The people made a village on top of the flat bank at the sand bar. The old people told them it would be better to make the village there. The old men said eyeryone would have to haul tundra ground (sod blocks) to the place for building. They told the people to pack it on their backs in skins. They could also pack it in pairs using big skins like baskets. They told those people to go far away from the building place to get the sod so it would not break the ground up around the village. The old men planned that village so it would be a safe and a happy, clean place to live. They told the people how to build it.
Later, in the dance house (kazghi) the old people said, “We should call this place Kauwerak because of the sand and gravel bar in front of it. That is how my people came to be called the Kauweramiut.”
For a long, long time people lived at the village called Kauwerak. Today the high mound of tundra ground can be seen standing above the level land from many miles away. Up close, the sunken places on either side of the mound show where the houses and the kazghi used to be. Moss and berry bushes grow where the great battle with the Siberian warriors took place. Sometimes old things wash up on the beach by the abandoned village. The birds nest where the children used to play and the musk oxen, reindeer, and fox move about where the people of Kauwerak once set their snares and harvested other animals to feed their families.
There was one man that everybody knew was the leading man in that village. White people call him a “chief.” This man was the leader because he was a good hunter, he had good luck in what he wanted to do and his family was healthy with many people in it. He was a rich man and he helped the people in the village when they needed it. People asked his advice. He always knew what to do. If he told people wrong, he would not be the leader. There was no special name for the man who was the leading person in a village. When people found a good leader, they usually lived near the same place where he built his house.
A grandma and a boy or girl, or a poor couple always had their home at the end of the village. The leader of the village always helped them whenever he caught a seal or caribou. Anything that he caught — fish or meat — he shared with them.
There were many strict rules to be obeyed. If the leader was careless about it, the rules were broken many times. If the leader did favors for his people, they were required to obey and respect him. A leader that always helped his people was always respected and honored by them. He must always help his people with whatever they needed. As a rule, the people must always obey their leader. If he is only a good leader, but he is not a good ruler (judge/provider/leader) they always went away to some other place. They usually went somewhere by themselves where there was no one to tell them what to do. Some families liked to stay where there were lots of people. Other families liked to stay in a quiet place and they built their homes far from a village.
Many people liked to stay in a village where they had people to share good and bad times. They could have dancing in the evening and play games. The kazghi was the place for dancing, hearing stories, wrestling, high kicking, and many other Eskimo games to make people strong. Boys and young men learned what to do when the time came to live by the land or to fight the Siberian warriors or others when they came to Kauwerak land without asking.
No matter where the people finally lived, they put their village where they could catch the most fish all seasons. The Eskimos have always built their houses where they could get tomcod year round. At other times, some families would stay inland in the river country where they could catch ptarmigan and rabbits or lingcod in the rivers. They made their homes where they could harvest food in the winter or in those times when the stormy weather lasted long, because in those times their stored provisions would run out and they would begin to get hungry. They did not have many nets and traps, or stores to buy food, like we have now. That is why they stayed right close to where they could fish for tomcod or seal. They hung them to dry in the summer. They ate them dry, fresh or frozen in the winter with seal oil. Sometimes they starved. Other times they had plenty of food.
If a family was large, they could not stay in the village all the time. The had to stay where they could find a better place to catch fish or hunt game to provide for everyone all year long.
Houses were a rounded shape made of water willow frame. They put blocks of ground sod outside with grass next to the frame. The top had grass laid on it. After that, a layer of mud was packed around the top. A window was built into the roof. It was made out of seal gut sewn together to make one big piece. They got real good light through the gut, even if they could not see through it.
They used seal oil lamps made out of clay. These were shaped half-round on the front side and the back part was square. People who lived inland used fish oil or caribou fat for oil to burn in the lamp. The coast people used seal oil.
Later on, our forefathers used nets and traps to catch fish. They used nets to catch seal and white whales. They used harpoon spears for walrus, seals, oogruk, and the black whales. They used snares for birds and the big and small animals on the land. They used traps and spears to catch bigger animals, too. They built corrals of water willows and drove the caribou to them where they could kill them with spears and knives. Those old corrals looked almost like reindeer corrals they use today. There are a lot of places around Kauwerak that look like little hills with moss growing out of them. These are big piles of caribou antlers or bones left from where a corral used to be. Sometimes, part of the corral is still there. The bones are broken open so people could get the marrow to eat.
