Liudmila Ainana (1934–2021)

On July 2nd 2021, Liudmila Ivanovna Ainana (1934–2021), the oldest custodian of Asian Yupik knowledge, language, and culture, passed away. Ainana (pronounced Aynganga in Yupik), her Yupik name, under which she was universally known, was an Honored Citizen of the Chukotka Autonomous Okrug, the founder and first president of the Yupik Society of the Chukotka Yupik, an ethnographer, and the author of a host of publications on the language and culture of the Yupik people. Ainana lived a long and eventful life, her rich biography spanning not only different cultures, but different worlds: the world of a traditional-contact society (Krupnik and Chlenov, 2013) and that of Soviet Chukotka, the world of the intelligentsia circles of Moscow, Leningrad, and Anadyr and the national villages of the North, the worlds of America and Russia, of academia and hunting. The life of Ainana, along with that of her family, reflected the general fate of the Asian Yupik in the 20th century. Born in a tiny coastal settlement in the family of a ship’s captain and harpooner who worked with the Americans, she would walk the long path to becoming one of the most respected Elders of Chukotka, an outstanding connoisseur of the heritage, traditions, and language of her people, a national intellectual, and the author of textbooks and manuals on the Yupik language, as well as world-class ethnographic works. Shamanism and animistic concepts, the close interaction between Alaskan Yupik and the Chukchi, Soviet secondary and higher education at the Leningrad Herzen Institute (so renowned throughout the North), the preservation and development of local lore and national culture, human rights campaigning in the 1990s—miraculously, all these facets to the history of the Yupik of Chukotka find their place in Ainana’s rich biography. Ainana was born in the small settlement of Uqighyaghaq near Cape Chaplino (location of a large Yupik settlement, Ungaziq) in a thriving Yupik family of the Laakaghmiit clan. Thanks to Ainana’s memoirs, we know the stories of her grandparents, people born as far back as the 1860s and ʼ70s. It is only fitting that we begin Ainana’s biography with an account of her closest relatives, as their stories have come down to us specifically thanks to Ainana’s openness, memory, and deep respect for the history of her family. Her father Atata (1892-1942) worked as a boat captain in the 1930s and ʼ40s and often sailed over to Plover (a predominantly Yupik coastal settlement established in 1931 and closed in 1957), and her paternal grandfather Kaqa (? -1946) had worked with American whalers at the beginning of the 20th century: “…we called him [her grandfather] ‘Foma neveruiushchii’ [literally ‘Doubting Thomas’]. He knew nothing about religion or about customs. But how many interesting stories he had, for all that! Because he’d lived so many years.” Ainana recalled that her father paid little attention to traditional beliefs; he “didn’t put any faith in the shamans”, spoke good Russian, and was one of the first Yupik mechanics. Working in Plover did not prevent Atata from going hunting. In 2012, Ainana told me a story about how her father and several other hunters from the Laakaghmiit clan had drifted out on an ice floe for a long time, had tried to get back to shore over the ice, and finally managed to do so in the vicinity of the settlement of Qiwaaq; one of the hunters, a man named Tul’khi, had even died during this excursion. Ainana’s mother was called Yanga (1885-1956). Yanga’s father Ayakhta was a shaman. At the end of his life, he became very ill, and as Ainana recalled, he …