Illness and Wellness in Yup'ik Oral Tradition

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This project explores Indigenous Yup’ik concepts of illness and wellness, how such concepts differ from biomedical understandings of disease, and the roles of traditional healers past and present. The PI team, guided by the Elders’ Committee of Calista Education and Culture, an Alaska tribal organization, will conduct two gatherings of Yup’ik elders in Bethel, Alaska. Accounts collected during these gatherings will be integrated with narratives recorded over the last two decades to document attitudes toward disease, epidemics, healing, and shamanic practice. The work counters rapid loss of traditional knowledge and promotes use of Yup’ik language, two Indigenous research priorities in the region. This community-based project seeks to compile and integrate ethnohistorical and personal narratives describing Yup’ik understanding of illness and wellness. Two topic-specific gatherings will assemble Yup’ik elders from across Southwest Alaska who retain knowledge of traditional practices and Indigenous concepts of disease causation and curing. Discussions will focus on continuity and change in understanding of epidemics and healing, with special attention to the roles of traditional healers today and of shamanic healers, or angalkut, in the past. Accounts from these gatherings will be integrated with archival transcripts to generate a bilingual volume that includes elders’ accounts and an introduction that contextualizes Yup’ik traditions within Alaska and the Arctic more generally. Selected place-based accounts will be recorded as podcasts and linked to the online Yup’ik Atlas, preserving elders’ knowledge and making it broadly accessible to scholars and the public.This award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria.