The Sugpiaq Ethnohistory project came about as a response to the concerns of many Elders and culture bearers in the Native village of Nanwalek, Alaska. When community members thought about their traditional lifeways, they often expressed that they were “at the verge of losing everything,” because there was no information or proper documentation available to use for educational, cultural, and historical projects. Many in Nanwalek wished that local children would learn more about their ancestors’ history and values, so that they can “get grounded” in their Sugpiaq way of life.

Building on her previous work with Nanwalek, Medea Csoba DeHass compiled an ethnohistorical account of the Lower Kenai Sugpiaq cultural area and the Alaska Native people inhabiting the region as an NSF postdoctoral fellow based at Dartmouth College. She specifically focused on “places that count” such as currently uninhabited village sites, subsistence areas, seasonal camps and culturally significant landscapes. Csoba DeHass designed and completed this research in collaboration with the Nanwalek Indian Reorganization Act Council (IRA) and the people of Nanwalek as active participants.

To achieve these goals, Csoba DeHass spent six months in Nanwalek working with Elders to collect oral histories and personal historical accounts. These audio-visual materials reflect Sugpiaq epistemological views on the local landscape’s history and “what is worth knowing” about Sugpiaq past on the lower Kenai Peninsula. Additional research activities at archives and museums in Alaska, Berlin, and London revealed relevant documents, artifacts, and information that were new to scholarly discourse and were previously unknown to Native collaborators. 

For instance, the lower Kenai Peninsula items from the Jacobsen collection at the Ethnologisches Museum in Berlin have never been explored before this study. The collection’s Sugpiaq material is currently accessible to the public through this project’s research website in an effort to create an opportunity for virtual repatriation and to initiate conversation between museum personnel caring for these items and people in origin communities whose ancestors’ created them. Likewise, a review of the archival material in the Alaska Commercial Company collection unearthed documents that correlated with oral historical accounts and helped people better understand their past. Therefore, through these project activities, the study’s intellectual merit was to contribute to the greater scientific understanding of how people continually use adaptive historical reinterpretation to reframe their past from their current point of view, and the ways these cultural specific representations shape people’s outlook on...

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