There used to be wars between the Eskimos and the Naukan and Uelen people of Siberia. The fighting came in the summertime. The warriors from Siberia came across with their skin boats. They were trying to take the land. They also wanted some womenfolk because they brought a good price in useful things in Siberia. They wanted other things, too, like white fox and a special rock (metal) from the people of Kauwerak. They liked this metal to make their pipe bowls for smoking the white tobacco. A man of Naukan or Uelen who had a metal pipe was a rich man.
Kauwerak village was inland about forty miles from where Teller is today. It was about seventy miles from Nome and was in Imuruk Basin near the upper end of the big Salt Lake. There was a blind aungutguhk that lived in Imuruk Basin. He was always right every time he told the people things in the big kazghi at the village.
At an evening gathering, one time, the blind man told the people many Siberian warriors would come. He said they should ask the leading men of the village to send a watchman with a kayak to go down to the upper end of Tuksuk. That man should watch from the top of Kaukreouevick, a high hill where he could see both Tuksuk and Salt Lake. They could see the Siberians coming in plenty of time to let Kauwerak village know trouble was coming. This was a good place for the men to make arrows. Several men decided to stay all the time during the warm weather to watch for the Siberians. When they saw them coming, they counted the skin boats. Then they ran to their kavaks on the beach behind the hill and hurried to Kauwerak to warn the people. Sometimes, when there was a lot of trouble, the women would hide along the banks of Tuksuk. When the Siberian skin boats came, they threw heavy rocks at the warriors or swam under the water and cut the bottoms of the boats. A lot of Siberians drowned when this happened. Three boats are probably still on the bottom at Kuthlitkitooit (Narrows).
The Siberians had shields for their bodies. They used old, dry walrus skin over the upper part of their body to protect them from arrows. This covered only around their chest and back. There was nothing around their arms or legs.
The last battle fought by the Eskimos and the Siberians in Alaska was at Kauwerak village. All the Siberians were killed except one man. After the first battle, they had sent only two men they did not kill back to Siberia to tell what happened. They were told to warn their leading men not to send any more warriors. The last time they sent only one man back to tell the Siberian people not to send any more warriors to Kauwerak. They said, “Next time, all the men would be killed and no one would come back to tell what happened.”
Around the year 1902, I, William A. Oquilluk, saw a lot of men’s skulls all piled up here and there behind Kauwerak (Sand Bar) village. Grandfather told me, “These are from the last time of war.”
Those skulls were all dry and the sun had baked them real white. This showed that the war was not too long ago. Grandfather saw it. He was old enough to go hunting with bows and arrows. He told me about the fighting. He said that some times Kauwerak had to send for help from the Fish River villages over near White Mountain. He told me, “We did this when the blind aungutguhk said he saw that the warriors were going to be many.
The first white man to come by Aukvaunlook (Mary’s Igloo) was on his way to Imachuck. His name was T. L. Davidson. He went up the Kuzitrin River and passed by Bunker Hill. Then he went by the Kougarok River, past Taylor and stayed there until the snow was gone.
An Eskimo man and his family stayed between Noxapaga and the place called Mary’s Igloo. This man used to go hunting and set snares for ptarmigan and rabbits in the winter months. He also fished through the ice on the river.
One day, he put snowshoes on his feet, took his seal skin hunting bag to hold rabbits and ptarmigan from the snares, and a hatchet with a jade-stone blade. He also took his knife, bow, and arrows. He was going down the river to his snares. It was early in the morning.
The Eskimo went around a river bend. He saw someone coming up from below on the ice. It seemed this person was pulling a sled behind him. There were no dogs with the man.
The Eskimo stopped and watched the man coming. The Eskimo pulled out his bow, put the string tight, and put out one of his arrows. The strange person was getting closer. He stopped before he got too close. There they stood in the middle of the river, looking at each other.
It was the first time the Eskimo man had seen a strange man like that with such strange clothes on his body. There were no mukluks on his feet, either. The Eskimo thought, “Is this man a real human man like me, or is he only a spirit?”
