Kotlik Days 7-10

The last couple of days have been less exciting in terms of adventure but I have been getting a lot of work done. I’ve met with two of the elders of Kotlik nearly everyday now and have been eliciting a lot of vocabulary items; I have about six hours of recordings so far (a little less than I was hoping for by this point but still a great start and plans adapt to changing circumstances). The vocabulary here for plants and wildlife is very different than in other Yup’ik dialects which is awesome, and I have gotten the number system and kinship terminology down. Today, I also began eliciting verbs, but I’ve found that I keep getting morphologically complex words, which isn’t to surprising considering the structure of the language but it makes things more complicated until I know what each morpheme means, and I’m still trying to figure out two of them. For instance when I ask for the word “big” they give me “it is big,” or for the infinitival verb “to speak” they give me “I speak” or “I speak to you.” Once I know what’s happening it’s actually really cool but people don’t think about grammatical morphemes much or know what they mean so it takes some work to figure it out. Because of this I even began eliciting some very simple sentence paradigms today (I/You/You.DL/he/she/it/we/you all/they hunt (seal/me/you/you.DL/he/she/it/we/you all/them)) which was a lot of fun! I’m looking forward to continuing with the elders and hopefully hearing some traditional stories over the next few weeks.

Unfortunately, the Yup’ik language and many parts of the culture here are being lost and not enough work has been done yet. Its part of why I’m glad to be here (besides the people all being really nice, and the area being really pretty) and working on the Kotlik dialect. Apparently, there are still Yup’ik regions along the Kuskokwim where the culture is still strong and they still make traditional kayaks, and use dogsleds and where the children are learning the language natively (all of which I’d love to see and learn and I will one day), but those areas are also much better documented. Kotlik though is working a little bit towards preserving and passing down traditional knowledge like in fishing and hunting and Eskimo dancing, and I think they have a good but tentative start towards that end. We’ll see what I have to say after this weekend…

As for food, on Sunday night I had salmon soup with the bones left in and you had to pick them out, which was interesting. Then, on Monday I had whale chowder, which was much better than the raw whale. Where as the raw Beluga was crunchy the cooked Beluga was chewier. It actually tasted quite good, but about 3/4s of the way through I got to the point where I couldn’t handle the texture anymore and had to stop eating it, but nevertheless it was pretty good. Then last night I had cooked arctic goose with seal oil, potato salad, fried herring egg covered seaweed, and Eskimo ice cream (whipped sugar, oil, some other things and fish scales (I think that’s the part of the fish they put in it)) with wild blueberries and wild cloud(salmon)berries in it. All in all, the goose with seal oil was delicious! Seal oil is actually really good and gives you lots of protein and energy. The Eskimo ice cream was also pretty good, the potato salad was potato salad and I didn’t try the herring egg covered seaweed. Not this trip, thank you.

Other than that, this morning I met my friend again outside the school, it has been about a week and I missed him. He came running up to me all excited with his tail wagging and he let me pet him for a half hour and we jumped and ran around playing together for a while. He was still attached to his leash, apparently he had gotten free somehow and in the end we ran into his owner and she went to tie him up again (sad face) but he escaped and she had to chase him and I don’t know what happened after that. He’s the cutest little black husky ever and has golden eyes with a patch of red fur on his forehead; he’s probably only 3-4 months old, still a small puppy. I wish I could take him with me, Id give him several baths, some flee baths, comb his fur out, feed him some nourishing food and he’d be a great looking puppy; he already is, just dirty. Buy him a blue collar and name him adventurer, or wanderer, or kaviak, or sir plays a lot (all of these would be in Yup’ik though). It’d be great, I hope I get to see him again!

Tomorrow I’m going to a friend’s fish camp for a couple of days with some of the community members, elders, and youths. The fish camp is down river (everyone has their own fish camp where they spend the summer catching the fish they need for the winter) and it should be a lot of fun, and I hope to learn a lot. This is part of that youth program which is beginning to help pass down traditional knowledge, so it should be quite an experience, I’m happy they invited me to join them. Maybe I can record the elders telling some stories in Yugtun while we’re there, we’ll see what happens. I leave for that tomorrow afternoon and get back on Saturday afternoon, and then will start working again and see what happens! I’ll tell you all about it when I get back, but for now I think that is all there is to tell.

Piura!