Project Summary for Fienup-Riordan 2224984

This project explores Indigenous Yup’ik concepts of illness and wellness, how such concepts differ from biomedical understandings of disease, and the roles of traditional healers past and present. The PI team, guided by the Elders’ Committee of Calista Education and Culture, an Alaska tribal organization, will conduct two gatherings of Yup’ik elders in Bethel, Alaska. Accounts collected during these gatherings will be integrated with narratives recorded over the last two decades to document attitudes toward disease, epidemics, healing, and shamanic practice. The work counters rapid loss of traditional knowledge and promotes use of Yup’ik language, two Indigenous research priorities in the region.

This community-based project seeks to compile and integrate ethnohistorical and personal narratives describing Yup’ik understanding of illness and wellness. Two topic-specific gatherings will assemble Yup’ik elders from across Southwest Alaska who retain knowledge of traditional practices and Indigenous concepts of disease causation and curing. Discussions will focus on continuity and change in understanding of epidemics and healing, with special attention to the roles of traditional healers today and of shamanic healers, or angalkut, in the past. Accounts from these gatherings will be integrated with archival transcripts to generate a bilingual volume that includes elders’ accounts and an introduction that contextualizes Yup’ik traditions within Alaska and the Arctic more generally. Selected place-based accounts will be recorded as podcasts and linked to the online Yup’ik Atlas, preserving elders’ knowledge and making it broadly accessible to scholars and the public.

This project has three goals beginning in 2023-2024. The first is to initiate conversations with contemporary elders and healers on Yup'ik concepts of disease causation and cure. A field team of 2 and 4 elders will meet during two topic-specific gatherings in Bethel, Alaska, during 2023 and 2024, to discuss the role of shamans as healers in the larger context of Yup'ik views on illness and wellness, both past and present. Through these gatherings, researchers hope to supplement shaman narratives recorded during previous gatherings as well as to deepen our understanding of current Yup'ik attitudes toward disease in general and the COVID pandemic in particular. Topics to be addressed will include epidemics of the past, traditional healing techniques (some still practiced), as well as current recollections and interpretations of shamanic activity. During this ongoing pandemic, few topics could be more appropriate.

Our project's second goal is to integrate information shared during the two gatherings with transcripts of previous recordings to complete a bilingual text on shamanism and traditional healing, including detailed accounts from more than 90 Yup'ik elders. The bilingual text will include elders' discussion of the significance of shamanism in Yup'ik oral tradition, good and bad shamans, and shamans as healers who could both interpret the cause of illness and help remove it from the patient's body. Much more than general accounts of anonymous angalkut, elders shared detailed recollections of their experiences with particular angalkut, providing a vivid history of their practices and personalities. PI Fienup-Riordan will provide an English introduction to the text, placing Yup'ik oral traditions concerning illness and wellness in the context of shamanism in Alaska as well as in other parts of the Arctic.

Our third goal is to engage one student intern during summer 2024 to work with ELOKA to create podcasts of selected shaman narratives and stories of traditional healers which he or she will post on the online Yup'ik Atlas. Our student intern's work adding content to the Yup'ik Atlas will be a significant step in the development of community-based research in southwest Alaska.

All logistics will be organized by the researcher and paid through the grant.