MacArthur Fellows Program
The MacArthur Fellows Program, MacArthur Fellowship but unofficially known as a "Genius Grant", is a prize awarded annually by the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation to between 20 and 30 individuals, working in any field, who have shown "extraordinary originality and dedication in their creative pursuits and a marked capacity for self-direction" and are citizens or residents of the United States. According to the Foundation's website, "the fellowship is not a reward for past accomplishment, but rather an investment in a person's originality and potential"; the current prize is $625,000 paid over five years in quarterly installments. This figure was increased from $500,000 in 2013 with the release of a review of the MacArthur Fellows Program. Since 1981, 942 people have been named MacArthur Fellows, ranging in age from 18 to 82; the award has been called "one of the most significant awards, truly'no strings attached'". The program allows no applications. Anonymous and confidential nominations are invited by the Foundation and reviewed by an anonymous and confidential selection committee of about a dozen people.
The committee reviews all nominees and recommends recipients to the president and board of directors. Most new Fellows first learn of their nomination and award upon receiving a congratulatory phone call. MacArthur Fellow Jim Collins described this experience in an editorial column of The New York Times. Cecilia Conrad is the managing director leading the MacArthur Fellows Program. In the 2008 Charlie Kaufman film Synecdoche, New York, The main character Caden Cotard was a recipient of the Grant, used it to fund his immersive play. Guggenheim Fellowship Thomas J. Watson Fellowship MacArthur Fellows Program website
Alaska Native religion
Traditional Alaskan Native religion involves mediation between people and spirits and other immortal beings. Such beliefs and practices were once widespread among Inuit, Yupik and Northwest Coastal Indian cultures, but today are less common, they were in decline among many groups when the first major ethnological research was done. For example, at the end of the 19th century, the last medicine man among what were called in English, "Polar Eskimos", died; the term "Eskimo" has fallen out of favour in Canada and Greenland, where it is considered pejorative and "Inuit" is used instead. However, "Eskimo" is still considered acceptable among some Alaska Natives of Yupik and Inupiaq heritage and is at times preferred over "Inuit" as a collective reference; the Inuit and Yupik languages constitute one branch within the Eskimo–Aleut language family and the Aleut language is another. Most Alaskan Native cultures traditionally have some form of spiritual healer or ceremonial person who mediate between the spirits and humans of the community.
The person fulfilling this role is believed to be able to command helping spirits, ask mythological beings to "release" the souls of animals, enable the success of the hunt, or heal sick people by bringing back their "stolen" souls. Among the Inuit this person is known as an angakkuq; the alignalghi of the Siberian Yupiks is translated as "shaman" in English literature. While the word "shaman" comes from the Tungusic language, it is sometimes used by anthropologists when describing Alaskan Native beliefs. However, most traditional people prefer to use the terminology found in their own, traditional Native languages. Traditional spiritual beliefs among the Alaskan Native peoples exhibit some characteristic features not universal in cultures based in animism, such as soul dualism in certain groups, specific links between the living, the souls of hunted animals and dead people; the death of either a person or a game animal requires that certain activities, such as cutting and sewing, be avoided to prevent harming their souls.
In Greenland, the transgression of this "death taboo" could turn the soul of the dead into a tupilaq, a restless ghost who scared game away. Animals were thought to flee hunters. Chugach spiritual healers may begin their work after an out-of-body experience, such as seeing oneself as a skeleton, exemplified in Aua's narration and a Baker Lake artwork In some Alaskan Native communities, the spiritual people have used a distinctly archaic version of the community's normal language interlaced with special metaphors and speech styles. For example, "the shadow is ripening" means the healer is returning from his spiritual journey during a "seance". Expert healers have been said to speak whole sentences differing from vernacular speech; the shamans among the Siberian Yupik peoples had a special language that used periphrastic substitutions for names of objects and phenomena. These spirits were believed to have a special language with certain substitutes for ordinary words; the Ungazighmiit had a special allegoric usage of some expressions.
