Iqyax - Jacob Stepetin Final

My "Little Bone"

Sewing the "Skin" (fabric, traditionally sea lion skin) onto my Iqyax

            “What’s this dad? What did they use this one for?”

            That was a question I asked a lot as a child when I would go with my dad to Chulka to dig for ancient Unangax artifacts. Spear tips, sewing needles, stone knives, arrow heads, oil lamps; I would find these items, ask my dad what they were, and he always knew the answer.

            “That one would go on the end of a harpoon, and they would kill a seal with it. See how there are barbs facing backwards so it would get stuck in the seal?” he would say. He always knew the answer, because he asked his father when he was a boy, and his father asked his before him.

            But this time was different. “What’s this dad? What did they use this one for?” He looked at it for a while. He twirled it between his fingers, held it up close to his face, then far away…

            “I don’t know what this one is son. I’ve never seen one like this before. Is that blood on the side? What are these little scratch marks? What did they use this one for?”

            He always knew the answer, but he didn’t know the answer this time. I kept that little piece of carved bone for a long time, not knowing anything about it other than that one of my ancestors created it and left it in the dirt for me to find. That little piece of bone held mysteries of my peoples’ past and I was determined to know what it was.

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            I have been interested in kayaks for a long time, ever since I was first set down in one as a 9-year-old. Even though I just floated there in ankle-deep water for a minute, I was obsessed. My Ancestors used kayaks, or Iqyas as we call them, to survive. The Iqyax was an extension of an Unangax man’s body, and it was also a living thing on its own. It had to be cared for, respected, and loved, just like a child or a lover. The ocean was their source of life and the Iqyax was the vehicle through which they were able to tap that source.

            When the Russians came, my Ancestors were forced to hunt seals and sea otters for the value of their fur. The Iqyax was still necessary for life, but only because it made it possible to get fur. If a hunter did not get enough fur, they would be punished or killed. Many were killed. Not just because they couldn’t supply enough furs. In the beginning many were simply murdered. Many died from the new diseases. Some died trying to rebel. As much as 90% of the Unangax population in the Aleutian Islands was lost in a period of 40 years between the 18^th and 19^th centuries.  

            90% is a large, sad number, and it says a lot, but it does not say who was lost. Who were those 90%? What was lost along with them? In a culture where all knowledge is preserved through oral history, when someone dies, the knowledge of every generation that came before them dies with them, unless they passed that knowledge on. Unangax people lived in the Aleutian Islands for 10,000 years before the Russians came, and when 90% of my ancestors died, 90% of that 10,000-year oral history and knowledge died with them. We forgot how to build our Iqyas. We forgot what that little bone was that I found in the dirt.

            Now we are learning again. I am trying to learn. I have built my own Iqyax, but not the way it was done by my ancestors. I have built my own Iqyax in the best way we know, but it is not the way it was done before the Russians came. I learned that that little bone belongs inside an Iqyax. That little bone was once a myth, something that was only written about by Russian ethnographers, but now we know they were real. We still do not know what their purpose was.