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Tengautuli Atkuk / The Flying Parka

The Meaning and Making of Parkas in Southwest Alaska

By Ann Fienup-Riordan, Alice Rearden, and Marie Meade

A unique collaboration celebrating the importance of parkas in Yup'ik material culture

Parkas are part of a living tradition in southwest Alaska. Some are ornamented with tassels, beads, and elaborate stitching; others are simpler fur or...

Ellavut / Our Yup'ik World and Weather

Continuity and Change on the Bering Sea Coast

By Ann Fienup-Riordan and Alice Rearden

Ellavut / Our Yup'ik World and Weather is a result of nearly ten years of gatherings among Yup'ik elders to document the qanruyutet (words of wisdom) that guide their interactions with the environment. In an...

Qaluyaarmiuni Nunamtenek Qanemciput / Our Nelson Island Stories

By Edited by Ann Fienup-Riordan. Translated by Alice Rearden

In this volume Nelson Island elders describe hundreds of traditionally important places in the landscape, from camp and village sites to tiny sloughs and deep ocean channels, contextualizing them through stories of how people interacted...

Agayuliyararput/Our Way of Making Prayer

Kegginaqut, Kangiit-llu/Yup'ik Masks and the Stories They Tell

By Marie Meade, Ann Fienup-Riordan

Drawing on the remembrances of elders who were born in the early 1900s and saw the last masked Yup’ik dances before missionary efforts forced their decline, Agayuliyararput is a collection of first-person accounts of the...

Yup’ik Elders at the Ethnologisches Museum Berlin

Fieldwork Turned on Its Head

By Ann Fienup-Riordan. Foreword by Peter Bolz. Photographs by Barry McWayne

Norwegian adventurer Johan Adrian Jacobsen collected more than two thousand Yup'ik objects during his travels in Alaska in 1882 and 1883. Now housed in the Berlin Ethnological Museum, the Jacobsen collection remains one of the...

Paitarkiutenka / My Legacy to You

By Frank "Miisaq" Andrew, Sr.. Edited by Ann Fienup-Riordan

Yup'ik elders of southwest Alaska recall, “Our ancestors were never heavy with a tool kit.” They carried in their minds what they needed to live rich lives in the harsh environment of the Bering Sea...

Yuungnaqpiallerput / The Way We Genuinely Live

Masterworks of Yup'ik Science and Survival

By Ann Fienup-Riordan

Honorable mention for the Victor Turner Award for Ethnographic Writing from the Society for Humanistic Anthropology

Honorable mention for the 2008 William Mills Prize for Non-Fiction Polar Books

Survival in the harsh subarctic environment requires great resourcefulness...

Ciuliamta Akluit / Things of Our Ancestors

Yup'ik Elders Explore the Jacobsen Collection at the Ethnologisches Museum Berlin

By Marie Meade, Ann Fienup-Riordan

In the 1880s, the Norwegian-born traveler Johan Adrian Jacobsen spent a year in Alaska and amassed an unprecedented collection of Yup'ik material culture that eventually made its way to Germany’s most prominent ethnographic museum. More...

Stories for Future Generations / Qulirat Qanemcit-llu Kinguvarcimalriit

The Oratory of Yup'ik Elder Paul John

By Paul John. Translated by Sophie Shield. Edited by Ann Fienup-Riordan

Before it was written, this book was spoken. For ten winter days in 1977, the orator Paul John—widely respected as a dean of Yup’ik elders, and recognized for his tireless advocacy of Yup’ik language and...