Customs and Traditions in Quebec Arts and Entertainment in the Yukon Territory
Am J Community Psychol. Author manuscript; available in PMC 2014 Sep 1.
Published in terminal edited form as:
PMCID: PMC4119478
NIHMSID: NIHMS592081
Yup'ik Civilization and Context in Southwest Alaska: Customs Member Perspectives of Tradition, Social Change, and Prevention
Abstract
This paper provides an introduction to key aspects of Yup'ik Inuit civilization and context from both historical and contemporary community member perspectives. Its purpose is to provide a framework for understanding the development and implementation of a prevention initiative centered on youth in ii communities in Southwest Alaska equally role of collaboration with the University of Alaska Fairbanks and the National Institutes of Wellness. This paper is written from the perspective of elders and local prevention workers from each of the 2 prevention communities. The co-authors discuss their culture and their community from their own perspectives, drawing from direct feel and from ancestral noesis gained through learning and living the Yuuyaraq or the Yup'ik way of life. The authors of this paper identity key aspects of traditional Yup'ik culture that in one case contributed to the adaptability and survivability of their ancestors, especially through times of hardship and social disruption. These cardinal processes and practices represent dimensions of culture in a Yup'ik context that contribute to personal and collective growth, protection and wellbeing. Intervention development in Yup'ik communities requires bridging historical cultural frames with contemporary contexts and shifting focus from reviving cultural activities to repairing and revitalizing cultural systems that structure community.
Keywords: American Indian and Alaska Native, Culture, Community based participatory research, Customs intervention, Suicide
Introduction
As prelude to the intervention story profiled in this special issue, we asked community co-researchers from 2 of our partnering Alaska Native communities to reflect on both long-standing cultural traditions and more current issues that informed the blueprint and content of the interventions themselves.
The four co-authors are from two different Yup'ik communities both on located on the west coast of Alaska. One of the communities, Alakanuk, Alarneq, in the Yup'ik language, has collectively chosen to accept their customs prevention research efforts shared openly and resolved through tribal process to allow the name of their community to be used in publications. The other community has not yet initiated a parallel approval process to allow the apply of the community proper noun in publications and will therefore be referred to equally "Hamlet A." Both communities partnered with the University of Alaska Fairbanks to develop prevention projects for youth based on cultural-traditional rituals, practices and values. Both communities were motivated by the collective recognition that the traditional means of life take inverse and that young people are suffering equally a result. Many of the children growing up today in these communities are struggling, and some are not making information technology through their most hard times early in life. The authors of this paper contend that children no longer have the secure mooring one time provided past their Indigenous culture. The work of helping these youth must happen through a revitalization and re-interpretation of the values, traditions and practices that once provided the guidance, instruction and reasons to live for the ancestors of contemporary youth struggling to learn this aforementioned purpose today.
The authors of this paper are Yup'ik community members who are concerned for the futurity of their children and young people. The first writer, Ayunerak, is an elderberry of the community of Alakanuk. Ayunerak comes to this work with a deep cognition and experience in the health and healing fields; she was the first community health aide to work in the newly established health clinic in Alakanuk. Ayunerak served in this role for over 25 years, and continues to serve her community every bit a member of the board of directors of her regional Alaska Native health corporation. Ayunerak was one of the master leaders in the development and implementation of the Elluam Tungiinun (Towards Wellness) youth prevention projection in her customs. The second author, Al-strom, is likewise from the community of Alakanuk and served as one of the local coordinators for the Elluam Tungiinun project. The third author, Moses, is a community member of Village A and served as the local coordinator for the Yupiucimta Asvairtuumallerkaa (Strengthening Our Identity as Yupik People) project. The fourth author, Charlie, is besides an elder from the community of Village A. He worked with Moses to oversee the evolution and implementation of the Yupiucimta Asvairtuumallerkaa project.
