The First People

Northwestern Alaska was once a very warm country. Alaska was close to the sun. This continent had no winter and it was warm always.

The Kauwerak Eskimos’ ancestors were very large people. They were also healthy and very strong human beings. They lived long and were happy. They did not wear clothes. They never worried because they had everything they wanted. They did not work in their minds because they did not have to worry or think about how to survive.

There was a man, called Ekeuhnick, who lived in the ancient times before the First Disaster. His name means “burns like that which was burning and went out” — a glowing coal. Ekeuhnick was taught by an old wise man called Aungayoukuksuk. He appeared as a prophet to Ekeuhnick. Aungayoukuksuk came to teach Ekeuhnick so he might become a leading person to his people and to make known to them that he would be a leading person among them.

I

The People of Ekeuhnick’s Time

The stories of the old people, handed down from generation to generation, speak of the Eskimo people when the world was young. This is the way the old stories described the very first ancestors of the Eskimos of Northwest Alaska.

The Eskimo ancestors were very large in build and very strong in body. The women were built strong in body like men. Those people did not have to work in their minds to stay alive. That is, they did not have to think about how to make tools or use their resources around them to survive or to make themselves comfortable. They had no worries about living.

Everything was upon the earth. The sun was warm year round and there was no winter time like now. The people lived off the country. Everywhere they went they could find a place to stay. They used only rafts to go across the rivers and bays. In their time they never thought about building houses, boats, or other useful things because they did not need them. That is why the old people say the Eskimo’s ancestors did not use their minds like later times when they invented tools, clothes, houses, boats, and weapons. Before the first disaster they did not need them.

They had all kinds of animals on the land and fishes in the rivers. People in those old days lived a very long time. Many of them lived up to seeing the fifth or sixth generation after them. Then they died. In those days the men and women believed that when they died they went to another world.

Those long ago people had a wide nose and mouth and bigger eyes than now. They had hairs on their bodies and long hair on their heads. Their bodies were weatherbeaten and brown in color. They did not stay in one place. They had to rove around.

The people in those days did not know about ghosts or spirits and they were never scared, either.

Those early Eskimos did not need houses to live in. They lived like wild animals until after the First Disaster. Very few of them lived together. When a son or daughter found someone to become man and wife, they lived with one of their parents until later. When the parents became old they took care of them.

A time came when the people began to notice that the country was not as warm as it used to be. It was still a warm country, but people had to cover more ground to keep living the way they always did.

Many years later they felt the ground shaking. They didn’t know what it was. It was an earthquake, and the ground cracked and broke up in places. Until this happened, the people did not believe in spirits. They did not even know what a spirit was. When the earthquake happened the people began to have some worries. Because of the mighty shaking, they began to think there might be some sort of living being or something that got mad or cursed the earth. They thought there might be someone who was punishing them and there might be someone or something that might help them if they believed in it.

From that time on they began to think of spirits to help them.

After the great earthquake the Eskimo people began to look for others to find out what happened to them. They had a big gathering of the people for the first time. The older people talked together and decided they should stay close together from then on. They decided to live in one place together and make a village. Those Eskimos began to think about each other more than before. They began to talk about the resources around them and how they could have things on hand when they were needed.

People began to look forward. They decided to organize before another disaster came to them. This first village was only one of many that began. The population was great in those days. The Eskimos were so many they had to go many places in order to live.

As time passed, nearly every year great earthquakes were coming. That made the people change their way of living. They learned they had to help one another in order to survive. Their living changed from no worries about life to one of hardship. The people began to see the earth changing from the earthquakes. In some places the ground was sinking and new lakes were coming. In other places the ground was coming up. This made people begin to think about other and bigger disasters coming. They began to prepare for such a thing. They talked it over. They began to make things out of what they found around them. There were tools for making baskets, bags of hide and bark, pouches of animal guts, pots of clay, and equipment for packing and carrying and storing things, and equipment and tools for catching animals. Animals were mostly caught in snares and traps.

