alaska Native corporation, has developed most of its local land—the boreal forest in Anchorage—into big box stores and strip malls. Anyhow, the script was comprehensive and detailed, and not to be whimsically spruced up with the interruption of personal narrative.
I was a college student, slightly bored and wondering what my friends in NYC and Boston were up to. What my relatives were doing on the tundra or the swelling tides of the Bering Sea, in the endless light of summer's white nights. I needed to depart from the script for the sake of my sanity, even though we were monitored and reprimanded for such departures. One of the things I was required to do was to demonstrate “Eskimo yo-yo” in order to increase the sales of authentically handcrafted yo-yo products in the Heritage Center's gift shop. Once I got the tourists interested in how fun and rewarding it was to master their use, I would tell the tourists the real story of how my mom and uncles and most other King Islander kids would play with grass-filled, skin-stitched, and fur-tufted yo-yos (not dissimilar from the poly-filled ones available for sale in the gift shop just to the right of the exit) in order to later better use bone- or rock-weighted bolas to catch and kill migratory seabirds for food, clothing, fun, ceremony, stewardship, exchange, ornament, pedagogy, or all of these and more. There were millions of birds that nested on King Island. I didn't understand millions in any language until I went to King Island myself. That is another story, all those birds and all the things and places and people that could still be there, or maybe definitely once were, but already and definitely may not be and may, in the grand scheme of things, never even have existed. This could all be vacant any instant.
*
I imagine the cliffs bare.
“Mom,” I ask, after a good interval of conversation where we both repeat things to each other we already know, “is there a word you know for seabird?” Maybe she doesn't want to disappoint me. “Imaani: ocean. Tiŋmiat: bird. Imaani.tiŋmiat,” she answers.
* * * * * * * ** *
How many oceans full of seabirds were there?
How many oceans
How many words
many oceans once full of seabirds
few words to describe them
tiŋitkaa: it blew away
a particular constellation containing many stars: siġupsiġat
siġvauraq: young guillemot
it is empty: imailaq
imiktuq: it is echoing
qayuktuŋa