Kotzebue: a modern Alaskan Eskimo community

Kotzebue was selected initially as a field setting in which to study changing kinship and residence of an Alaskan Eskimo group because of the present high level of acculturation in the community and because I had had prior experience there at a time when it was still essentially an Eskimo village. As reconstruction of the aboriginal culture progressed, it became apparent that the Kikitarmiut Eskimo living along the eastern margins of Kotzebue Sound were a separate ethnic and dialect group; the scope of the paper was expanded accordingly. The aboriginal Eskimo who inhabited the area occupied a small but distinct ecological niche in the Arctic coast line of Alaska. As a result, their land-use and customs differed somewhat from those of other Alaskan Eskimo. Their unique location on the sheltered and quiet waters of kotzebue Sound, at a point adjacent to the mouths of three large Alaskan rivers, provided the setting for the development of a trading complex whose influence was felt throughout the Alaskan Arctic. Stefansson notes that rivers figured importantly in aboriginal trade only in Alaska and Hudson Bay, and that those in the hinterland of Kotzebue were among the principal Western arteries of commerce (1914a, p.3). The aboriginal Eskimo at kotzebue became entrepreneurs and traveled widely. By the latter part of the nineteenth century, individual Eskimo were using scraps of brown paper upon which to make maps of their journeys, indicating the villages visited and, by pictographs, the articles exchanged there (Nelson, 1899, p.198).