Observing the angakkuq Sorqaq's seance in a community at Qaanaaq, Peter Freuchen explains the motivation in that case: In this case, the special language was understood by the whole community, not restricted to the angakkuit or a few "experts". In some groups such variants were used when speaking with spirits invoked by the angakkuq and with unsocialised babies who grew into the human society through a special ceremony performed by the mother; some writers have treated both phenomena as a language for communication with "alien" beings. The motif of a distinction between spirit and "real" human is present in a tale of the Ungazighmiit. Another interesting example of the special language and its contribution to relexicalization: Techniques and ceremonies vary among cultures. Sleight-of-hand, ventriloquism might be used to impress the audience. In some cultures the angakkuq was pinioned before the séance, or the angakkuq might hide behind a curtain. Holding the séance in the dark with lamps extinguished was not obligatory, but the setting was familiar and widespread.
Some authors suggest that an angakkuq could be honest in his tricks, believing in the phenomena he himself mimicked, moreover, he could consciously cheat and believe at the same time. Knud Rasmussen mentioned a young Netsilik Inuit living in King William Island, he smeared himself with the blood of a seal or reindeer, telling people that he had a battle with spirits. Rasmussen conjectured that he could believe in this spirit battle experience which he mimicked with smearing blood; the personal impression of Rasmussen about this man was that he believed in the spirits. As Rasmussen asked him to draw some pictures about his experiences his visions about spirits, Arnaqaoq was first unwilling to do so, he accepted the task, he spent hours to re-experience his visions, sometimes so lucidly that he had to stop drawing when his whole body began to quiver. The boundary between ang
Peter the Aleut
Cungagnaq is venerated as a martyr and saint by some jurisdictions of the Eastern Orthodox Church. He was a native of Kodiak Island, is said to have received the Christian name of Peter when he was baptized into the Orthodox faith by the monks of St. Herman's missionaries operating in the north, he is purported to have been captured by Spanish soldiers near "San Pedro" and tortured and killed at the instigation of Roman Catholic priests either there or at a nearby location. At the time identified for his death, California was Spanish territory, Spain was worried about Russian advances southwards from Alaska. Hubert Howe Bancroft, in his multi-volume History of California, only notes that, in connection with an incident wherein a Russian fur-hunting expedition was taken into custody after declining to leave San Pedro. According to the most developed version of the story, in 1815 a group of Russian employees of the Russian American Company and their Aleut seal and otter hunters, including Peter, was captured by Spanish soldiers, while hunting illicitly for seals near San Pedro, (which has variably been interpreted as either San Pedro, Los Angeles or as San Pedro y San Pablo Asistencia.
According to the original account, the soldiers took them to "the mission in Saint-Pedro" for interrogation. One Russian source states that after being taken prisoner near modern Los Angeles, the captives were taken to Mission Dolores—that is, modern San Francisco. With threats of torture, the Roman Catholic priests attempted to force the Aleuts to deny their Orthodox faith and to convert to Roman Catholicism; when the Aleuts refused, the priest had a toe severed from each of Peter's feet. Peter still refused to renounce his faith and the Spanish priest ordered a group of Native Americans, indigenous to California, to cut off each finger of Peter's hands, one joint at a time removing both his hands, they disemboweled him, making him a martyr to the Eastern Orthodox faith. The Spanish captors were about to torture the next Aleut when orders were received to release the other Russian and Native Alaskan prisoners. An account of the martyrdom of Peter the Aleut is contained in a lengthy letter written on Nov. 22, 1865, by Symeon Ivanovich Yanovsky to Damascene, abbot of the Valaam Monastery in Finland.
Yanovsky, one of the chief sources of information about St. Herman of Alaska, was chief manager of the Russian colonies from 1818-1820. In the letter he was reporting on an incident that he had heard from a supposed eyewitness, that had taken place fifty years earlier in 1815; the letter contains the description of Peter being tortured by "Jesuits" but this would have been impossible, as the Jesuit order had been expelled from all Spanish territories in 1767, suppressed in 1773, had only been reconstituted in 1814. In 1815 there were no Jesuits within several thousand miles of California, as the reconstitution of the Jesuits in New Spain would not take place until 1816. There were only Franciscans in California at the time, it would be unlikely that anyone could confuse members of the two well-known and dissimilar orders. Yanovsky adds, "At the time I reported all this to the Head Office in St. Petersburg." And indeed, this earlier communication, his official dispatch to the company's main office—dated Feb. 15, 1820, five years after the event—also relates the story of St. Peter's martyrdom, albeit with different details.
