26 Yuuyaraq: The Way of the Human Being, Part 1: The Great Death

After introducing himself, Napoleon describes the Yup’ik spiritual concept of yuuyaraq, which describes how human beings should live, and iinruq, the spiritual essence embedded in all objects, living or inanimate. From there he connects the spiritual concept to the illness that wiped out so many Native Alaskans in the 19th century where our excerpt begins.

In the old Yup’ik world, the angalkuq were powerful and indispensable forces because they represented, protected, and upheld Yuuyaraq, even against the spiritual realm, of which they were members. They were the guardians of an ancient culture that had become brittle with age, a culture whose underpinnings the rest of the world would never understand, a culture that was about to crumble as a result of temporal forces from the one direction the angalkuq were not looking–the physical world.

Illness and Disease

Not knowing of microbes, bacteria, or viruses, the old Yup’ik attributed illness to the invasion of the body by evil spirits. They knew that certain plants and spoiled food caused death and they strictly forbade the eating of them. But illness unattributed to the ingestion of poisons through the mouth was attributed to evil spirits. Such illness was treated by the angalkuq in their role as medicine men and women. Certain herbs, plants, and even animal parts provided commonly known remedies for many ailments suffered by the Yup’ik. They also had home remedies for small burns and cuts, sore backs, sprains, and other minor ailments. The angalkug were not called in unless the illness was deemed to be serious and of an unknown  nature, probably caused by an evil spirit and thus requiring a spiritual remedy.

The angalkug must have known that some of the ailments were, by nature, physical. Their knowledge of the human anatomy was probably as good as that of their Western counterparts at that time. Some angalkuq were even said to have performed surgeries, amputations, and autopsies. They had names for all major bones, muscles, arteries, veins, and organs, and knew roughly the function of each. But their remedies for unknown disease were different from their Western counterparts who used bromides and elixirs, while the angalkuq used songs, dances, and chants.

The important thing to remember is that the old Yupiit believed that illnesses unattributed to the ingestion of poisons or injury were caused by the invasion of the body by evil spirits. With the arrival of Western man, the Yupiit (and Yuuyaraq) would be accosted by diseases from which they would never recover. The old Yup’ik culture, the spirit world and its guardian, the angalkuq, were about to receive a fatal wounding.

The World Goes Upside Down

When the first white men arrived in the Yup’ik villages, the people did not immediately abandon their old ways. It is historical fact that they resisted Russian efforts to colonize them. They did not abandon their spirit world or their beliefs upon first hearing the Christian message of the priests. That the missionaries met resistance is clear from the derogatory and antagonistic references they made about the angalkuq in their diaries. They called them rascals, tricksters, even agents of the devil.

The Yupiit saw missionaries as curiosities, as they saw all white men. The Yupiit said of them, yuunritut,-“they are not human beings.” Obviously they were not impressed by the white men, even though they quickly adopted their technology and goods. But resistance to Western rule would crumble, Yuuyaraq would be abandoned, and the spirit world would be displaced by Christianity.

The change was brought about as a result of the introduction of diseases that had been born in the slums of Europe during the dark and middle ages, diseases carried by the traders, the whalers, and the missionaries. To these diseases the Yup’ik and other Native tribes had no immunity, and to these they would lose up to 60 percent of their people. As a result of epidemics, the Yup’ik world would go upside down; it would end.

This period of Yup’ik history is vague. There is no oral or written record of their reaction to this experience, but we can and must attempt in our minds to recreate what happened because this cataclysm of mass death changed the persona, the lifeview, the world view, of the Yup’ik people.

The Great Death

As a child I heard references to yuut tuqurpallratni–when a great many died,” or The Great Death. I never understood when it happened, nor was I told in detail what it was. But I learned that it was a time-mark for our Yup’ik people and that it was caused by disease.

I heard references to yuut tuqurpallratni from three men, my granduncles, all of whom are now dead. Their white man-given names were Joe Seton, Frank Smart, and Sam Hill, but of course we did not call them that. To me they were my Apakcuaq, my Apaiyaq, and my Angakalaq. In almost every reference to the experience, they used the word naklurluq, or “poor,” referring both to the dead and to the survivors, but they never went into detail. It was almost as if they had an aversion to it.

From looking at the various epidemics which decimated the Native people, I at first thought of them collectively as the Great Death, but I am now convinced that the Great Death referred to the 1900 influenza epidemic which originated in Nome. From there it spread like a wildfire to all corners of Alaska, killing up to 60 percent of the Eskimo and Athabascan people with the least exposure to the white man. (Details are reported by Robert Fortune in his book, Chills and Fever). This epidemic killed whole families and wiped out whole villages. It gave birth to a generation of orphans- our current grandparents and great-grandparents.