Pretty soon the strange man got down on his knees. He put his two hands together and said strange words. The Eskimo could not understand him. Finally the man made signs with one finger. He made one long sign downward and one across. Then he stood up.
The Eskimo never moved. He still held his bow ready. The white man came toward him with a hand out-stretched to the Eskimo. When he got close he smiled at him, and at the same time grabbed his hand. The stranger pumped the Eskimo’s hand up and down and made motions for him to put the bow and arrow in his carrying case on his back. Then the white man made motions to ask the Eskimo to take him to his home. They walked away together.
Pretty soon they came to the Eskimo’s house. The Eskimo told his wife what had happened. He told her how he happened to meet this strange man down the river. He told her he brought him home because he was the same image as they were, a human being.
Then the Eskimo went out to his shed and brought in his spear. He put it at his side. He brought in all his belongings from the shed into the house. His house was built with lots of water willow trees for a frame. This was covered with blocks of sod. It was a warm house.
The white man gave some needles to the woman. He gave a knife to the man. They were glad to get them and they smiled at him for the gifts. They no longer watched him close after that.
The man had strange food. They gave him boiled rabbit meat. He was glad to have it, too. After he ate, the white man motioned to the Eskimo to go out. The Eskimo took his spear and he looked at the white man. Then he said a few words to his wife. The white man did not know what the words meant.
The men went out. The white man took something strange from under the cover of the sled. The Eskimo had never seen anything like it. The white man put one part into the hole of another part. He locked it together. Then he pointed it to a tree stub across the river. He motioned to the Eskimo to look at it. The white man put the long thing up to his shoulder and shot it. It was a 30/30 long barrel gun! The Eskimo was afraid and ran into the house because the noise was so loud. He thought, “This white man is starting something bad now.”
The Eskimo grabbed his spear and was ready to kill the strange man. The white man slowly grabbed the spear and put it beside the house. Then he pointed across to the stub.
The Eskimo looked. It was gone.
The Eskimo thought, “This must be some big aungutguhk — more than an Eskimo aungutguhk — because he broke the stub off from the tree. He did it from clear across the river.”
Pretty soon the white man took the Eskimo across the river to explain that the shell and bullet did the damage when he shot the gun. Soon the Eskimo learned what the stranger meant. Next he was going to try out the gun like the white man did. The white man pointed out another stub. The Eskimo was going to try to knock the stub off like the other time. He pulled the trigger. There was a loud bang. He looked across the river. The stub was gone!
The white man patted the Eskimo with a big smile and gave him a gun with ten boxes of shells. Now the Eskimo man would do anything for this strange white man because he was a new friend. There were no other men around like him. Then the white man spread out a map. The Eskimo had never seen anything like that before, either. It looked as though this thing had the same shape as the coast and the land, and all the rivers were marked and showed on it. The white man pointed out he wanted to go a special place. He asked the Eskimo if he knew that place.
Of course the Eskimo knew the place. He knew every bit of that land. The white man motioned he wanted the Eskimo to be his guide to that place. The Eskimo agreed.
Two or three days later the men started out. They pulled the white man’s sled. It turned out the white man wanted to go to a place called Candle now. They did not go far. They went as far as Kougarok River. The white man said he was going to stay there. He said maybe he would find some gold there.
The Eskimo went back to his family. The white man sure did find good ground. He worked the Kougarok for five or ten years. Then he was getting pretty old. His name was Thor Davidson. He was a good friend and many Eskimo people knew him.
That white man came around 1909 and died before the flu came in 1918.
In other centuries, it was our ancestors’ custom for a daughter-in-law to be as a servant for her husband’s home and also for her parents’ home.
There were many ways to win a girl to become a wife. It was not an easy task to become husband and wife. They had no way to marry with a license or a ceremony. A man had to show a young girl’s parents he would be a good husband. An older woman could ask a man to be husband to her, even if she had never been a wife.
If a man had many skins of caribou or fox, he had to give them to the girl’s parents. He had to help them by giving them gifts of any kind of fur skins in order to get her to become his wife. He helped with the hunting for the girl’s family.