The most significant difference is that Yanovsky's original brief letter of 1820 accompanied a Russian translation of an account given in 1819 by a Kodiak Islander with the Russian name "Ivan Kiglay". This is the only account that purports to be from a witness, any differences found in other accounts are additions or embroideries that lack foundation or support. Kiglay's account describes the capture of Russian-led fur poachers by Spanish soldiers in the vicinity of San Pedro Bay and taken to "the mission in Saint-Pedro". While the rest of the prisoners are removed to Mission Santa Barbara and another Kodiak Islander named Chukagnak—who had been wounded in a battle with the soldiers—are imprisoned separately at "the mission at Saint-Pedro", the next day Indians acting at the behest of a Spaniard torture and kill Chukagnak. Kiglay is going to receive the same treatment, until the Spaniard receives a letter that gives other directions. Kiglay is reimprisoned, escapes to Fort Ross, where he gives his testimony.
There is nothing in the account that links the execution of Chucagnak to a refusal on his part to abandon Orthodoxy. Instead, the eyewitness account states that the Kodiak islanders were all offered the opportunity to become Catholics, that they had all declined because they were Christians, with the exceptions of Kiglay and Chukagnak were all transferred to Santa Barbara with no further mention of, or demand for, conversion. Peter the Aleut has been referred to as a "martyr of San Francisco". Additionally, many modern descriptions of the m
Alutiiq
The Alutiiq people called by their ancestral name Sugpiaq, as well as Pacific Eskimo or Pacific Yupik, are a southern coastal people of Alaska Natives. They are not to be confused with the Aleuts, who live further to the southwest, including along the Aleutian Islands, their traditional homelands include Prince William Sound and outer Kenai Peninsula, the Kodiak Archipelago and the Alaska Peninsula. In the early 1800s there were more than 60 Alutiiq villages in the Kodiak archipelago, with an estimated population of 13,000 people. Today more than 4,000 Alutiiq people live in Alaska. At present, the most used title is Alutiiq, Alutiit; these terms derive from the names that Russian fur traders and settlers gave to the native people in the region. Russian occupation began in 1784, following their massacre of hundreds of Sugpiat at Refuge Rock just off the coast of Sitkalidak Island near the present-day village of Old Harbor. Given the violence underlying the colonial period, confusion because the Sugpiaq term for Aleut is Alutiiq, some Alaska Natives from the region have advocated use of the terms that the people themselves use to describe their people and language: Sugpiaq, Sugpiat — to identify the people, Sugstun, Sugt'stun, or Sugtestun to refer to the language.
All three names are used now, according to personal preference. Over time, many other ethnonyms were used to refer to this people; the people traditionally lived a coastal lifestyle, subsisting on ocean resources such as salmon and whale. They supplemented these maritime foods such as berries and land mammals. Before contact with Russian fur traders, they lived in semi-subterranean homes called ciqlluaq. Today, in the 21st century, the Alutiiq live in coastal fishing communities in more modern housing, they work in all aspects of the modern economy, while maintaining the cultural value of subsistence. In 2010 the high school in Kodiak responded to requests from Alutiiq students and agreed to teach the Alutiiq language, it is one of the Eskimo languages, belonging to the Yup'ik branch of these languages. The Kodiak dialect of the language was being spoken by only about 50 persons, all of them elderly, the dialect was in danger of being lost entirely. Alvin Eli Amason and sculptor Sven Haakanson, executive director of the Alutiiq Museum, winner of a 2007 MacArthur Fellowship.
