Ancient Land, Sacred Whale

by Tom Lowenstein

On a tiny peninsula called Tikigaq, an ancient people evolved an intricate, densely woven system of rites to accompany their hunting. For 1,500 years, until late last century, elaborate myth and magic were integral to the Tikigaq way of life. Tom Lowenstein began to tap this rich and sacred tore in 1973 when he met Asatchaq, who, born in 1891, was the last great singer and storyteller of his people.

Ancient Land: Sacred Whale is a work unique in contemporary literature, combining scholarly insight with poetic mastery to bring the grandeur of ancient Tikigaq imagination to Ere. Widely acclaimed as a classic text on Inuit culture and mythology, Lowenstein's masterpiece is rich with the astonishing detail of ancient life. This "ancient" and yet most modern of texts culminates with a long poem of the whale hunt.

Genres: Poetry

181 pages, Paperback

First published April 1, 1994

About the author

Tom Lowenstein was an English poet, ethnographer, teacher, cultural historian and translator. Beginning his working life as a school teacher, he visited Alaska in 1973 and went on to become particularly noted for his work on Inupiaq (north Alaskan Eskimo) ethnography, conducting research in Point Hope, Alaska, between 1973 and 1988. His writing also encompasses several collections of poetry, as well as books related to Buddhism. Since 1986, Lowenstein lived and continued teaching in London.

Reviews

[Uvrón · Rating 4 out of 5]

(Another tired rambly review, but the expression helps me to retain books in my memory.)

I find ethnography beautiful. Especially this sort of ethnography, which is half the author’s own storytelling and poetry, an attempt to translate a culture’s idiom. Or as Lowenstein puts it, ‘the poem in whose sphere a community lives’.

In this case the poem is the whale hunt as it took place in the northern Alaskan settlement of Tikigaq, an actual, materially vital spring activity but also a metaphor that structured a year of rituals, social relations, journey through life, family and cultural history, the mythic past, and the land the Tikigaqmiut lived on some of the year and centered their culture in, land that was itself a whale harpooned long ago. I say ‘as it took place’ because this is an attempt to understand the whale hunt in the past, but the Tikigaqmiut still exist, much changed but not gone.

I found myself drawn to speak the words as best as a short guide in the book could teach me: i is short, a is “uh”, the g here is a French r, q is an uvuluar stop like a k in the back of the throat. Tikirrruhk-.

Good ethnography communicates how deep and dramatic the human experience goes. I still do not know the Tikigaqmiut, having read this book a second time. I don’t even know the umialiks, the whale hunters themselves, neither the male hunters who waited on pack ice and killed bowhead whales from skinboats nor the female hunters who waited in ritual abstinence in iglus that became poetic spaces where whales could be summoned through the katak entryway. I don’t even know what it fees like to travel through a katak.

But I am left with thoughts of how narrow our big world is, so poisoned by connections that demand eradication and capitulation of alternate ideas. Humans can live in so many ways. We have found such meaning and joy in the long Arctic dark, telling stories with family, inventing physical challenges in the cramped space of a qalgi, building a material and cultural and calendrical world out of the hidden hard-won bounties of animal skin and slate and inland wood. We walk on the whale land stepping on generations of our ancestors’ bones where they make their way to the sandy surface.

And all of this is not just one well-defined template, but a rich and contested culture grown by individuals and movements just as ours is today. That is the hardest to uncover, that richness. I wonder how the centuries in Tikigaq altered the stories of rape and revenge, the ritual of the sacrificed wolf pup, the shifting opinions over which shamans were powerful and which were charlatans. When did amulets take on the valences of life or death? When did sealskin menstrual pads become the exception that could be charged with either energy?

It’s easy to wander sleepy through wonderings. But I have to accept I don’t know much. Any culture contains lifetimes’ worth of study, but even glimpses like this help us imagine new possibilities.

Anthropology is important to me, and it makes me so sad when my friends encounter it only through non-anthropologists writing quackery like Guns, Germs, and Steel or Sapiens. I wonder if I can make my own occasional ethnography club, finding short ethnographic works that introduce the kind of perspectives so painfully missing from political and social discourse.