This paper describes the Yup'ik way of life from tribal customs member and elderberry perspectives. The co-authors discuss their civilization and their community from their own perspectives; drawing from direct experience and from bequeathed knowledge gained through learning and living the Yuuyaraq or the Yup'ik way of life. The authors point out that while no life is free of trouble, children in their ain communities are growing upward and experiencing stress and hardship different that occurring in the lives of children raised in the dominant society. It is against this backdrop that the intervention development work was undertaken in the communities to give children the strengths and skills they demand to survive as Yup'ik people today. The authors nowadays aspects of their customs histories, indigenous noesis and social customs that they identify equally most of import to the customs intervention research described in this special issue.
The four co-authors worked in two teams with Ayunerak and Alstrom taking lead on introducing and describing aspects of Yup'ik community history, civilization and context that are critical for understanding the electric current status, needs and strengths of the Yup'ik people. Moses and Charlie follow this with a give-and-take of social change in Yup'ik communities, highlighting some of the more than disruptive impacts of social modify for Yup'ik youth, families and communities.
The authors collectively indicate that intervention development in Yup'ik communities is based on identifying the underlying construction of cultural-traditional activities in order to determine the processes that make these activities protective and strengthening. These underlying protective factors or protective processes embedded within Yup'ik civilization provide a basis for intervention development and implementation. Identifying what is protective within Yup'ik civilisation requires bridging historical cultural frames with contemporary contexts. It requires shifting the focus from reviving cultural activities to repairing and revitalizing the cultural systems that structure activity in the communities.
Our editorial goal of this paper is to strengthen the power of the words written by our co-researchers while also preserving diction and their fashion of describing their world. Our collective aim is to describe how ethnic cognition and practice tin simultaneously enhance and advance the progress of scientific noesis and practice in intervention research. This foreword and the accompanying determination are meant only to provide the necessary framing to permit greater access and understanding across our target audience for the special issue.
Who We Are: History of a Yukon River Community
Paula Ayunerak and Deborah Alstrom
In the earliest days there were many intertribal wars between the Yup'ik (Inuit) groups on the lower regions of the Yukon River drainage and the Athabascan (American Indian) groups inhabiting the interior regions and borders of the Yukon River (Fig. 1, Customs Map). Those Yup'ik groups at the borders of Athabascan territory eventually left to a safe place near Nelson Island on the western coast of the Bering Sea. Somewhere during the latter years of the 1500s to the early on 1600s, the families who were originally from the Yukon River border regions began a render migration dorsum home from the Nelson Isle surface area west of Bethel and Southwest of the current village of Alakanuk. This migration followed the annual summertime harvest of fish and berries.
Map of Southwest Alaska with locations of traditional settlement sites
The eldest man, who was also an 'Anallkuq' or Shaman/Holy Human, had decided to have a residuum at Tin can Tin Bespeak or Akmiut, where he ended up settling, feeling that he was likewise old to continue on the journeying. He and his family unit became comfortable because the area had everything that they needed to survive and it was peaceful there. By that time, the wars betwixt the Yupiit and Athabascans (Enqillit) had long subsided. People still traveled to their summertime, fall, spring and winter camps for their seasonal harvesting, simply always returned to Akmiut.
The Yukon River was a very narrow river a few centuries ago. Many warriors and hunters would take the turn into Nalugciq slough thinking that it was either the Yukon River, Kwiqpak for Yup'ik speaking peoples, or the Kwiqpak slough, a tributary of the Yukon River. Different parts of the Nalugciq slough were established sites for hunting and camping purposes used by people in the days when families used to migrate from expanse to area following their food sources. The slough eventually started being called Nalugciq or Naluik after some time had passed. As time went on, the Nalugciq ultimately became Alarneq (Alakanuk).
Our Cultural Ways: Moving Towards Wellness Through the Strength of Our Creator
Our ancestors were strong. They were stiff in their bodies because of their difficult work on the state, and potent in their spirit because of their beliefs and rituals. This force came from our connection to this place where our ancestors settled and raised families. The things that in one case kept our people safety and well remain important for u.s. today. The teachings, practices and noesis of our ancestors prevented harmful things from happening within individuals, families and communities. Some aspects of our civilisation and traditional-spiritual life were particularly important to us for our survival, and these we sought to bring support through our prevention research project Elluam Tungiinun (Toward Wellness) that took place in this gimmicky time. We cannot go into too much detail in this paper, and instead will focus on a brusque list of core values, behavior and practices that the Yup'ik people alive by.
