ARCUS 15th Annual Meeting and Arctic Forum 2003

We Are Sugpiaq: Archaeology, Environment, and Oral Traditions of the Outer Kenai Coast, Alaska (Film and Discussion)

Aron L. Crowell^1
1Arctic Studies Center, National Museum of Natural History, Smithsonian Institution, 121 W. 7th Ave., Anchorage, AK, 99501, USA, Phone 907-343-6162, Fax 907-343-6130, acrowell@alaska.net

Film, approx. 15 minutes, in English/ Sugcestun
Produced by the Arctic Studies Center, Pratt Museum, and Native villages of Nanwalek, Port Graham, and Seldovia, Alaska

Sugpiaq/Alutiiq residents of the Kenai Peninsula, southern Alaska, are working with the Smithsonian Institution‚s Arctic Studies Center, the Pratt Museum, and the National Park Service to record oral histories, excavate 100 to 800 year-old ancestral village sites, and document on-going environmental change. Oral traditions about life in old settlements of the outer Kenai coast, narrated by Alutiiq Elders, provide a detailed framework for archaeological interpretation. The film traverses time and space between contemporary village life, interviews with Elders, and fieldwork at sites along the spectacular, glaciated Pacific shore of the Kenai Peninsula. It explores community perspectives on ancestors, heritage, land, subsistence resources, and cultural identity.

Oral accounts, artifacts and faunal data from the outer coast illuminate indigenous adaptations to a rich but unstable coastal environment, where earthquakes, volcanoes, climate change, biological regime shifts, and advancing glaciers have factored in human history. Native narratives refer directly to colder conditions during the Little Ice Age (A.D. 1250 ˆ 1900) when the sites under investigation were occupied. Migrations and settlement shifts also correlate with sudden natural disasters, such as a massive tectonic event that flooded coastal villages at around 1170 A.D. Contemporary Sugpiaq/Alutiiq communities depend heavily on salmon, seals, plant foods, and other subsistence resources, an intimate and spiritually rich relationship with the environment that informs the archaeological study of human ecology. Sugpiaq/Alutiiq hunters and gatherers are keen observers of present-day environmental changes, including ocean temperature-related declines in seal and sea lion populations, and are actively involved in government co-management of subsistence resources.

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