North Alaska Chronicle

by Campbell, John Martin

• ISBN13: 9780890133538
• ISBN10: 0890133530
• Format: Hardcover
• Copyright: 1998-05-01
• Publisher: Museum of New Mexico Pr

Summary

This remarkable collaboration between an anthropologist and a Nunamiut Eskimo tribesman offers a rare, often poignant glimpse into history, legends, lore material culture and daily life of a traditional society that no longer exists. Simon Paneak's drawings constitute the heart of the book depicting from a memory a way of life that in a very short time had been lost irretrievably.

Author Biography

John Martin Campbell, trained in anthropology and the natural sciences, was a member of Yale University's 1956 North Alaska Expedition. Over the course of two decades he worked extensively with the Nunamiut Eskimo people of the Brooks Range. He is former research associate at the Smithsonian Institution, chairman of the department of anthropology at the University of New Mexico, and director of the university's Maxwell Museum of Anthropology. Simon Paneak was born in 1900 in a Nunamiut encampment on the north front of the Brooks Range. As a child and young adult he acquired detailed knowledge of his tribe's history and technology. A survivor of the white men's diseases that ravaged his society, he emigrated to the Arctic coast in 1920. There he married a coastal Eskimo who had been trained by missionaries and from whom he learned to speak, read, and write English. In the 1930s a small number of Nunamiut returned to their native land and there took up where they had left off three decades earlier. Simon Paneak died in 1975.

Table of Contents

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS	ix
INTRODUCTION	1	(8)
CHAPTER 1: NORTH ALASKA	9	(10)
CHAPTER 2: THE NUNAMIUT ESKIMOS	19	(14)
EPILOGUE	33	(4)
THE SIMON PANEAK DRAWINGS	37	(108)
REFERENCES CITED	145