Loren Leman, Lieutenant-governor of Alaska, 2002-2006 Cungagnaq known as Peter the Aleut, an Eastern Orthodox saint from Kodiak Island. Chugach Awa'uq Massacre Alutiiq Museum Alaska Native Language Center: Alaska Native Languages Map Alaskan Orthodox Christian texts Alutiiq Museum List of Native American peoples in the United States
Yup'ik
The Yup'ik or Yupiaq and Yupiit or Yupiat Central Alaskan Yup'ik, Central Yup'ik, Alaskan Yup'ik, are an Eskimo people of western and southwestern Alaska ranging from southern Norton Sound southwards along the coast of the Bering Sea on the Yukon-Kuskokwim Delta and along the northern coast of Bristol Bay as far east as Nushagak Bay and the northern Alaska Peninsula at Naknek River and Egegik Bay. They are known as Cup'ik by the Chevak Cup'ik dialect-speaking Eskimos of Chevak and Cup'ig for the Nunivak Cup'ig dialect-speaking Eskimo of Nunivak Island. Both Chevak Cup'ik and Nunivak Cup'ig Eskimos are known as Cup'ik; the Yup'ik, Cup'ik, Cup'ig speakers can converse without difficulty, the regional population is described using the larger term of Yup'ik. They are one of the four Yupik peoples of Alaska and Siberia related to the Sugpiaq ~ Alutiiq of south-central Alaska, the Siberian Yupik of St. Lawrence Island and Russian Far East, the Naukan of Russian Far East; the Yupiit speak the Yup'ik language.
Of a total population of about 21,000 people, about 10,000 speak the language. The Yup'ik Eskimo combine a contemporary and a traditional subsistence lifestyle in a blend unique to the Southwest Alaska. Today, the Yup'ik work and live in western style but still hunt and fish in traditional subsistence ways and gather traditional foods. Most Yup'ik people still speak the native language and bilingual education has been in force since the 1970s; the Yupiit are the most numerous of the various Alaska Native groups and speak the Central Alaskan Yup'ik language, a member of the Eskimo–Aleut family of languages. As of the 2000 U. S. Census, the Yupiit population in the United States numbered over 24,000, of whom over 22,000 lived in Alaska; the vast majority of these live in the seventy or so communities in the traditional Yup'ik territory of western and southwestern Alaska. As of the 2010 U. S. Census, the Yup'ik at 34,000 people is the largest Alaska Native tribal grouping, either alone or in combination followed by the Inupiat.
The Yup'ik had the greatest number of people who identified with one tribal grouping and no other race. In that census, nearly half of American Indians and Alaska Natives identified as being of mixed race; the neighbours of the Yup'ik Eskimos are the Iñupiaq Eskimo to the north, Aleutized Alutiiq ~ Sugpiaq Eskimos to the south, Alaskan Athabaskans, such as Yup'ikized Holikachuk and Deg Hit'an, non-Yup'ikized Koyukon and Dena'ina, to the east. The form Yup'ik was used in the northern area while the form Yupiaq was used in the southern area. Certain places had other forms; the form Yup'ik is now used as a common term. Yup'ik comes from the Yup'ik word yuk meaning "person" plus the postbase -pik or -piaq meaning "real" or "genuine"; the ethnographic literature sometimes refers to the Yup ` ik people or their language as Yuit. In the Hooper Bay-Chevak and Nunivak dialects of Yup'ik, both the language and the people are given the name Cup'ik; the use of an apostrophe in the name "Yup'ik", compared to Siberian "Yupik", exemplifies the Central Yup'ik's orthography.
"The apostrophe represents gemination of the'p' sound". The names given to them by their neighbors: Alutiiq ~ Sugpiaq: Pamana'rmiu'aq, Pamanirmiuq Deg Xinag Athabaskan: Dodz xit'an, Novogh xit'an Holikachuk Athabaskan: Namagh hit'an Koyukon Athabaskan: Nobaagha hut'aankkaa Dena'ina Athabaskan: Dutna, Naghelghazhna Upper Kuskokwim Athabaskan: Dodina sg Dodinayu pl The common ancestors of the Eskimo and the Aleut are believed by archaeologists to have their origin in eastern Siberia. Migrating east, they reached the Bering Sea area about 10,000 years ago. Research on blood types and linguistics suggests that the ancestors of American Indians reached North America in waves of migration before the ancestors of the Eskimo and Aleut; this causeway became exposed between 8,000 years ago during periods of glaciation. By about 3,000 years ago the progenitors of the Yupiit had settled along the coastal areas of what would become western Alaska, with migrations up the coastal rivers—notably the Yukon and Kuskokwim—around 1400 C.