Ellam Yua: The spirit of the universe
Ellam Yua/Tangrumanrilnguum, Spirit of the Universe/Unseen One, gave u.s.a. our Yuuyaraq: Way of Life; Alerquun: Rules of Life and Piciryaraq: Truth of Life through the Angallkuq or Shaman/Holy Human. Ellam Yua/Tangrumanrilnguum gave life to the Yupiit, or 'the real people of the land,' also as to all the animals that alive on the land and in the water. He was the creator who made everything. Nosotros did not say God but we said Ellam Yua, the spirit of the universe who is everywhere. Even if we think that we are solitary we are not. He is aware of us, and He is watching us. In those days nosotros had a very strong religion and respected everything that Ellam Yua created. For instance, wood was highly respected: nosotros made shelters, houses, heated our houses, and fashioned dog squad sleds, kayaqs and other boats. Piece of furniture, plates, bowls and ladles of all sizes were fabricated of forest. Fish and mink traps of all sizes were also made of wood. Wood-working had healing power; if a man became deranged, he would be put to work on woods so that he could recover.
Ellam Yua provided the real people and the animals with food from the land and the h2o. Each person and animal has a spirit given to it. Both the Yupiit and the animals inhabit a sentient world infused with spirit. All living things have to be respected. The land gave Yupiit meat from animals and birds, while the water provided fish, seals and whales. Vegetables and fruit came from both the state and the sea or rivers. The rain, lakes and rivers all provided sources of drink both in the class of liquids and ice. Even though Ellam Yua gave to the real people the animals, they must still bear witness proper respect to secure them as food. Fish were always brought into the house in a pan in case the fish was accidently dropped where people walked. This prevented boldness of the fish. They poured water into the seal's mouth when brought to the business firm or hamlet in order to quench its thirst because it was a water animal. This was a way to show great respect for the seal that had been killed for nutrient.
Yuuyaraq: Rules to live a Yup'ik Manner of life
There is a very close connection betwixt the animal world and human world. We believe that humans and animals communicate through Ellam Yua, and that these relationships are governed past rules. For each different type of nutrient, there are rules that men and women must follow to take intendance of information technology. If the rule is not followed for that detail animal, and so that nutrient source volition either get scarce or disappear entirely, depending on the intensity of the violation. If the rules were followed carefully and the animate being spirit was pleased for case, with the fashion that the weapons were handled after information technology was caught, or the way that information technology was cared for and eaten, then the nutrient source would multiply and the hunter would be blessed with more to catch. Subsistence required good relationships between humans and animals and maintaining this relationship was the only way people survived long ago. Respect for the land too as the bounding main ensure the seasonal provision of food given to u.s. through Ellam Yua.
Yuraq: Marking our development as a people through Yup'ik dancing
Eskimo dancing has been going on for many decades. At that place are several ways to dance: Kivqiq is a trip the light fantastic of giving and request for an item from the head of the household. Ellriq, is another type of dance washed by an individual man or a woman. He or she will get set up for 5 years making clothes, blankets and other items made of cloth, skin or baskets as well as plates and ladles made from woods. For the Ellriq trip the light fantastic, ane boy or girl will be dressed from head to toe with new wearing apparel, including a parka, cap, mittens and mukluks. Agayuliyaraq is a dance that is a prayer request for animals, fish, berries, wood or good conditions at a sure fourth dimension of year in the hunting or fishing cycle. Men would sometimes use masks of unlike animals that are described in the verses of the songs as part of the Agayuliyaraq trip the light fantastic. After the dance is over, the masks would be taken out to the tundra, away from trails, and left there. Information technology is said that the masks would never be seen again, even if 1 went out the next 24-hour interval to observe it. The Agayuliyaraq dance is the just blazon of dance still used today. People stopped performing the other types of dances after the missionaries came to the area and labeled them evil and superstitious. In all of these dances, Yupiit included their family members who had passed on as a style to honor them.