Sometime a man had to look for a woman from village to village to find one to suit him. When he found her, he had to be smart and clever to get her to become his wife. Sometimes a man had to travel very far to find what he wanted. He sometimes had to go by dog team or boat. He had to find a girl who did not have someone already to be a husband to her.
When a man was rich enough to have two, three or four wives, no one could stop him. That was his own business. After a few years, this made many people related in both far and near villages to this one man. If this man’s four wives had a lot of children, they spread all over the country from place to place. Then they would each raise families in those other places. This went on from generation to generation. Therefore, from east to west and north to south, those four women’s children spread out with their families over much country. No matter where they were, from generation to generation, the relations are remembered from those ancestors. People in different places found new ways of living to suit the lands where they settled.
In this time, this relationship is starting to be forgotten. It is slowly fading away among the Eskimos. Too many young children do not have any old folks to tell them who their relations are and who they were.
Even the language is beginning to be forgotten. Many children do not know the Eskimo dialects. They talk only in English. One time, there were different dialects in each village all along the coast. Also, it was this way among the inland peoples. Once there was only one dialect. In those days, they could understand each other from Golovin up to Barter Island.
St. Lawrence Island people have many relatives in Siberia. Their language stayed almost the same as the Siberian people. They still use many of the same words. It is hard for the mainland people to understand.
King Islanders have a different dialect from the mainland language, but it has many of the same words. It sounds like the words of China or Japan, but other people can understand them just the same.
Diomede Islanders have a different dialect from King Islanders and also the mainlanders. But it is more like the mainlander. The only difference is in the way the words are said.
The Eskimos learned the English language quite easily. When they really stood up to protect themselves they would say “No!” to something they did not like. They meant “no.” That word “no” started real trouble because Eskimos from generation to generation have found that nowadays the word “no” means trouble.
The whaling ships used to travel along the Bering Sea, through the Straits, and north along the coast. There was a whaling station at Tigaruk (Pt. Hope) and one at Pt. Barrow in those days. There were piles of coal for the ships to use along the shore, too. Some of the whaling companies built storehouses at the stations. They would leave the wooden whale boats behind when they left after whaling season. They would leave a watchman to take care of them. In the springtime, they would take out the boats, scrape off the old paint, then they would fix up the boats and put new paint on them. They did this to get ready for the next season when the whale ships would come again. Sometimes they put new masts on them and fixed up the sails.
My grandfather, Etorina, worked with a man they called Thompson. He did not leave when the season was over that year. He stayed behind to take care of the boats all winter. Another whaling outfit left someone behind at Pt. Barrow to do the same thing. I never heard his whole name, but someone said he was called “Jackson.” He was a doxivuk (black man). He had his son with him at that place.
The doxivuk had a boat different than the ones other people used. It was wider, like a whale boat, but it looked like it was cut off in the back and was flat on the hind end. One day the doxivuk needed some things he did not have at Pt. Barrow. He decided to go to Pt. Hope and try to get them there. He and his son started out in the wooden boat. That is the way the grandfathers used to tell it, anyway.
It was in the springtime. It had been stormy weather for two or three days. Etorina decided to walk up the beach and see if a walrus or some other animal had washed up on the land. He could use it for bait in his traps. Pretty soon, he came to some rocks. He could see something sitting there. When he got a little closer, he saw it was a little boy. When he got to him, he asked him, “How come you are sitting here all by yourself?”
The boy couldn’t talk Eskimo, but Grandfather could understand a little English. The boy pointed out on the water. Etorina looked around. He saw that doxivuk’s boat washing over and over in the waves up the beach. The boy said he had been coming down with his dad from Pt. Barrow to get something they needed for the boats. While they were coming down, the wind changed to the North. They were sailing, they did not have motors in those days. Etorina had quite a time tying up that boat so it would not keep washing in and out against the shore. There was not much of a place to tie it, but there was a lot of coal around. He finally wrapped a rope around one of the piles of coal to hold the boat and stop it from going in and out.
Then Etorina told the boy, “We better look for your dad.” They went up the beach. They found the man about a quarter of a mile away from the boat. He was washing back and forth in the waves. Grandpa put the man on dry land and piled rocks and coal over him so the ravens or other birds or animals would not eat him before they could come back. Then he took the little boy home to his house.