E. reaching as far upriver as Paimiut on the Yukon and Crow Village on the Kuskokwim. The Russian colonization of the Americas lasted from 1732 to 1867; the Russian Empire supported ships traveling from Siberia to America for whaling and fishing expeditions. The crews established hunting and trading posts of the Shelikhov-Golikov Company in the Aleutian Islands and northern Alaska indigenous settlements.. Half of the fur traders were Russians, such as promyshlenniki from various European parts of the Russian Empire or from Siberia. Grigory Shelikhov led attacks on Kodiak Island against the indigenous Alutiiq in 1784, known as the Awa'uq Massacre. According to some estimates, Russian employees of the trading company killed more than 2,000 Alutiiq; the company took over control of the island. By the late 1790s, its trading posts had become the centers of permanent settlements of Russian America
Kenai Peninsula
The Kenai Peninsula is a large peninsula jutting from the coast of Southcentral Alaska. The name Kenai is derived from the word "Kenaitze" or "Kenaitze Indian Tribe", the name of the Native Athabascan Alaskan tribe, the Kahtnuht’ana Dena’ina, that inhabited the area, they called the Kenai Peninsula Yaghanen. The peninsula extends 150 miles southwest from the Chugach Mountains, south of Anchorage, it is separated from the mainland on the west on the east by Prince William Sound. Most of the peninsula is part of the Kenai Peninsula Borough. Gerasim Izmailov was the first European man to explore and map the peninsula in 1789, though Athabaskan and Alutiiq Native groups have lived on the peninsula for thousands of years; the glacier-covered Kenai Mountains, rising 7,000 feet, run along the southeast spine of the peninsula along the coast of the Gulf of Alaska. Much of the range is within Kenai Fjords National Park; the northwest coast along the Cook Inlet is marshy, dotted with numerous small lakes.
Several larger lakes extend through the interior of the peninsula, including Skilak Lake and Tustumena Lake. Rivers include the Kenai River, famous for its salmon population, as well as its tributary, the Russian River, the Kasilof River, the Anchor River. Kachemak Bay, a small inlet off the larger Cook Inlet, extends into the peninsula's southwest end, much of, part of Kachemak Bay State Park; the Kenai Peninsula has many glaciers in southern areas. It is home to both the Sargent Icefield and Harding Icefields and numerous glaciers that spawn off them; the peninsula includes several of the most populous towns in south central Alaska, including Seward on the Gulf of Alaska Coast, Kenai and Cooper Landing along the Cook Inlet and Kenai River, Homer, along Kachemak Bay, along with numerous smaller villages and settlements. Homer famously marks the terminus of the paved highway system of North America and is a popular destination for travelers who have driven to Alaska from the lower 48 states.
Seward is the southern terminus of the Alaska Railroad. There are airports with scheduled flights in Kenai and Homer as well as smaller general aviation airports in Soldotna and Seward; the Seward Highway connects Seward to Anchorage, the Sterling Highway is the backbone of Kenai Peninsula connecting the larger towns to Anchorage. The peninsula has a coastal climate, mild, with abundant rainfall, it is one of the few areas in Alaska that allow for agriculture, with a growing season adequate for producing hay and several other crops. The peninsula has natural gas and coal deposits, as well as abundant commercial and personal-use fisheries. Tourism is guiding services for hunters and fishers; the Kenai Peninsula is known as "Alaska's Playground"
Michael E. Krauss
Michael E. Krauss is an American linguist, professor emeritus and long-time head of the Alaska Native Language Center; as of February 2013, the Alaska Native Language Archive is named after him. Krauss is known first and foremost as an Eyak language specialist, a language that became extinct in January 2008. However, he has worked on all of the 20 Native languages of Alaska, 18 of which belong to the Na-Dené and Eskimo–Aleut language families. With his 1991 address to the Linguistic Society of America, Krauss focused awareness of the global problem of endangered languages, he has since worked to encourage the documentation and re-vitalization of endangered languages across the world. Krauss joined the faculty of the University of Alaska Fairbanks in 1960 and served as director of the Alaska Native Language Center from its inception in 1972 until his retirement in June 2000, he remains active in efforts to document Alaska's Native languages and encouraged awareness of the global problem of endangered languages.
