Nome Archaeology Camp: Place-Based Learning for Future Stewards of the Bering Strait

From Alaska Park Science 20(2), 2021, by Jillian Richie, Hannah Atkinson and Justin Junge of the National Park Service and Lisa Ellanna of Kawerak, Inc. The project was supported in part by the Shared Beringian Heritage Program.

Archaeologist Jeff Rasic shows how to inspect material from a soil probe. Image from the National Park Service's page.

The place

Nome — Sitnasuaq in Iñupiaq — lies at the southern edge of the Seward Peninsula, the westernmost reach of mainland North America. During the Last Glacial Maximum, 24,000–15,000 years ago, the sea was about 400 feet (120 m) lower, and the "peninsula" was landlocked within the Bering Land Bridge joining Alaska to Asia — the route most archaeologists agree people took into the Americas around 14,000 years ago. The ancestors of today's Indigenous residents are thought to have arrived about 4,000 years ago. The region is now home to three main cultural groups — Iñupiat, Central Yup'ik and Siberian Yupik — in 20 communities.

Its archaeological sites are protected at local, tribal, state and federal levels, but threatened by natural and human forces, and deep-rooted traditions are shifting with cultural and technological change. Local leaders wanted activities to help young people carry on cultural preservation and stewardship.

The camp

Local cultural resource specialists created the Nome Archaeology Camp. From 2015 to 2019, more than 50 high school students from 14 Alaskan communities attended the annual week-long camps, working with professionals from the National Park Service, Kawerak, Inc., Bering Straits Native Corporation, Alaska Geographic and the City of Nome, and with local experts and Elders.

The camp drew on many approaches — hands-on archaeology and museum work, decolonising methods in anthropology, community-based participatory research — letting the place and its people shape the results. In training the next generation of stewards, it serves the purpose set for Bering Land Bridge National Preserve in its founding law: "to provide archaeological and paleontological study, in cooperation with Native Alaskans".

Students Jennifer Smith and Martin Hadley help record a site near Salmon Lake, 2015. Image from the National Park Service's page.

Reading the land

At basecamp on Salmon Lake — a popular spot for recreation and subsistence, and spawning ground of the northernmost sockeye salmon run in the United States — modern, historic and ancient remains dot the tundra.

• Survey, not digging. With GPS units, tapes, cameras and notebooks, students surveyed a small village site. Unlike most field schools, the camp does not excavate: after recording visible features, students used a minimally invasive soil probe. In 2015 they drew a piece of charcoal from the centre of a large round depression — the remains of a semi-subterranean house — which a laboratory radiocarbon-dated to nearly 1,000 years old. The lesson: you can learn about the past without destroying it.
• A caribou drive line. Nearby, students identified a drive line — two slowly converging rows of stacked rocks, or inuksuk, used to funnel caribou into a corral for harvest — then re-enacted a community hunt from the archaeologist Lewis Binford's account, taking turns as hunters and caribou. A favourite role was the rhythmic driver, a person imitating a caribou's bobbing, dipping movements to lead the herd to the hunters.

Students re-enact traditional hunting at a caribou drive line, 2018. Image from the National Park Service's page.

Learning from Elders

In all five seasons, Elders and local experts shared their upbringing, family stories, the names and uses of traditional plants, and where oral history meets science. In 2016 Guy Martin of Nome told how oral history — also recorded in People of Kauwerak — helped relocate a long-lost stone monument and confirm its continuing importance. As he told The Arctic Sounder, when the timelines of scientists and of Elders' stories agree, each confirms the other — gratifying to the Elders' memory and a complement to science.

Students then reflected on their own part in the tradition: to ask questions, respect Elders, and above all share the stories.

Elders share stories with students, 2016. Image from the National Park Service's page.

Many students were moved personally. One 2016 participant, Caitlin Tautuk Hanna, said recording a site let her glimpse how her ancestors lived and see the places in the stories she had heard come to life. Daphne Stein of Kotzebue was taken with a fish-catching tool, the naquq — beautiful and cleverly made — and said the camp had inspired her to do research of her own as an archaeologist.

Elders and students catalogue artifacts donated to the Carrie M. McLain Memorial Museum, 2015. Image from the National Park Service's page.

Museums and a gathering place

• Carrie M. McLain Memorial Museum. In 2016 its 15,000 historical and cultural objects, 12,000 photographic prints and negatives and hundreds of boxes of documents moved to a new home in Nome's Richard Foster Building. Students saw the move behind the scenes, helped catalogue and 3D-scan a collection of ethnohistoric artifacts, and toured the new curatorial facilities and exhibits.
• Katirvik Cultural Center — katirvik means "gathering place" in Iñupiaq, Siberian Yupik and Central Yup'ik — next door, celebrates the region's Indigenous knowledge and cultures. Students helped shape it: exhibits, traditional drumming and dancing, Indigenous foods and discussion.

A behind-the-scenes tour of the Carrie M. McLain Memorial Museum, 2016. Image from the National Park Service's page.

Students practise traditional drumming with Lisa Ellanna at the Katirvik Cultural Center, 2016. Image from the National Park Service's page.

From learning to action

Colonisation has left many Indigenous Alaskans facing questions of identity and cultural loss, and a young person's identity can be bound up with a place and landscape. Through place-based learning, instructors showed students that reviving and preserving culture can be a healthy way of coping.

In final presentations, students were encouraged to propose direct action. They argued for Alaska studies, Native drumming, Alaska Native arts and Indigenous language classes in public schools, supported using traditional place names, and urged state and federal rules that let residents harvest traditional foods.

Students left with academic credit from the University of Alaska Fairbanks Northwest Campus, basic field-science skills and a deeper understanding of the Bering Strait's history and culture — and, the instructors hope, the confidence to ask questions and take part in preserving the culture of the region they call home.

Sources

• Richie, J., Atkinson, H., Junge, J., and Ellanna, L., 2021, "Nome Archaeology Camp: Using Place-Based Education to Inspire the Next Generation of Stewards in the Bering Strait Region," Alaska Park Science 20(2): 20–25. https://www.nps.gov/articles/000/aps-20-2-3.htm
• Supported by Alaska Geographic, Bering Straits Native Corporation, the Bureau of Indian Affairs, the Carrie M. McLain Memorial Museum, the City of Nome, the Katirvik Cultural Center, Kawerak, the Murie Science and Learning Center, the National Park Service, the Norton Sound Economic Development Center, the Shared Beringian Heritage Program and the University of Alaska Fairbanks Northwest Campus.
• The photographs carry no credit in the original.
• Words on this page from people and organisations outside the federal government are paraphrased; rewritten in hubnx's own words.