Before the missionaries, Eskimo dancing was performed as a kind of prayer asking Ellam Yua for blessings of different kinds. Information technology was also washed as an expression of thankfulness for the blessings given from Ellam Yua. The dissimilar leaders of the village would come together to teach their songs to the rest of the grouping of men or women. When the songs were learned, they then could teach the trip the light fantastic movements to the residuum of the people in the community. The trip the light fantastic movements were basically sign linguistic communication showing what happened in the story. Different masks were too made to prove what kind of animal spirit was beingness honored because it gave its life to the person(s) who defenseless it; or they could evidence what was being requested to catch, for example, in preparation for a seal chase.
Nosotros would dance with brute masks at the potlatch where the whole customs came together and invited other communities to come up for entertainment. The mask was used only once at a potlatch on one song, danced by the person information technology was made for. Taking masks to the tundra afterward signified that the prayer or thankfulness was sent to Ellam Yua. It was believed that the mask reappears to a purified or chosen person in the future.
The drum is the main tool nosotros use to dance. The drum's round design is made as a way of depicting the Yupiit belief that our lives keep in a cycle. The centre of the drum is like the womb in women and represents life returning back after death, such as when people die and are reincarnated through the births of new babies; or when the animals used for food sources return back to the hunting areas depending on the way that the hunter and receiver treat information technology after it was caught. Information technology is this renewal, continuous and carefully completed, that allows usa to survive every bit a people.
We believe that nosotros are all function of a community, those in bodily course and those who accept left this globe. At that place is a belief that all our family unit who have passed on to the next world comes to a potlatch to picket and participate with their living family. At that place is another belief that if a person died earlier or during a potlatch time, it is a favorable time to go because he or she will non brand the journey lone to Pamaalirugmuit. Pamaalirugmuit is a name of the wonderful and peaceful place that the people accept a chance to go to afterwards death (just similar Heaven in the Bible). The newly deceased person is picked upwards by the spirits of their deceased ancestors and taken along with the other spirits to their new dwelling house. This is how we marked the transitions in our homo life.
Qasgiq: Our rituals create a customs
The qasgiq was a very important and sacred building in each different village. In the latter years later the missionaries arrived and built churches, the importance of the qasgiq was described to have the same intensity of significance as a church. It was a place that was highly respected. The men of all ages used information technology equally their home and would slumber in it, eat in information technology, bathe in it and brand the tools they needed to alive. Women and children lived in separate sod houses surrounding the qasgiq.
The unabridged customs used the qasgiq for ceremonial and entertainment purposes, like the Agayuliyaraq, or potlatch. The qasgiq brought men, women and children together to listen to the elders of the village talk about Yuuyaraq (Way of Life), Alerquun (Rules of Life) and Piciryaraq (Truth of Life). It was a place to teach Yup'ik morals and values and survival skills. Children raised in the Qasgiq were given daily talks on Yuuyaraq, Alerquun, Piciryaraq, and were instructed near the cycle of life and death. We believe that a living person can prepare for his journey to Pamaalirugmuit while he is still living. At that place are many things that a person can do to set for his/her afterlife journey, such as helping others and keeping a clean business firm and torso. Children in the qasgiq were taught to live in a earth where all of their actions will affect their hereafter and their life, even afterwards their bodies no longer alive.
In the qasgiq way of life, each and every fellow member of the community was needed and each needed the other for seasonal harvest and daily life activities. Families were the key to survival long ago. Parents began education their children from the earliest age possible, and it connected throughout their lives into adulthood. Parents taught by role modeling their behaviors and demonstrating through their own deportment the means to do things. When the children grow older, they retrieve what they saw and what they heard in the qasgiq. The qasgiq was the spiritual center of the Yup'ik communities. People abandoned the qasgiq when the epidemics came and the large pits that made the foundation of the qasgiq were needed for graves. Missionaries also encouraged the Yup'ik to build single-family unit homes, to a higher place ground using materials brought into the region. This inverse the way of life of our people, when we moved away from our spiritual center.
How Our Ways Have Changed: Life Today in a Community on the Coast of the Bering Sea
Charles Moses and James Charlie, Sr
We will hash out in this section how our ways of life have changed, and the furnishings this has had on our families in the villages. It once was that families would move around on the land and there was no permanent settlement where all families would reside year-round continually in one place. Our village (Village A) was established as a community in 1964 and had simply over 280 people. It has grown over the years and today has a population of nearly 600. Along with its growth, our hamlet has experienced a cultural change as well. When information technology was beginning established, the economic system was largely subsistence-based. This meant that families still had to piece of work together in order to survive. Traditional values connected with our subsistence economy were yet taught and skillful past everyone. Parents would spend much of their fourth dimension education their children these subsistence means.
Yup'ik civilisation has evolved through thousands of years and is standing to exercise so to this day. Over the by few decades the economic system of our village has go more than focused on wage-labor. Living in our hamlet today is similar living in a unlike environment for many of the older residents who remember what it was like to alive in tents and motion effectually to camps on a seasonal round. Equally a result of these changes to customs life and culture, the people have less certainty that the old ways will keep to provide for their families. Many new parents are unsure about methods of child rearing. Some are looking to our traditions for guidance; others are learning western ways of child-rearing as outside influences begin to overtake our Yup'ik linguistic communication and teachings.
When the missionaries of the various religious denominations originally contacted the Yup'ik in Southwest Alaska, they first had to learn the language to brainstorm their missionizing work. Those missionaries who somewhen became fluent in the language may have themselves begun to realize the complexities of the culture, because the traditional Yup'ik language is the lawmaking to truly understanding the culture. The missionaries' presence had impacts on our communities that nosotros could not take anticipated upon their arrival. The missionaries were welcomed into the communities, but looking back information technology is articulate at present that some of the policies the missionaries instituted had lasting effects on the Yup'ik people. For example, in some communities today, school-aged children can no longer speak their Yup'ik language, while in other communities, there is no longer any Eskimo dancing. Among the almost disruptive outcome of contact and outside influence is the erosion of the core values; the loss of what made the traditional Yup'ik people a community.
The social framework within which our ancestors in one case lived came out of an adaptive process, consisting of trial and error and testing and retesting, over a span of thousands of years. Imagine creating a qayaq (kayak) without any prior experience or model to re-create, and using only the tools provided by nature. You would start with an thought, but chances are that you lot volition go through several failures earlier y'all finally succeed in creating one that tin be used safely in whatsoever flavour or atmospheric condition. It would take you many trials and redesigns to get information technology correct and keep yourself safe on the water. This is how the Yup'ik guild was created. Contact and contemporary processes take led the modern Yup'ik peoples away from something that has been adult, tried, and proven over many centuries; and much of the suffering in our communities today is related to this movement abroad from our traditional core values, subsistence strategies and families.
The say-so of elders in a irresolute world is at question today. This should not be the instance, but we observe today it is. The elders were always those in the community that could speak the most from their own direct experience in the earth. For all the wisdom they possess, an elder would remain humble. You will know you are in the presence of an elder should you receive advice qualified with something to the issue of, "When I was immature, an elderberry told me…" elders will but speak about what they have heard or seen using their own senses.
Today we hear the young adults in our communities say that the old ways are no longer relevant. This has truth on the surface because it is truthful that nosotros as Yup'ik are no longer completely dependent on a subsistence way of life. And then we may feel, today, freer to ignore the concerns of our elders and embrace the changes without because the fourth dimension and process it took by our elders to get where we are today. The elders fabricated information technology possible for the young people today to take more choices about what they desire to practise with their lives and who they want to exist.
For example, modern transportation engineering has done away with the qayaq and the dog team. Coupled with modern hunting and fishing equipment, similar guns, motors and nylon nets, subsistence has become less time consuming and more than easily accomplished. Because of this change, men and women no longer have to rely on working together to the same degree in very specific yet different complementary means to bring about success and wellbeing of their families.
The effect of these changes is indifference and altitude from our traditional values, roles and responsibilities, practise of spirituality and respect for the nature of the hunt every bit well as the game itself. Our disrespect of the animals and the surround where we pursue our nutrient has led to our becoming wasteful of life.