Krauss received a B. A. from University of Chicago. A. from Columbia University,. D. in Linguistics and Celtic from Harvard University. His dissertation was titled "Studies in Irish Gaelic Phonology & Orthography." Krauss conducted fieldwork with Gaelic in Western Ireland Krauss conducted fieldwork with Norse languages in Iceland and in the Faroe Islands. After completing a dissertation on Gaelic languages Krauss arrived in Alaska in 1960 to teach French at the University of Alaska, but Krauss was aware of and interested in the indigenous languages of Alaska prior to his arrival. In fact, while en route to Alaska he visited Harry Hoijer, the leading scholar of Athabaskan languages at the time. Arriving in Alaska he became aware of the dire situation of the indigenous languages of Alaska and turned his attention to documenting those languages, focusing on the Tanana language; this turned out to be quite fortuitous for scholars of Athabaskan comparative linguistics, as Lower Tanana nicely demonstrated a split in the Proto-Athabaskan *ts- series, not evidenced in Hoijer's data.
Although Krauss communicated this new information to Hoijer, it was not incorporated into Hoijer's major Athabaskan monograph, printed in 1963. The Minto data did appear in a series of IJAL articles by Krauss in the mid to late 1960s, but it was some time before the existence of an additional Proto-Athabaskan affricate series became known. Krauss' largest contribution to language documentation is his work on Eyak, which began in 1961. Eyak was already the most endangered of the Alaskan languages, Krauss' work is all the more notable considering that it represents what today might be considered salvage linguistics. While some Eyak data had been available, they were overlooked by previous scholars, including Edward Sapir. However, Eyak proved to be a crucial missing link for historical linguistics, being closely related to neighboring Ahtna and to distant Navajo. With good Eyak data it became possible to establish the existence of the Athabaskan–Eyak–Tlingit language family, though phonological evidence for links to Haida remained elusive.
Further, the system of vowel modifications present in Eyak inspired Krauss' theory of Athabaskan tonogenesis, whereby tone develops from vowel constriction. Michael Krauss' lecture at the Linguistic Society of America conference in January 1991 is cited as a turning point which refocused the field of linguistics on documentation and inspired a systematic global effort to document the world's linguistic diversity. In his lecture, titled "The world's languages in crisis," Dr. Krauss famously warned:."Obviously we must do some serious rethinking of our priorities, lest linguistics go down in history as the only science that presided obliviously over the disappearance of 90% of the field to which it is dedicated." Michael Krauss contends that in the United States, children are only learning 20% of the world's remaining languages. Badten, Adelinda W.. Ungazighmiit ungipaghaatangit. College: University of Alaska. Friedrich, Paul. On the meaning of the Tarascan suffixes of space. Baltimore, Waverly Press.
Gudgel-Holmes, Dianne. Native place names of the Kantishna drainage. Anchorage, AK: U. S. Department of the Interior, National Park Service, Alaska Regional Office. Hale, Ken. "Endangered languages". Language. 68: 1–42. Doi:10.2307/416368. JSTOR 416368. Harry, Annan N.. In honor of Eyak: The art of Annan Nelson Harry. Fairbanks, AK: Alaska Native Language Center, University of Alaska. Krauss, Michael E.. Na-Dene. College, AK: University of Alaska and M. I. T. Krauss, Michael E.. "The proto-Athapaskan–Eyak and the problem of Na-Dene, I: The phonology". International Journal of American Linguistics. 30: 118–131. Doi:10.1086/464766. Krauss, Michael E.. "The proto-Athapaskan–Eyak and the problem of Na-Dene, II: The morphology". International Journal of American Linguistics. 31: 18–28. Doi:10.1086/464810. Krauss, Michael E.. "Noun classifiers in the Athapaskan, Eyak and Haida verb". International Journal of American Linguistics. 34: 194–203. Doi:10.1086/465014. Krauss, Michael E.. On the classification in the Athapascan and the Tlingit verb.
Baltimore: Waverly Press, Indiana University. Krauss, Michael E.. Eskimo–Aleut; the Hague: Mouton. Krauss, M
