Krupnik, Igor and Lars Krutak, 2002 Akuzilleput Igaqullghet Our Words Put to Paper. Sourcebook in St. Lawrence Island Yupik Heritage and History, compiled and edited by Igor Krupnik, Willis Walunga (Kepelgu) and Vera Metcalf (Qaakaghlleq), Washington, Smithsonian Institution, National Museum of Natural History, Arctic Studies Center, 460 pages.

The 1000 or more Yupik people of St. Lawrence Island are unique among Eskimo—east of Alaska read "Inuit"—in a number of ways. While politically part of Alaska, and thus of the United States, St. Lawrence Island is essentially an offshore island of Asian Russia separated from the Asian mainland by one quarter the span of ocean that separates it from the Alaskan mainland. For this reason the St. Lawrence Islander Yupik are not nearly as close biologically or culturally to the Central Yup'ik (or to the Inupiaq) of Alaska as they are to the 1000 or more Yupik people of the Chukotkan Peninsula, who share a common language and culture with the St. Lawrence Islanders, except in-so-far as there have been cultural effects on both sides from the differing political, social and economic systems of the US and Russia in the last 100 years or so (a fact which in itself would provide material for much study—though not the subject of the book being reviewed). St. Lawrence Island and Chukotkan Peninsula Yupik (collectively termed "Siberian Yupik" in Alaska) have strong historic ties with the adjoining Chukchi of the Asian side, a fact reflected in the Siberian Yupik language, and are in fact the only Eskimo (Inuit) group that has borrowed culturally or linguistically to any extent from another indigenous group. Given all these fascinating features of the Island's people, it is not surprising that anthropologists and non-professional observers have over the last century—and longer—created a wealth of documentation, written and photographic, of the St. Lawrence Island Yupik. The book Akuzilleput Igaqullghet Our Words Put to Paper, (subtitled Sourcebook in St. Lawrence Island Yupik Heritage and History), was compiled by Igor Krupnik (formerly of Moscow where he specialized in Chukotkan Peninsula Yupik ethnology) and Lars Krutak, anthropologists at the Smithsonian, and edited by Krupnik, Willis Walunga (Kepelgu) and Vera Metcalf (Qaakaghlleq), the later two themselves St. Lawrence Island Yupik. It undertakes, very successfully, the task of "combining historical documents with present-day elders' stories […] bridging old documents with memories and knowledge shared among the community members" (p. 340). The first four parts of the book present census lists going back to 1900, notebook entries, diary sections, reports, etc. of teachers, doctors, earlier anthropologists, and other non-Yupik observers, plus some accounts by Yupik people written down in decades past by themselves and others, all dealing with such topics as pre-Christian festivals and practices, birth and death rituals, social structure (including the "clan" system, found in no group of Eskimos other than the Siberian Yupik), famines and epidemics, whale hunting, reindeer herding, and school attendance. Quite a few high quality photographs, especially portraits of individual Yupik, and a number of drawings are included. As pointed out in the introduction (p. 18), the problem was not one of finding enough material to fill the volume, but rather selecting what to include from the truly vast amount of available material. A very strong point of the presentation, and one which makes it most meaningful to the present and future of the St. Lawrence Island (and Chukotkan Peninsula) Yupik, is that, whenever possible, every individual mentioned through English names, nicknames, or Yupik names spelled haphazardly, or pictured in photographs, is identified by his or her Yupik name written in the modern accurate orthography of the language. This identification was done by Walunga and other elders together with Metcalf and other younger Yupik writers as Christopher Koonooka. The present-day Yupik know their ancestry quite well through the 100 years covered by the book, and Yupik names are "recycled," so, as Vera Metcalf states, "this …