The Canning River, seen here in 2018, flows from the Brooks Range into the Beaufort Sea along the western edge of the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge. (Photo by Lisa Hupp/U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service)
The story of a family is a story of the world, and the story of the world is that of a family. That premise is at work in a new book by Alaska author Ch’igiioonta She Holds a Child, who explores the displacement of the Nendaaghe Dena people through her own family stories. Readers interested in the precolonial history of the Western Brooks Range will see how no one element or person stands alone in Ïyaġaaġmiut: People Who Live Among the Rock Caches. From multiple viewpoints, Ch’igiioonta brings out what belonging to one another and the land requires amid great and complex changes.
The Nendaaghe Dena people were called Ïyaġaaġmiut by their Iñupiat neighbors, who characterized them as the ones who live among rock caches — a reference to pits they dug below permafrost levels to store caribou and other meats. As Ch’igiioonta tells their story, she refers to their homeland as their “estate. The author defines “estate” as a territory and economic unit formed from Indigenous peoples’ knowledge of the land, existing trail systems and natural boundaries, each with distinct features and ability to sustain a number of persons.
Throughout the book, many colorful maps guide readers through the storied, “late prehistory” geographies of the Nendaaghe Dena Estate in extended kinships with others of Northwestern “Alaska.” The full “map-in-progress” of the focal area is printed at the book’s front. I recommend viewing a larger version of the “Map of Athabascan and Inupiat Estates in Northern Alaska, ca. 1800” on the website of AthabascanWoman.com. The author’s discussions are replete with place names and changes in place names across multiple languages and cultures—Iñupiatun, and three Athabascan ones, Dinjii Zhuh K’yaa —the author’s own, Denaakk’e, and Lower Tanana and their various subgroups. The whole book is organized with an introduction and five chapters, featuring multiple family genealogies and six useful glossaries listing regional, place and family names as well as some Indigenous word definitions and a chronology of key events.
This work develops two mutually contributing historical contentions, an environmental one and an economic-colonialist one. At the same time, Ch’igiioonta’ shows their interactions. Her environmental argument, an underrecognized one, links volcanic eruptions that cause worldwide weather cooling with Iñupiat and Athabascan oral histories of two back-to-back winters with no intervening summer. Consequences included Arctic famine and depopulation with consequential demographic and societal shifts. With brilliant sleuthing, the author pinpoints the 1815-16 eruption of Tambora in Indonesia as the likely culprit. She does so by contributing the oral genealogies and family stories her father, Stephen, taught her, as well as ones shared by others. She combines these teachings with nineteenth-century ship logs and maps showing coastal ice conditions, tree ring evidence, and other ecological and climatological sciences.
Lethal environmental hardships, including consequences of subsequent volcanic eruptions, and adaptive recoveries from them interact with the chronologically overlapping economic-colonialist contention. From the late eighteenth century new trade items brought changes to established economic relationships within and among estates and their families. This was followed by appearances of European and Russian explorers, naval expeditions, and Hudson’s Bay company traders themselves, and Christian missionaries. Nineteenth-century incursions also included smallpox and scarlet fever epidemics and introductions of guns. Whereas customary respect among Arctic Indigenous citizens called on those from another estate to take up the ways and language of their hosts, many Europeans arrivals expected and began administering adherence to their own views and ways brought from outside.
Through many stories, the author shows how environmental forces, causing fluxes of food availability, overlapped with Europeans’ press into long-established socio-economic-cultural networks. The book shows those forces and intrusions cannot be separated from internecine conflict, altered ecologies, adaptive kinship patterns, traditional boundaries and outright dispossession. In one of my favorite stories from the book, I learn how the Nendaaghe’s Tłeevihiti’ family included a man whose life was protected while battling Iñupiat. This was because—although they were not from the same people—the two men were brothers. In the author’s words, “a person’s relationships had everything to do with survival.”
Amid intense climatological changes, violent conflict and the ongoing march of empire, there is something to learn—particularly for those with deep family ties—for every serious reader interested in Alaskana, world history, climatology, geography, colonialism, decolonization, Indigenous languages, worldviews, self-determination and more-than-survival for everyone. As Ch’igiioonta’ herself writes: “As with all my writing this will not be your bedside reading.” Ïyaġaaġmiut is a rich, authoritative book well worth reading while wide awake.
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