Hostname: page-component-78c5997874-lj6df Total loading time: 0 Render date: 2024-11-15T02:49:46.839Z Has data issue: false hasContentIssue false
  • English
  • Français

Hunters and Herders: Chukchi and Siberian Eskimo Navigation Across Snow and Frozen Sea

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  21 October 2009

David H. Lewis  and
Mimi George
Get access Rights & Permissions [Opens in a new window]

Extract

The tip of the Chukotskiy Peninsula in the Soviet Far East is 86 km from mainlandAlaska and its mountains are clearly visible from St Lawrence Island. It is a ruggedtreeless land that straddles the Arctic Circle between the Bering Sea and the ArcticOcean. In winter it is snow-covered and the sea stays frozen until May.

Type
Research Article
Information
The Journal of Navigation , Volume 44 , Issue 1 , January 1991 , pp. 1 - 10
Copyright
Copyright © The Royal Institute of Navigation 1991

Access options

Get access to the full version of this content by using one of the access options below. (Log in options will check for institutional or personal access. Content may require purchase if you do not have access.)

References

NOTES AND REFERENCES

Bridging the Bering Strait.Sail, 8, 36–39(1989).Google Scholar
Icebound in Antarctica.Secker and Warburg, London(1987).Google Scholar
Lewis, M.We the Navigators, Hawaii University Press, Honolulu.(1987, 1st edn. 1972).Google Scholar
Route finding by Desert Aborigines in Australia. This Journal, 29, 21.Google Scholar
An experiment in Polynesian navigation. This Journal, 19, 154.Google Scholar
Ara Moana. Stars of the Sea Road. This Journal, 17, 278.Google Scholar
2Irwin, C. (1983). Inuit navigation, empirical reasoning and survival. This Journal 38, 178.Google Scholar
Nelson, R. K. (1969).Hunters of the Northern Ice.University of Chicago Press, Chicago.Google Scholar
Stefansson, V. (1962).My Life with the Eskimo.New York.Google Scholar
3Bogoras, V. (1904). The Chukchee. Memoirs of the American Museum of Natural History, vol.11 (ed. by Franz Boas). Much of what we know about the Chukchi andSiberian Eskimo of an earlier day we owe to Vladimir Bogoras, whose many years of ethnographic fieldwork while exiled to Chukotka by the Tsar was supplemented by his benign direction of Soviet Northern People's policy, until he was supplanted on the eve of collectivization.Google Scholar
4Downs, R. M. and Stea, D. (1977).Maps in Minds.Harper and Row, New York.Google Scholar
5 Perival Baza is a stout building heated by two enormous Russian coal stoves. There are sleeping platforms in the living rooms, a snow porch and storage areas. A wind generator is backed up (rather redundantly, we thought) by a diesel generator. The base stands on the bank of the Ioniveyem river, near where it empties into the head of the 100 km-long Kolyuchinskaya Gulf.Google Scholar
6Yarangas are great pyramidal tents, open at the apex where the poles come together, and with vertical side walls to shoulder height. They are mostly canvas-covered, although one that we slept in was made largely of skin. The main tent is unheated - floored by snow in winter. Here, all the cooking is done. The inner rectangular tented room (or polog), which can accommodate five adults comfortably, is made from some twenty reindeer skins and is floored with split walrus or mukluk seal hide, over a layer of tundra grasses. In the summer, the fur side of the skins face inwards, while in the winter the fur side faces outward. The polog is lit by candles and its only heating is a home-made kerosene wick lamp (seal oil in the old days). Yet even in weather of -40 °C, this remarkable dwelling is warm and cosy, for the occupants' warmth and moist breath transpires through the pores of the reindeer skins to the outside fur, where it freezes and is beaten off in the morning.Google Scholar