The people shared their ideas and what they learned with each other. But they came to understand they needed a leader. They needed to organize. They decided to appoint an older man to be the head leader or chief. This way they could talk over some things that needed to be done all together.

In those days there were no animals herded like livestock for the village to use. There were lots of animals around to hunt. There were no gardens or farms. Everything that was needed grew around the places the people lived without their help.

A day came which the ancient Eskimo people never expected. The sun came close to the full moon. Soon the sun went behind the moon. It happened around noon time. The sun eclipsed behind the moon and it was getting dark, but people could see because it was not real dark. There was a kind of reddened color everywhere and it got cold . It began to frost on the ground. The animals began to roam around . The birds began to fly everywhere. It seemed they forgot to be afraid of each other.

The people had no clothes to wear and they began to look for shelter. Some found caves. So were the animals looking for shelter. The birds were flying in every direction. The people could not hear much from each other because the birds and animals made so much noise.

The sun and moon stayed together for three days and three nights. Each day less and less noise could be heard. On the third day there were only a few little noises. On the fourth day, at noon, the sun came out from behind the moon, but it was still cold.

There were only a few people who survived to see what happened when the sun came out to shine on the world once more. Every plant, all the grass, and the fruits and berries were frozen. Even the birds and animals were dead. Only a few large animals still walked around.

Only four families were left after the First Disaster.

When it looked like the climate would get even harder to live in, and that other disasters might come, the people began to think about how they might need better tools and weapons. They talked it over with each other and with the leaders. They thought about how to use rocks and stones — things like jade and slate and hard rocks that would break off with sharp edges when they were hit the right way. They thought how to use driftwood and growing live wood, and bark and the sap and roots of the trees and plants. They thought about all the parts of the animals they could not eat and how they could be used. They experimented and soon made useful things — clothes, tools, bags and pouches to store things — from skins, bones, teeth, sinew, guts, and even the blood of animals.

One man thought about making a spear. He found a long piece of wood like a water willow. Then he found a pointed piece of rock. He fastened the rock to the end of the wood with a strip of animal skin. He tried it and it worked.

Some man took another kind of rock and put it on a short piece of wood to make a handle. He bound it together with rawhide and it made a hammer. Others made things, too. Some found rocks with sharp edges. They bound a rock with a sharp edge to a handle like a hammer, but this kind of tool made an ax for cutting wood. They made knives of all kinds out of sharp rocks. Sometimes they put wood or horn handles on them. They kept improving the first things they made until they had tools to do all the things they wanted to do.

The womenfolk made clothes out of fur skin. No longer were the bodies of the people uncovered and exposed to the sun and rain.

The weather was changing little by little every coming year. One day a man saw lots of fishes in the river. He was wondering if there was a way to catch more fish without fishing with a spear. This would be a better way. One day he ran across a spider web and found that some flies had been caught. He began to see that if he could only make something like that web out of something, he would catch many fish with it. So he thought it over.

All at once he took a piece of rawhide string and studied it and the web of the spider. He tied a knot in the end of two strings and then another knot a little farther along between the two strings. He was making a mesh. He worked at tying the strings of rawhide together until he made a net like the spiderweb. He worked at it a long time. Then he set it in the river. Next morning he looked in the net. Sure enough, he had caught two fish in it. The fish were hanging to the net.

When he took the two fish the net twisted so bad he thought about how to keep the net straight. He found two long roots of a tree. He put them through the top and bottom lines of the net. Then he tied one end of the net to the ground on the bank of the river. Only the bottom of the net was not tied down. He thought a rock might keep it down. So, he put rock weights on the bottom of the net. Then he went home. Next morning, when he looked in the net, there were lots of fish in it. He brought the others and let them look. Since that happened, the Eskimos have made the nets better and better.

Once, a man cut a big tree. Then he chipped out some wood from the middle of the tree to make a hollow. After he finished it, he tried it to see if it would float in water. He took it out in the water with a long pole. He could go wherever he wanted to. That was the first boat built. After that, everyone built a boat for themselves. The boats got larger and better. They made paddles out of animal shoulder blades fastened to wood poles. Later they made the paddles all of wood from end to end.

