Chapter 07: Not Thinking

Kuuyux Ilarion Merculieff grew up on St. George island, one of the Pribilof islands, hundreds of miles off the coast of Alaska in the Bering Sea. Now in his seventies, he is one of the last of his generation to be raised in a tradition manner in his Unangan (Aleut) culture.

The island is tiny– a speck in the vastness of that freezing ocean– hemmed in by fog. When he grew up there it was home to millions of seabirds and millions of Northern Fur seals. The island is a mere 3 x 10 miles, only 34 square miles in total. Maui, by comparison, the second largest of the Hawaiian islands, is 727 square miles.

The Pribilofs are the nesting grounds of over two hundred species of seabirds. The islands are also home to the largest population of Northern Fur seals in the world. The trade in their pelts brought first Russian fur traders to the island (in 1786 Russian navigator Gavriil Pribylov ‘discovered’ the islands which had been home to Unangan people for nearly 10,000 years, and gave them their common name) and then eventually the US government, which purchased Alaska in 1867, and proceeded to enslave the Unangan people in these killing fields, something this government is reluctant to acknowledge as it happened into the 20th century, and the US government is not supposed to enslave people.

The Unangan people migrated from Egypt ten thousand years ago, likely arriving at the Pribilofs via a landbridge during the last ice age. From this outpost in the far northern ocean, they built a culture that boasted the most densely populated linear shoreline in the Americas, creating a thriving culture in a place of profound inhospitability.

From this location, hundreds of miles off the coast of Alaska, they plied the oceans in anthropometric kayaks made of sealskin and whalebone, traveling as far south as the southern tip of what is now Chile in South America.

Replica of an 1826 Unangan Iqyax (single seat anthropometric kayak). The shape is probably quite accurate, the materials are not. The paddle is traditional. The hat is traditional.

As I got to know Ilarion a number of years ago, and learned about the Unangan culture, I found archival video footage of Unangan men exiting these kayaks on the shore of the island. They are dressed in traditional skin garments, and they are not wearing shoes. The water temperature around the Pribilofs in winter typically ranges from one to two degrees above freezing; during the summer it can rise to nearly five! degrees above freezing.

So this is a culture of such robust vitality that they were able to survive barefoot for thousands of years in water that is a degree above freezing. Since I am reluctant to step into water in the San Francisco Bay that is a balmy twenty or more degrees above freezing, and in fact refuse to surf here without a wetsuit, in waters that to Ilarion’s people must seem quite tropical, this caught my attention. Who are these people who managed to build a culture in one of the most remote and inhospitable places on earth, and how on earth did they manage to thrive there?