Etorina told the Pt. Hope people, “There is a boat up there on the beach, and a man is drowned. I found this boy sitting on the beach.” Some of the men went back with Grandpa and they brought the doxivuk’s body back to Tigaruk. Thompson wanted the people to bury the body. So, they dug in the ground. They did not put the body on the cradle of crossed beachwood like people usually do. They buried him the white-man way. Thompson stuck a small log split in half with the other half nailed across at the top in the place where they put him in the ground. He put it at the head of the grave. People did not know then what the cross was for.
This was the first time Eskimo people had seen a dead man put in the ground like that. They were wondering and talking about it. “Why did the white man do that way?” Thompson must have told them why it was, but it was a new thing and people did not understand it.
Etorina and his wife kept the boy. He learned to eat some of the things Eskimo people like. They taught him how to talk some Eskimo. Pretty soon, he could play with the other children and answer them when they talked to him. He was a pretty smart fellow.
After a while we could see four masts — just the top part of them — sticking up out in the ocean. This meant a whaling ship was anchored out from Pt. Hope. It was so shallow that you could just barely see the masts sticking up out from the ocean. You could not see the ship at all. The ships had to stay that far away from the shore so they could keep floating.
Pretty soon, we saw a bunch of the whaling boats tied behind a little boat coming to Pt. Hope. The little boat must have had a steam engine in it or something, to pull all those other boats. It had smoke coming out of it. When the boat landed, the captain recognized the doxivuk boy. He asked him something. The boy must have told him his dad was drowned. The people saw him pointing to his dad’s grave. When the captain understood, he told Etorina, “We are going to take the boy with us. We are going to give you a lot of groceries so you can have groceries all summer long while he is gone.” Then the captain took the boy out to the ship.
Later on, when the season was over, the captain came back by Tigaruk so Etorina’s family could see the boy once more. The grandma made him a squirrel skin parka to take with him. He liked that very much. We never heard of him again.
Towards the fall, before the snow came, there were quite a few good-sized boys around Tigaruk. It was a pretty good-sized village then.
Those big boys talked about the doxivuk and his grave. They were saying, “If anybody wanted to become an aungutguhk, they could go over to the graveyard and pick out whoever was dead that they thought would be the best to help them be an aungutguhk.” Some of them tried the dovivuk’s grave. Pretty soon, this one young man named Omaluk took his Eskimo rain parka made out of seal gut and put it on. He did not put his right arm in the sleeve. He left it inside the parka. The left hand was out, though. He said to the other boys, “I am going to show you how. I am going to ask this man if he can help me.”
The young man sat down right next to the head of the doxivuk’s grave, close to the crossed stick. He talked and talked and asked the man if he could get helped by his spirits. Pretty soon, there were a lot of boys standing all around, watching. They wondered what was going to happen and they wanted to see it. That young man never stopped talking. Finally, the boys heard something moving in the ground. They listened to it. They heard that noise from the doxivuk! The ground began to split open. It was breaking up. Omaluk got so scared, he jumped up and ran off from that place. Everybody ran back, except his brother. The other man waited. He wanted to see the doxivuk come out of his grave. He watched for a long time, but nothing happened. As soon as the boys ran off, he could not hear any more noise. He hollered to the boys, “There is nothing here now, any more!” It did not do any good. The boys never went back to that grave again after that.
Many white people think that many years ago there might have been some boats that drifted from Japan or Korea to Alaska to start people being here. Our ancestors say we have ancestors that have been here from generation to generation since there was land between Alaska and Siberia. Our grandparents do not believe our ancestors came from other countries and changed to Eskimos. They learned their own ways from the beginning.
Before the Second Disaster happened, our ancestors said there was a land strip across the Bering Straits. That land extended from Wales to Diomede Island and then to Point Barrow. There was a narrow raised strip from Diomede to Naukan of Siberia. They claimed the rest was all land, but it was low country. The Kobuk River mouth came out straight from Cape Espenberg. They claim the biggest lagoon in western Alaska was between Point Hope and Barrow. There was a big lagoon in the Selawik area that went clear out to Cape Espenberg. The Selawik River came to the Kobuk River. All that land was there before the Second Disaster.