Other changes have besides impacted our civilisation. For instance, children today are no longer being strengthened mentally and physically with the necessary chores of emptying the honey-saucepan (toilet), packing water, chopping wood, feeding the dogs, or whatever work associated with contributing to the survival of a family in a totally collective subsistence way of life. In fact, nigh children in Southwest Alaska, peculiarly those in communities with water and sewage systems, don't really have regular or daily chores anymore. Instead, children in the rural communities spend their weekdays in school and their evenings and weekends watching Tv set or playing video games. The traditional values associated with instruction in the qasgiq and in the homes have been overtaken with the Western social values taught in the schools. It remains a vital practice to teach the children the Yup'ik values that allowed for generations of successful living on this land.
It is not just the Yup'ik communities that are experiencing these changes and the issues associated with these changed and changing conditions. All the indigenous communities are going through the aforementioned transitional stages in varying ways and degrees. The Yup'ik are fortunate to have elders in most, if not all, of the villages that yet call up the traditional means, and speak their language fluently. These communities are in a good identify to revive their language and many of the customs and the associated values, relying on the force of these elders. This is not a phone call to elders but, it too starts with reviving values associated with traditional child-rearing techniques. Every village has parents and grandparents who continue to practice some of the traditional means of raising a family unit at home, and it is their children (and the influences of these children on others) who will keep these communities going equally strong Yup'ik communities in the twentieth century.
Revitalizing Culture and Context
Through Kinship, Charlie Moses and James Charlie, Sr
Our communities are still cute communities in many ways because of the people, but many are get-go to lose their traditional character and spirit because of the pressures to change and assimilate to a more mod way of life. The structure of our families is changing the most quickly and with the almost consequences for our youth. Many young parents no longer experience the do good of raising their children with the assist of their extended family members. Many immature people grow up today without knowledge of who their family is and where they come up from. As part of the Yupiucimta Asvairtuumallerkaa (Strengthening our identity as Yupik People) Program, we endeavored to create a transmission on applying traditional kid-rearing techniques in the 21st century (reference to online appendix). Young parents tin review and apply these teachings as they raise their own children.
Our families create our communities and we cannot have a strong community without a potent knowledge of our connection to each other through kinship. In our intervention plan we besides developed a Yup'ik kinship terms action to remind each united states of america of how we are connected to the others in our community. Kinship is part of raising a child, and children feel lost today because they practice not feel connected or like they are function of a culture or community. The key for the modernistic Yup'ik is to ensure that our children succeed in the Western school organization while at the same time teaching them traditional cultural values that have stood the exam of fourth dimension. In an effort to identify and highlight some of these time-honored strengths and traditional values that have served the Yup'ik and other Alaska Native people so well over these many thousands of years, Dr. Gerald Mohatt and his staff from the Center for Alaska Native Health Inquiry (CANHR) interviewed over 100 Alaska Native individuals who each shared his/her own life story as information technology related to alcohol, and then that others might do good from their experiences (Mohatt et al. 2004). Through these life stories we were able to identify some of the strategies that people are actually using to prevent and/or recover from alcohol abuse. Some of these are personal, individual strengths or decisions that people made; others are strengths, values, supports, and successful ways of behaving in today's globe that were developed in the family; and however others are strengths, values, supports and successful means of behaving that come from the customs.
It is this model of increasing protection and strengths through the revitalization of traditional practices and ways of life that guides our work with children in our community. We accept realized through this work that the proven means of our ancestors yet affect our people today. We need to continue these ways to go on as communities. We need to continue to recognize the natural ways to forbid and/or recover from the modern ills similar alcohol corruption, and revive the identity of Native individuals equally well as communities, thereby enabling them to "evolve" into the twentieth century Yupiit.
