The Dwellers Between: Yup\u27ik Shamans and Cultural Change in Western Alaska

This paper examines the history of the Yup\u27ik Eskimos of western Alaska and explores how their shamans shaped the response to introduced epidemic disease. As in the experiences of so many other Native American groups, disease epidemics played an important role in the history of relations between the Yup\u27ik Eskimos and white settlers in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. I argue here that while the Yup\u27ik Eskimos grappled with the devastating effects of introduced diseases, they did not repudiate their shamans and traditional faith, which sets the Yup\u27ik people apart from other Native Americans. Before contact with Europeans, the Yup\u27ik people relied on their shamans for physical and psychological healing. Despite challenges from missionaries, traders, and disease, the Yup\u27ik Eskimos retained faith in their shamans well into the twentieth century. The shamans\u27 enduring power as healers rested on specific features of the Yup\u27ik belief system and the inability of western medicine to cure disease at crucial historical moments. During Russian rule in western Alaska, the shamans maintained their influence over the people by leading the Yup\u27ik Eskimos to incorporate new diseases, like smallpox, into their world view. Later, American missionaries and their western medicines brought enormous pressure onto the shamans to relinquish control. However, widespread disillusionment following the terrible double epidemic of 1900 encouraged the Yup\u27ik people to return to their shamans