Language: St. Lawrence Island Yupik
Other men would lower a man with walrus-hide rope tied around him, and then he would get these cormorants.
—Branson Tungiyan, 2001
Daring cormorant hunters rappelled down cliffs on walrus hide ropes to hook the birds from their nests. Other times they plucked cormorants from ocean rocks where the birds sleep in large groups, silently taking one bird at a time without waking the others.
St. Lawrence Island Yupik
Region: St. Lawrence Island, Alaska
Object Category: Clothing
Object Type: Parka
Accession Date: 1923
Source: Arnold Liebes (collector)
Museum: National Museum of the American Indian
Museum ID Number: 123415.000
Estelle Oozevaseuk: Ngelqaaguq, ngelqaaghaaguq
(Young cormorant, it is young cormorant.)
Branson Tungiyan: I thought it might have been eider [duck].
Estelle Oozevaseuk: Duck skin is different. Duck skin has a firmer birth skin. This is a young cormorant.(1) It’s smaller and lighter. And puffin skin is the one that no matter how much strength people have, the skin is the hardest thing to tear.
Branson Tungiyan: Kangqaagni?
Estelle Oozevaseuk: Aa-a [yes]. They got a lot.
All kinds of birds are on the cliffs. Kitty-winks [Kittiwakes], all kinds nested there, murres mostly. The auklets have multiplied the most now, lots of them. They’re the ones we kill and eat. But the ones that we never killed, they’re dwindling I think.
Suzi Jones: How would they catch the cormorants?
Branson Tungiyan: The cliffs where we’d get the young cormorants are about thirty miles south of Gambell, the bird rookeries. Other men would lower a man with walrus-hide rope tied around him, and then he would get these cormorants. Piwhaanitli sangaawat, taakelghiitqun nekreget, sangwaat atughaqegkangit ngelqaaghaghniighuigni [the kind, long pole with a hook that is used when getting young cormorant]. We scaled the cliffs or they lowered us. And we used long sticks to get to where we couldn’t reach those further up and kind of dropped them off to the boat down there and they got them. That’s when they still can’t fly, the young ones that are used for such parkas as this.
Suzi Jones: And you’ve done that?
Branson Tungiyan: Yes, scary. When I look back, I call it scary.
Suzi Jones: Were cormorant also used for food?
Branson Tungiyan: Yes. Young cormorants are preferred. They hang them, and they let them age and dry them.
When animals decline
Aron Crowell: You said that the auklets, the ones that people hunt, are abundant now but the ones that they don’t hunt are dying off.
Estelle Oozevaseuk: Yes. That’s what I mentioned when I talked about subsistence. Because in the Eskimo’s world, when they hunted some animal, they started to multiply, but when they ignored it, they’d dwindle.
Aron Crowell: You mentioned that animals are aware of people. Is that part of it?
Estelle Oozevaseuk: Yes, I think so.
Aron Crowell: Is that true for the sea mammals too, the seals and whales, that if you don’t hunt them, they’ll all diminish?
Estelle Oozevaseuk: Yes, that’s the thing, you know. If you don’t hunt them, they will just go down, but if we can hunt them, they’ll multiply. That’s what we Eskimos believe.
Jacob Ahwinona: I concur with what she said about animals, when you don’t hunt them anymore, they deplete. That is true to our Eskimo way of life, our subsistence style of living. My grandparents, they taught me when I was a little boy never to abuse any living creature that crawls upon this earth that God gave us for subsistence or to survive upon this earth, no matter what it is. That’s our belief and our culture. So when you have animals that you hunt and you kill, you use them like these birds here or any living animal. The more you get them, the more they come. But when you [stop] killing them, they deplete.
It’s just like fisheries now for our salmon, which are depleting now. It’s the same thing, but this is different. That fish is different because the big bucks are getting them, not the subsistence fisherman that’s supposed to get it up there like myself. I’m not getting it anymore but those commercial [fishermen] are getting it. That’s how come they’re depleted. They’re not giving [them to] the Eskimos that need it the most, that survived through it and lived all their life eating it. They’re restricting it from us. That’s how come they’re depleted. But the food we eat, the animals we catch, like just what she said, it’s true, the more you catch, the more they come. Even in the tundra area, where we have berries, lots of berries, we pick them all summer after summer. But once we stopped going there, poof, they just stopped growing, because you’re not using them anymore. It is true what she has said.
Aron Crowell: So that’s something that is difficult to explain to the Department of Fish and Game. Their regulations are based on the opposite idea.
Jacob Ahwinona: Yes, that’s right. Even if we explain it to them, they still don’t believe us. That’s where we stand on something like that, but it’s true.
[From discussion with Jacob Ahwinona, Estelle Oozevaseuk, Marie Saclamana and Branson Tungiyan (Kawerak, Inc.) at the National Museum of Natural History and National Museum of the American Indian, 5/07/2001-5/11/2001. Also participating: Aron Crowell and Bill Fitzhugh (NMNH) and Suzi Jones (AMHA).]
1. Cormorants are water birds that, unlike ducks, are have feathers that are not completely waterproof (Armstrong 1990).
2. According to St. Lawrence Island Yupik Elder Vera Kaneshiro, Kangqaak is a high cliff area south of Gambell near Boxer Bay.Estelle Oozevaseuk: They collected all kinds of bird skins in our area for parkas. They went out to the cliffs to get them. Each summer the families have to go by boat to the cliffs. They spend the time out there [in a camp]—dug up the ground and put skins over it for a shelter, and they call it tupaq [a tent-like shelter made from animal skins]. I’ve seen them when we went to pick salmonberries. They put them up sometimes on the cliffs that are just a little ways from the coast.
Several methods were used to capture pelagic cormorants (Phalacrocorax pelagicus) at their rookery cliffs. One was to rappel down the cliffs on walrus hide ropes and use hooks to snag the birds, as described by Branson Tungiyan. Gambell Elder Roger Silook told about another: “They hunt the cormorants in the night while they are sleeping on rocks. Sometimes 30 or 40 of them sleep on one rock, with their heads under their wings. When you sneak up on them all you have to do is to take the cormorant with both hands and lift it straight up without making any noise. This way an expert bird hunter gets all the cormorants sleeping on one rock. If he makes a noise he loses all the rest of the birds.”(1)
Men’s and women’s bird parkas were similar in design. An average sized coat required about 85 crested auklets, 35 murres or puffins, or 25 cormorant skins, stitched together with whale or reindeer sinew.(2) Bird parkas were reinforced at the bottom and cuffs with dog or seal skin, with dog fur around the hood to protect the face from wind and cold.
1. Silook 1976:36
2. Silook 1976:20