One man thought about how wind might be useful for a boat. He saw a leaf blow off from the water willow tree into the water. The leaf was bent and dried by the sun. When it landed in the water the wind took it across the river in no time. So, the man imagined how he could make a sail out of light skin and the wind would blow the boat away along the water. That would be a new way to travel. He tried this idea after sewing a few hairless skins together to make a sail. His idea was successful. The wind took the boat across the lake. He only had to steer it. After the people saw this happen, all the others began to build boats with a sail.

So, the Eskimo people built more and more things. One man looked into a mouse hole in the ground. The mouse had made a home in the high dry ground. He had nice dry grass stored in the hole to sleep in and to keep warm in the nights. That mouse had found roots and seeds to eat and stored them in his home.

The man told the others about the mouse building his dry home in the ground, keeping warm, and how he gathered and stored away food for the cold time. The people began to build their homes to keep warm in the nights while they slept and to keep dry from the rain. Their houses were half in the ground and the upper part was covered with earth. Those houses were really warm.

Some other Eskimos learned to build homes from the ants.

The people learned to travel using the sun by day and the stars at night for direction. When a person traveled in the daytime he looked carefully at the place where he was. He felt where the wind was coming from. When it was stormy he looked at the blowing snow or into the way the grass was bent by the wind. He also looked to see which way a snow drift pointed.

One day, in winter time, a man cut a hole in the ice on the river to fill a wooden bucket for water. He looked through the hole into the bottom of the river. He saw lots of fishes going up the river. He came back to the house and told the others about what he saw. Then they talked about the fish and how they were going to catch them. Finally, one of the children went to look into the water.

Sure enough, there were lots of fish. So, he went and cut a young water willow. He sharpened one end, and began to spear those fishes right through the hole in the ice. He came up to the house with two fish. He laid them on top of the house. The people came out to see them. Those fish were stiff frozen. They had not seen this before in their lives. Those people had no idea of how to eat them. They left them lay there.

Pretty soon the boy was getting hungry. He took up one of those fish and tasted it. It sure tasted good, and he ate it all. He told the others. They first found out frozen fish are good to eat from that boy. Many people made spears for fishing through the ice. Lots of men, women, and children have speared fish through the ice since then.

II

The People of Beeueoak’s Time

The time passed and the lives of the people changed as the climate and land became different. In some things they had, their old ways seemed never forgotten. The Second Disaster came. It was a terrible flood and all the land was covered with water. Only three families survived.

They found better ways to live, yet they found some things did not need to be changed. They did find, as centuries passed, many ways to make their living easier and there were many, many more people, many more families, and lots of villages came.

One time some of the young men were far off. They ran into another village and found a man who made a weapon that could kill any kind of animal that is not too big. The young men told the other village that where they came from they had different kinds of tools they could make. Also, they had something to catch fish called “nets.” It was decided that a man would come to the young men’s village with his weapon. He would bring a woman. She would show the womenfolk of the young men’s village an invention of some sort used for making clothes.

Finally, the two visitors arrived — a man and his wife. The people gave them a really good home to live in while they stayed. The visitors and the village learned a lot from each other about the useful things the people of the two villages could make. Now, at last the village saw the weapon.

It was made out of a long piece of wood. It was a hard piece of wood with a rawhide string tied on each end. It was named sutguhk, bow. It used a light length of wood as long as the bow. This slim shaft had a very sharp piece of bone on one end and was called kugruhk, arrow.

This weapon was real powerful. It was strong enough to kill caribou or even bear. It killed squirrels, ptarmigan, and birds of all kinds. Everyone wanted to have one for himself. So, they made bows with arrows for every man.

The visitor’s wife was sewing. She sewed squirrel skins together for a parka. She made foot mukluks. The other women in the village asked her what kind of a piece of bone was used to sew them together.