Through Ritual and Paula Ayunerak
The desire to belong to a community is a central characteristic of being human. For Yup'ik (the real people) there are different levels of community; kin relations, schoolhouse community, working community, village community, male and female customs, elder customs and others. Customs is created past the customs, practices and values held by its members. Yup'ik live their lives through their communities, and the rituals that brand their communities are important even today. The Curuuqaq or Potlatch is 1 example of a ritual issue that creates customs for Yup'ik peoples. The potlatch is not done in whatsoever office of the year except in the wintertime after Christmas. When potlatch season comes around, information technology brings together a wider customs of unlike people. One of the purposes for the potlatch is to memorialize our recently deceased kin. This may accept place the year following afterward the death or longer depending on when the family has prepared for the give away of goods and nutrient in honor of the deceased. The potlatch brings people together from all spiritual backgrounds to notice this rite of passage for the deceased and families of the deceased. This ritual has been going on for generations and has evolved from a smaller scale family unit rite to community-wide ceremonial involving several families, and large displays of giving and sharing.
Other rituals that once were used for prevention or for formalism purpose, such as smudging, tin can be connected similar the Potlatch in our communities today. Long agone, there were different means of smudging. People used the Labrador tea (ayuk) to cleanse their houses, and would go into each room in the house, calorie-free the tea and allow the smoke to circulate. This circulating of the smoke combined with prayer is what we phone call smudging. For men, the Labrador tea was used for purifying their ain bodies and the bodies of others, and for purifying their tools/weapons before going out hunting. They likewise used to go home and purify themselves and their gear if they had an unlucky hunting trek the outset time that they went out. A woman used it to purify her torso after a menstrual bike so that she would non contaminate her hubby or her husband's hunting equipment. Smudging was in one case part of a family unit's ritual observance, and it was a custom that identified us as Yup'ik hunters or caretakers. Smudging today is carried on past mainly a few elders and happens in private contexts in the customs. We chose to revive the practice of smudging as function of our intervention work with the children in our community. We would burn Labrador team to open each of our intervention activities. We would explain how the circulating smoke, combined with our prayers would make clean out our minds and bodies and allow usa to practise proficient work and fill up on the knowledge we were receiving that solar day. At first there were a few people who disagreed with the revival of a traditional practice used by our ancestors. Over time, those people that in one case disagreed came to encounter that the ritual had good uses and opened people up to learning things most who they are and where they come from. The ritual reminded people that they all belonged to the aforementioned customs, joined together by the circle of smoke and prayer.
Other rituals also used to have the power to change things and bring people together as a customs. Many of these we take forgotten or lost over time, but some we still remember. For example, the human action of laughing at, making fun of or openly talking about a spirit considered to be evil or bad for the people has been good since the influenza epidemic occurring at the beginning of the twentieth century. Along with humans and animals, many other things around u.s.a. are deemed to take a spirit. There are spirits of sickness, injury and bad luck or misfortune. Spirits can get either weak or potent depending on the fears or strengths of the humans. In the early 1980s, the spirit of suicide came to our village and it became so strong in our community that many lives were lost to it.
I of the elders helping to create our prevention plan came up with a ritual on how to deal with that particular spirit of suicide. This elderberry had been in many meetings with other elders that helped him call up hearing about a way to deal with a particularly strong and bothersome spirit. He brought this idea out during i of our piece of work group meetings and it caused one of our younger people to recollect nigh the way of the musk ox. The mode of the musk ox involves protection of the young members of the grouping by the older members encircling around them. We added this to the ritual of ridding the spirit of suicide and decided to try conducting this activity as a customs-wide ceremonial.
We gathered together as many people in the customs as nosotros could and had the elderberry requite instructions near the ritual. Nosotros start came together with all the adults holding hands encircling all the youth who had come to the activity just as the musk ox exercise with their young to protect them. Then the elder asked for u.s. to pray every bit hard every bit we could for aid that day to have the spirit of suicide leave and never come back. After praying, he asked for the whole grouping to stomp the floor as hard as we could four times together. We followed the stomping with the act of smoothing out the floor with our feet. So the elder instructed the group to express mirth hysterically at the spirit. All through the steps that were followed, the adults held their hands together surrounding the youth and children. The terminal part of the ritual involved the elder making throwing movements with his arms iv times toward the due west, to cast the spirit in a place of no return or luck.
After our community performed this ritual we felt a difference amongst each other and in our homes and lives. We all felt lighter and happier. We smiled at each other more easily and things got ameliorate for our young people. The ritual brought us together and together we were stronger.