The suffering, the despair, the heartbreak, the desperation, and confusion these survivors lived through is unimaginable. People watched helplessly as their mothers, fathers, brothers, and sisters grew ill, the efforts of the angalkuq failing. First one family fell ill, then another, then another. The people grew desperate, the angalkuq along with them. Then the death started, with people wailing morning, noon, and night. Soon whole families were dead, some leaving only a boy or girl. Babies tried to suckle on the breasts of dead mothers, soon to die themselves. Even the medicine men grew ill and died in despair with their people, and with them died a great part of Yuuyaraq, the ancient spirit world of the Yup’ik.

The Survivors

Whether the survivors knew or understood, they had witnessed the fatal wounding of Yuuyaraq and the old Yup’ik culture. Compared to the span of life of a culture, the Great Death was instantaneous. The Yup’ik world was turned upside down, literally overnight. Out of the suffering, confusion, desperation, heartbreak, and trauma was born a new generation of Yup’ik people. They were born into shock. They woke to a world in shambles, many of their people and their beliefs strewn around them, dead. In their minds they had been overcome by evil. Their medicines and their medicine men and women had proven useless. Everything they had believed in had failed. Their ancient world had collapsed.

From their innocence and from their inability to understand and dispel the disease, guilt was born into them. They had witnessed mass death- evil–in unimaginable and unacceptable terms. These were the men and women orphaned by the sudden and traumatic death of the culture that had given them birth. They would become the first generation of modern-day Yup’ik.

The Survivors’ World

The world the survivors woke to was without anchor. The angalkuq, their medicines, and their beliefs, had all passed away overnight. They woke up in shock, listless, confused, bewildered, heartbroken, and afraid. Like soldiers on an especially gruesome battlefield, they were shell shocked.

Too weak to bury all the dead, many survivors abandoned the old villages, some caving in their houses with the dead still in them. Their homeland- the tundra, the Bering Sea coast, the riverbanks had become a dying field for the Yup’ik people: families, leaders, artists, medicine men and women—and Yuuyaraq. But it would not end there.

Famine, starvation, and disease resulting from the epidemic continued to plague them through the 1950s, and many more perished. These were the people whom the missionaries would call wretched, lazy, even listless. Gone were the people whom Nelson so admired for their “arts, ingenuity, perseverance and virtuosity,” the people whom Henry B. Collins claimed had reached the “peak” of modern Eskimo art. Disease had wiped them out. The long night of suffering had begun for the survivors of the Great Death and their descendants.

The End of the Old Culture

The Yup’ik people of today are not culturally the same as their forebears. They are, however, linked to the old through the experience of the Great Death. One was wiped out by it, the other was born out of it and was shaped by it. It is from this context that we have to see the modern Yup’ik Eskimo. It is only from this context that we can begin to understand them.

Like any victim or witness of evil, whether it be murder, suicide, rape, war or mass death, the Yup’ik survivors were in shock. But unlike today’s trauma victims, they received no physical or psychological help. They experienced the Great Death alone in the isolation of their tundra and riverine homeland. There was no Red Cross, no relief effort. The survivors of the Great Death had to face it alone.

They were quiet and kept things to themselves. They rarely showed their sorrows, fears, heartbreak, anger, or grief. Unable to relive in their conscious minds the horror they had experienced, they did not talk about it with anyone. The survivors seem to have agreed, without discussing it, that they would not talk about it. It was too painful and the implications were too great. Discussing it would have let loose emotions they may not have been able to control. It was better not to talk about it, to act as if it had never happened, to nallunguaq. To this day nallunguaq remains a way of dealing with problems or unpleasant occurrences in Yup’ik life. Young people are advised by elders to nallunguarluku, “to pretend it didn’t happen.” They had a lot to pretend not to know. After all, it was not only that their loved ones had died, they also had seen their world collapse. Everything they had lived and believed had been found wanting. They were afraid to admit that the things they had believed in might not have been true.

Traumatized, leaderless, confused, and afraid, the survivors readily followed the white missionaries and school teachers, who quickly attained a status once held only by the angalkuq. The survivors embraced Christianity, abandoned Yuuyaraq, discarded their spirit world and their ceremonies, and buried their old culture in the silence of denial.

Having silently abandoned their own beliefs, the survivors were reinforced in their decision not to talk about them by the missionaries who told them their old beliefs were evil and from the tuunraq, “the devil.” They learned to sternly tell their grandchildren not to ask them questions about the angalkuq, the old symbol of Yup’ ik spiritualism, as if they were ashamed of them and of their old beliefs. They would become good Christians–humble, compliant, obedient, deferential, repentant, and quiet.

The survivors were fatalists. They were not sure about the future or even the next day. They told their children to always be prepared to die because they might not even wake up in the morning. They cautioned against making long-range plans. From their own experience they knew how fleeting life was, and from the missionaries they knew how terrible the wrath of the Christian God could be. As new Christians, they learned about hell, the place where the missionaries told them most of their ancestors probably went. They feared hell. They understood fear and they understood hell.

