Gambell: Centuries of Occupation

On the west beach, a few hundred yards from teacher's housing, lies the recently excavated remians a Siberian Yupik dwelling dating back to the late 19th century. This particular structure here with Carrie in the foreground was a style typical of the Nunglook or "underground" dwellings constructed from a whale bone frame and sod siding. The living quarters were were underground with the sod and bone srucuture above ground. The original occupation sites around Gambell predominate much of the west beach and were used largely as seasonal camps in the summer when fishing was good and the weather warm. It wasn't unitl the coming of the first missionary, Gambell's name-sake and it's first school teacher, Vene C. Gambell in 1898, that the present village was incorporated into a permanent year-around residence for the largely nomadic Yupik peoples here. By the mid-1920's, government- imposed laws made primary school mandatory for children through the age of 14, thus changing forever what was, for some 20 centuries, a nomadic, subsistence lifeway for the Siberian Yupik Eskimo. Without sentimentalizing too much, though, one should consider the fact that after a great epidemic in 1878-1879, the entire population of the island was reduced from roughly 3,000 people to as few as 150! It was within one decade of this great disaster that Alaska's territorial minister of education Sheldon Jackson sent its first reflief efforts into present-day Gambell to try and revive a shattered society. In 1891, the first herd of Siberian Reindeer were introduced to Gambell via Jackson as a way to provide the Yupik people a new more consistent harvest of game to replace falling harvests of bowhead whale and walrus. The irony here, not lost on my social studies students, is that the great edpidemic and declining harvests of traditional game that almost drove the Eskimo population of Sivuqaq into extinction was a direct result of overharvesting from American commercial whaling during the mid 1900's. It is also widely speculated that the mysterious epidemic was direct result of conatct and trade with these same American whalers.