This fix of manufactures describes how we created a enquiry project with the University of Alaska Fairbanks as part of our community response to the deaths that were happening among our young people. It is informed by what we have described, including the focus on strengthening our elders, utilizing the concept of qasgiq, the sacred learning space, revitalizing traditional parenting, and recreating rituals. This is our home, the identify that we love. This is our style of life, how we look at the earth. We have an ancient cognition that is as important today equally it was for all of our past generations. Alarneq, our ancestral dwelling, remains today a place that tin nurture and abound healthy youth and protect them from alcohol abuse and suicide.
Editorial Conclusion
Stacy M. Rasmus
The authors of this paper identify key aspects of traditional Yup'ik culture that once contributed to the adaptability and survivability of their ancestors, particularly through times of hardship and social disruption. These fundamental processes and practices represent dimensions of culture in an indigenous Yup'ik context with indelible capabilities to contribute to personal and collective growth, and to protection and wellbeing.
Traditional-cultural practices such equally Qasgiq (Men's Firm), Yuraq (Potlatch) and Yuuyaraq (subsistence way of life) are examples of historically important contexts into which intervention was introduced. In the qasgiq, boys were taught how to make the tools they would need to make a living and survive out on the state. The qasgiq was a place where people would become to get advice and seek healing. Yuraq and yuuyaraq were important dimensions of the qasgiq. Yup'ik civilization and Yup'ik life functioned through the qasgiq.
Hawe et al. (2009) argue for a "systems-approach" to intervention enquiry that starts with careful and detailed study and agreement of the context in which intervention will take place. This study of civilization and context will reveal the organization of important formal and informal "activeness settings" (p. 267) and the social networks that connect people to these activities. The intervention is understood as a disquisitional event in time in this system.
The authors of the electric current article have provided readers with a nuanced descriptive business relationship of selected primary activeness settings in which intervention takes identify in Yup'ik communities. For case, the authors depict how the qasgiq functions equally a key activity setting and a social network within a Yup'ik organisation, providing us with an appreciation of the ways in which intervention occurred naturally and effectively. Rapid social change brought most disruptions inside these aboriginal Yup'ik systems. Missionaries actively worked to shut downward the qasgiq in many Yup'ik communities. In its place were constructed single-family houses that were often of poorer quality in that they were less adaptively suited to the environmental context than the traditional Yup'ik semi-subterranean multi-family dwellings. This consequence dramatically altered the arrangement that provided the structure for the activeness settings, and project efforts involved revitalization of the qasgiq as an important activity setting and network for intervention in Yup'ik communities. In the communities described in the paper, the yuraq and the yuuyaraq are however practiced today and function as activity settings for intervention. Nonetheless, these settings occur within a very dissimilar ecological organisation that continues to change apace over time.
Collectively, the authors of this paper affirm that a principal role of intervention with Yup'ik youth and families must involve repair or revitalization of the indigenous arrangement that once provided for activeness in their communities. The authors give examples of how they participated in the re-creation of fundamental Yup'ik activity settings and social networks every bit part of the community intervention described in the special issue. In one community, this occurred through the revitalization of a traditional Yup'ik kinship setting in social club to increment connectedness betwixt family members and strengthen family-level resources. The other community revitalized qasgiq, using a traditional ritual setting. In both communities, the goal was systems-level change occurring through the re-creation and re-interpretation of vital settings within local traditional civilization and practice, in order to offer new possibilities for the survival, growth and wellbeing of Yup'ik youth today.
Acknowledgments
We likewise need to acknowledge the piece of work of the elders and community planning group members in each of the communities. Special thank you go to Kim Hopper for his review and reflections on this work. This research was funded by the National Institute of Alcohol Abuse and Alcoholism, the National Institute for Minority Health and Health Disparities, and the National Middle for Research Resources (R21 AA016098-01, RO1AA11446; R21AA016098; R24 MD001626; P20RR061430).
Footnotes
Electronic supplementary material The online version of this article (doi:10.1007/s10464-014-9652-four) contains supplementary fabric, which is bachelor to authorized users.
References
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