The survivors also turned over the education and instruction of their children to the missionaries and the school teachers. They taught them very little about Yuuyaraq. They allowed the missionaries and the school teachers to inflict physical punishment on their children; for example, washing their children’s mouths with soap if they spoke Yup’ik in school or church. Their children were forbidden, on pain of “serving in hell,” from dancing or following the old ways. The parents–the survivors–allowed this. They did not protest. The children were, therefore, led to believe that the ways of their fathers and forefathers were of no value and were evil. The survivors allowed this.

The survivors taught almost nothing about the old culture to their children. It was as if they were ashamed of it, and this shame they passed on to their children by their silence and by allowing cultural atrocities to be committed against their children. The survivors also gave up all governing power of the villages to the missionaries and school teachers, whoever was most aggressive.

There was no one to contest them. In some villages the priest had displaced the angalkuq. In some villages there was theocracy under the benevolent dictatorship of a missionary. The old guardians of Yuuyaraq, on the other hand, the angalkuq, if they were still alive, had fallen into disgrace. They had become a source of shame to the village, not only because their medicine and Yuuyaraq had failed, but also because the missionaries now openly accused them of being agents of the devil himself and of having led their people into disaster.

In their heart of hearts the survivors wept, but they did not talk to anyone, not even their fellow survivors. It hurt too much. They felt angry, bewildered, ashamed, and guilty, but all this they kept within themselves. These survivors became the forebears of the Yup’ik people and other Alaska Native tribes of today. Their experiences before, during, and after the Great Death explain in great part the persona of their children, grandchildren, and great-grandchildren who are alive today.

Posttraumatic Stress Disorder: An Illness of the Soul

In light of recent cases of Vietnam veterans who witnessed or participated in war-related events repugnant to them, and who have subsequently been diagnosed to suffer from a psychological illness called posttraumatic stress disorder (PTSD), it is apparent to me that some of the survivors of the Great Death suffered from the same disorder.

The syndrome is born of the attempted suppression in the mind of events perceived as repugnant or evil to the individual who has witnessed or participated in these events. These events were often traumatic to the individual because they involved violence, death, and mayhem by which he was repelled and for which he felt guilt and shame. Not all veterans became infected by this illness. It was mainly the veterans who tried to suppress and ignore their experiences and the resultant feelings of guilt and shame who became ill.

Posttraumatic stress disorder can cripple a person. The act of suppressing the traumatic event, instead of expunging it from the mind through confession, serves to drive it further into the psyche or soul, where it festers and begins to color all aspects of the person’s life. The person who suppresses that which is unbearable to the conscious mind is trying to ignore it, trying to pretend it isn’t there. In time, and without treatment, it will destroy the person, just as any illness left untreated will in time cripple and kill the body.

Because of his guilt, the person suffering from PTSD does not like himself. He is ashamed of himself, ashamed of what he saw or participated in, and is haunted by the memory, even in sleep. He becomes withdrawn, hypervigilant, hypersensitive, and is constantly living in stress. Soon he is unable to speak truthfully with other people about himself or his feelings and becomes unable to carry on close interpersonal relationships. Living under a great deal of stress in his soul, he becomes less and less able to deal with even the minor difficulties of everyday life.

To such a person, escape from self becomes a necessity because even in sleep he finds no peace. He becomes a runner, running from his memory and from himself. He gets tired and begins to despair. In this day and age, alcohol and drugs become a readily available escape from the illness. For a time, these numb the mind and soul. Without treatment, many veterans and others who suffer from PTSD become alcohol and drug abusers. Many become addicted, and as a result lose friends, wives, families, and become isolated, exacerbating an already bad situation. Being unable to hold jobs, some become dependent on others for support. Some become criminals, further isolating themselves and further depressing an already depressed soul.

Tragically, under the influence of alcohol and drugs, the pent-up anger, guilt, shame, sorrow, frustration, and hopelessness often is vented through outbursts of violence to self and others. Such acts, which are difficult for others and even for the sufferer to understand, drive him further into the deadly vortex of guilt and shame. Family and friends who knew him before he became ill swear that he is not the same person and that they do not know him anymore.

Posttraumatic stress disorder is not a physical illness, but an infection of the soul, of the spirit. I use the word infection because the person suffering from PTSD does not volunteer to become ill and does not choose the life of unhappiness which results from it. I refer to PTSD as an infection of the soul because the disease attacks the core of the person, the spirit. The disease is born out of evil or of events perceived as evil by the person. And the nature of evil is such that it infects even the innocent, dirtying their minds and souls. Because it is infectious, it requires cleansing of the soul through confession. If PTSD sufferers do not get help, they will in time destroy themselves, leaving in their wake even more trauma and heartbreak.