She told them it was a needle made of bone. Her husband had made it from a piece of bone off a squirrel leg. He took the piece of bone and made it sharp on one end and put a hole in the other. She told them she used sinew of the caribou for thread to sew the pieces of skin or fur together. She explained the sinew came from the legs and also from the back of the caribou. She showed the womenfolk how to twist those sinews together to make one long string. It was good strong thread.

The woman’s husband learned how to make nets to catch fish. He also learned how to make tools of all kinds. Then they took a net for fish and some tools to their home village when their visit was over. They could share those with other villages, too.

III

The People of Anayuhk’s Time

The way the Eskimo people lived did not change much after the Third Disaster except for one thing. After the Second Disaster, people were moving around living by the land and seeing all the changes that came after the flooding. Sometimes two or three families stayed together. They built their spring time hunting and fishing camps and their fall camps. They usually built houses where they stayed in the winter time. Mostly, they had caribou-skin tents they put up at their camps. Sometimes they built houses there, too, if the fishing and hunting stayed good and they had good luck in that place. That is why they were scattered. They moved around where the hunting and fishing stayed good.

Before the whalers came the Eskimos lived by the land. They made their tools and other things from the rocks and minerals around them and from the parts of the plants and animals. They had learned lots of things already about making weapons to hunt and traps and nets to catch fish and birds.

Before Anayuhk grew up to be a man and for a while later, the Kaweramiut (the people of Imuruk Basin) traveled everywhere. They lived in places called English names today. They lived at Cape Darby, Cape Nome, Sledge Island, King Island, Little Diomede Island, Cape Wooley, Wales, Cape Espenberg, Kotzebue, and all the way past Point Hope. After the Third Disaster, there were only a few people. The ancestors said that only seven Kaweramiut people were left. There were two people left at Point Hope (Tigamuit) who were not Kaweramiut. There may have been others living up near Wainright and Point Barrow, but nobody went that far. They did not go south farther than St. Michaels so the stories do not tell what happened down there.

Those few Kauwerak people, living after the Third Disaster, stayed mostly in Imuruk Basin. There was plenty for everyone and they were working to build their families up strong again. The new generations sometimes went to other places to live. The Kauwerak country was full of good hunting so many of the men stayed there and others came and found girls to be a wife to them. Sometimes they stayed there, too. That is how the population grew in this part of Alaska.

The people found most of what they needed in Imuruk Basin and along the coast near Port Clarence. There were plenty of seals and beluga as well as caribou and other animals and different kinds of fish. There was a place under Birch Hill where they could find green stone like jade. It was hard. They could hit it with other stones a certain way and it chipped off with a real sharp edge. They learned to make arrow points and spear points with it. They used this stone mostly for spears to hunt bear because it did not break as easily as slate or ivory.

There was a place near Glacier Lake up in the mountains where there was a lot of slate. The men would have to wear their mittens or wrap their hands in skins to pull it out; it was so sharp. The slate stone came out of the mountain in big, thin, flat pieces. It was so sharp on the edges that when the geese built their nests up there, it cut the webs on their feet.

The Kauwerak men used to go to that place and get plenty of those sharp pieces. Then they would bring them home and fix them into knives and oolus. When they made an oolu, they would use a hard stone like a piece of quartz. They would make a groove in the slate where they wanted to shape it. After they made the groove, they could hold it in their hands and snap the piece off the blade. The women had to be careful not to break their oolus because they were brittle. They used to keep them in a little skin bag with an ivory piece carved like a bird or a seal used to fasten it shut like a button in a loop.

For a long time, the womenfolk did not have handles on their oolus. They just used the blade plain. Then, one time, when they were trading at Point Spencer, they saw the Siberian women had ivory handles on their oolus. After that, the Kauwerak women had wood or horn handles put on their oolus.

All during this time while the population was growing, the ancestors’ stories do not tell about any troubles with the Siberians. They say sometime after Kauwerak was built, the wars began. There is a story about this. It happened during the time of Kauwerak village.