After the Second Disaster, the shore along the land was changed. It was washed out and it sunk. At the same time there was an earthquake. The old people claim it was a beautiful land. It had many lakes like the Point Barrow area. There were many lakes from Wales to Point Barrow. It was all flat, low ground with no hills. They say there were many narrow rivers to the lakes. Many lakes ran into big, main rivers. After the big flood in the Second Disaster, that ground just disappeared. It became part of the ocean. Much of the country had changed.
The ancestors said the strips of land between here and Siberia were all gone. They said the big flood changed all this earth. Once more the Eskimos populated the western part of Alaska. Their numbers grew and they spread out from one end to the other. They did not stay in one place and build villages or cities until long after the Second Disaster. There was a lot of land to use and it was rich.
After the Third Disaster there were not very many people left in Seward Peninsula and around it. Here and there, some people survived who could make more children. The land was full of ghost villages. People wandered everywhere, trying to find food or somebody still alive. Even the islanders were having troubles. After the terrible Year of Two Winters (the Third Disaster), almost everybody died. Our ancestors say times were bad even to the south of Norton Sound. After that time, the land was good to live by once more. The families became large and prospered.
Many of the Eskimo people chose a new place to stay after a while. They would find a place where they could catch more fish or other game. They also would choose a place because there were more berries or more wood for winter fires. In many homes, they had a fire place in the middle of the room burning wood to keep warm. They had a window that opened straight up in the ceiling so the smoke could go through it. They cooked on the wood fire. Sometimes they had a fireplace in the corner, built in the wall.
Villages began and people went from the villages to hunting and fishing camps when the season changed. Everybody knew each other because their relations were everywhere near and far.
After the Fourth Disaster there were not so many Eskimo people again. Sometimes, in whole villages there was no one. Everybody died, or only one or two survived. When people began to get sick, sometimes there were only one or two people left who went around to keep the fires going and to bring water to the houses. It was very cold all over that winter. Sometimes a village heard about the flu in time to tell their people not to go around to the houses and not to let anybody come to the village. Most places were not so lucky. At Mary’s Igloo, a few people lived because they followed the rules. The third day after the flu came there was no smoke coming out of any chimney in the village. Most of the people were dead or dying. It seemed no good to leave the sick people and the survivors scattered all over the village. The school teacher let the people stay in the school house because there was coal to keep them warm. Other sickness after the flu lasted two or three months and many more people died.
Some villages turned people away from their places because of the flu. Sometimes they did it at gun point. They kept watchmen a ways from the village to watch for travelers. Shishmaref did not have the flu. Wales, Teller, Nome and many of the villages around Fish River country had it real bad. It seemed anybody could carry that flu to people. Some village councils would only let visitors speak to them from a long distance outside their houses for many months afterwards. At Mary’s Igloo, there were only seventy-five to a hundred people left. They were mostly children. While the flu was going on, people would be fine in the morning. In the evening, they would be dead. Five families at that village did not get the flu. All others did. Most of them died. The story was the same at other villages when there was someone left alive to tell about it.
Our people did not build cities. They did not know what other kinds of people thought was valuable and worth money. An Eskimo was rich if he had good luck in hunting, plenty of strong weapons, nets, and tools, good boats, a strong body, and a large happy family with lots of children. Then he knew lots of things about how to hunt, fish and travel, and everybody liked him. He was a rich man with wisdom. Others put gold and silver in banks to become rich. They bought things made in factories. They went mining for gold. But, now the Eskimos have learned from white people what value gold and other minerals have for them. They found out that white people took many millions of dollars from our father’s land, both from the ground and the sea. They took fish of all kinds, whales, and the other animals from the water. They took fur from the land and fur from the seal and sea otters of the ocean. They have gold and silver and money in the banks to buy valuable things. We still have some of the land.
The Fifth Disaster is maybe now. There are not many old people left. The rules and stories of our ancestors are being forgotten. The people do not know who their relations are. Many children lost their parents and grandparents in the flu and other sickness. They went to the mission orphanages and sometimes Outside. They did not learn about their forefathers.