Book
Lore of St. Lawrence Island - Echoes of our Eskimo Elders -- 3 Volumes
Publish date:
January 1, 1985
Volume 2 of the Lore of St. Lawrence Island, like Volume 1, is a collection of authentic narratives related by the elders living on this island in the Bering Sea, some 150 miles southwest of Nome, but only 40 miles from the Chukotsky Peninsula in Soviet Siberia.
The chapters in Volume 1 were contributed by the elders of the village of Gambell. The contents of this volume, on the other hand, are by the elders of Savoonga, the only other village on the island today.
In this volume you will find --in both the original Eskimo and a parallel English translation-- the accounts of twelve elders who were born at the turn of the century.
Their stories reveal for us a way of life relatively untouched by western culture. They describe early island history, the introduction of reindeer herding, and the consequent birth and growth of the village of Savoonga.
Authors
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Topics
Facultative Carnivore | Facultative Carnivore describes the concept of animals that are technically omnivores but who thrive off of all meat diets. Humans may just be facultative carnivores - who need no plant products for long-term nutrition. | |
Eskimo | The Inuit lived for as long as 10,000 years in the far north of Canada, Alaska, and Greenland and likely come from Mongolian Bering-Strait travelers. They ate an all-meat diet of seal, whale, caribou, musk ox, fish, birds, and eggs. Their nutritional transition to civilized plant foods spelled their health demise. | |
Carnivore Diet | The carnivore diet involves eating only animal products such as meat, fish, dairy, eggs, marrow, meat broths, organs. There are little to no plants in the diet. |
History Entries - 10 per page
Friday, January 2, 1920
The Lore of St. Lawrence Island - Volume 2
An Inuit woman describes how the reindeer were used on the island of St Lawrence - the importance of fat and how only some people ate the liver and kidneys.
Elsie Kava - page 97 - Volume 2 - Date is a rough guess.
Every part of the reindeer can be eaten. The jowls, the ears, the velvet on the antlers, and the knuckles are barbecued and eaten.
The stomach is first removed. Then, the fat on the outside of the stomach, called pugughyi, is peeled off very carefully without puncturing the stomach. Next, some of the contents of the stomach are squeezed out, while some is left in the stomach to ferment and be eaten later. That part of the stomach, called alamka, is washed thoroughly and eaten raw. The alamka, which has the texture like the nap of a towel, is rinsed thoroughly along with the stomach and eaten.
Somewhere in the reindeer is a part called the kevighqat This is turned inside out and filled with fat from another reindeer. The container it makes is called a keviq. The large intestine also is turned inside out so that the fat [on it] can be stored inside. Our family did not eat the kidneys nor the livers, but some people did.
The fat on the intestines is carefully peeled off all the way around and removed. Then the glands [on the intestines] are removed. There is a lot of this fat and when it is removed it takes on a tubular shape. Everything in the body of a reindeer is eaten.
Fall reindeer hides, which have thick fur, are used for bedding. In the spring, when the reindeer are shedding, the fur becomes scruffy. The fur gets very thin and the hair is short. This was saved for parka trim. Sometime in the month of July the fawn hides were ideal for clothing. The length of the hair had gotten just right and was of good quality. Even the hair on the adult reindeer got short.
Fawning began in April and only men took part in it. They worked in shifts of a week at a time.
We used to be there at Ivgaq when the reindeer would come to the camp on their own to give birth to their fawns. We would lie down and watch them giving birth. As soon as the fawns dried off, they began to walk and run with the mother. If there was a snowstorm while tending to the fawning, we used tents. Reindeer herders used tents at fawning time. There were lots of reindeer in those days.
Friday, January 2, 1920
The Lore of St Lawrence Island - Volume 2
Sometimes Inuit hunters would get trapped on ice floes over the entire winter, and would catch seals and then process the intestines into strands of beads full of snow to melt it with their body heat for drinking water.
Sometimes the Inuit hunters on St. Lawrence Island would be on an ice floe that breaks off the island and drifts through the ocean. This is a story about how they survived.
If the current carries them out pretty far, it will carry them around to the north side of the island. But if they drifted close in, the current would carry them south and away from the island. This is how they spent the winter. When the wind would die down, the current would take them swiftly north. They could see the Gambell mountain grow bigger, but when the north wind came up, they would see the mountain shrink again.
By the time the days began to get longer [in early March], they lost hope of getting back to the island. Mount Ayvikan [on the southwest part of the island] is the last mountain which can be seen. By this time, they had lost sight of that too. Now they could see nothing but the sea around them. They lived on a large ice floe. I think they made a shelter somewhere on it. When the wind died down, ice would form around the floe. The men would hunt for seals on this new-formed ice. In the beginning they had only one problem: no water.
The men caught a walrus or a bearded seal. They made containers from the processed intestines and filled them with snow so that their body heat could melt it. They then looped the intestines like strands of beads around their bodies between their inner and outer parkas. Our forefathers knew what they were doing. Their body heat melted the snow. This is how the men solved their water problem.