Even though the Siberians caused a lot of trouble and sometimes many people were killed, there were no more Disasters until 1917 when the terrible sicknesses began to kill so many of the Eskimo people. When the first big ships came there was some sickness but it did not seem to spread too much. Then the whalers came. They brought some sickness, too. The real bad times did not come until the miners came to look for gold. Not too many years after that, the Fourth Disaster came.

IV

THE PEOPLE OF KAUWERAK

The Eskimo population grew after so many years. Most of their places they settled along the ocean coast along Seward Peninsula north and up the rivers. There was no way to visit with other people in Alaska except the King Islanders and Little Diomede Islanders until after many years passed. The people of these islands had the same ancestors as the Kauwerak and they shared their ideas with each other.

In those days, the people did not visit with the Siberian people on Big Diomede or even the St. Lawrence Island people. They did trade a little bit, though, to get engagement presents for the women.

When the time came for an Eskimo to take a wife, he looked around for woman he would like to live with the rest of his life. When he found one he liked, he watched her. He looked to see how she could work. He watched to see how many good jobs she could do. He looked carefully to see if she would make a good wife and if he could make a good family with her. She had to be an honest person ready for a husband, for an Eskimo man cannot be shamed by his wife. He also had to be honest to her. The man had to be a good hunter and ready to be a good provider for the family he and his wife would make.

When a man found a woman he wanted for a wife, if she wanted him, he had to become engaged to her. First, he had to go hunting. He looked for land otter and killed five or six of them. He took the otters to the people from Siberia, the Russian land. He traded the skins for two long strings of beads and some short strings. The short strings stretched from ear to ear and had hooks on each end made out of ivory. The beads were given as an engagement present because in those days the Eskimos did not have beads, rings, or other kinds of precious jewelry for giving away.

In those days, like now, an Eskimo man and woman had to think of many things before they began living together as man and wife. They knew that Eskimos had to be alert for the times when their family circumstances would change. They had to look forward to many responsibilities and the work that a family would bring. They had to prepare in advance for changes that would come as time passed.

The arrival of a baby meant that one had to move to a new home of their own and had much more work. They would have to provide for their own needs and for that of the baby and the other babies to be made later. When babies came it was no longer right to live in the home of the family of childhood time. Sometimes, when people were wanting to be married, they did not think that babies coming would be a threat to their marriage. People had to look forward to the babies that would be made and be prepared for them. Then there would be happiness and new homes in the village. When it was the time for a marriage, the first thing Eskimos had to consider was the children that would be coming sometime.

As more and more babies were made, the population grew. One of the first big villages of the Seward Peninsula was called Kauwerak. It grew in a place where the Eskimo people used to seine for fishes.

There was a place all flat along the Kuzitrin River. Where the river goes into Salt Lake there was a little gravel sand bar. This was a good place to get the fishes of many kinds that came up the river. There were many birds and animals all around the place. The old people said it was a good place to stay. Soon a village grew on top of the flat bank of the river by the little gravel bar.

The old men told the people they must not disturb the ground around the place where they were going to build the houses. They told the people to go some distance from the village place and get the earth and sod to cover the parts of the houses that stood up above the ground. They told them to pack the earth to the village site on their backs or to work together in pairs to haul the sod in skins. This was so the ground around the village would not be broken up.

Later, when the dance house was finished, the old people said: “We should call this place for the little gravel bar in the river in front of the village. We will call this place Kauwerak.”

The village grew larger. The men hunted far away from the village. In those days the Eskimos communicated with each other by smoke signals, by stick waving, and by waving their parkas. They had special signs that everyone understood and they could make things known to each other from great distances.

In later times, one of the big villages of the Kauwerak Eskimos was called Aukvaunlook. This means black whale. The village was on the Kuzitrin River. In 1900 a man named T. L. Davidson called the place Mary’s Igloo because an Eskimo woman who helped him out once lived there. She was called Mary, and he told others the village on the Kuzitrin River was the place of Mary’s Igloo. Once someone put a mark on a map for Aukvaunlook and said it was Mary’s Igloo. That is what that place is called today.

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