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GRANT REPORT
he first time I listened to the deceptively upbeat Cup’ig hymn, “I Have Heard of a Land,” I heard a strange shifting in the background. The faint, rhythmic shirring sounded like someone was rubbing two sand blocks together. Strange, because the other 141 hymns, which have recently been digitized, a project funded in part by a 2019 Alaska Humanities Forum grant, were performed a cappella by Nona Amos. “Oh, that’s Harry Mike,” Muriel Amos, 65, explained to me from Anchorage. “The brother of Nona Amos, my mother-in-law. He’s probably sanding ivory, or maybe The pictographs seen here and on wood there in the back.” the following pages were used to It was Harry Mike, Amos went on to explain, who, in record the words of hymns in the the 1990s, convinced his sister Nona Amos to sit down Cup’ig language, rather than using in their house in Mekoryuk, the only inhabited town left English characters. The notations on Nunivak Island, to make a recording of Cup’ig hymns. were passed down from Nona Amos’ (The letter “c” is pronounced like the English sound “ch.”) mother to Muriel Amos of Mekoryuk. The audio cassette tapes that resulted are some of the best PHOTO BY KEVIN SMITH recordings of the rare island dialect, which is in danger of dying out. Located off the southwest coast of Alaska, Nunivak is a land pocked by craters, a barren tundra spreading over 1,625 square miles, just slightly larger than the state of Delaware. Inhabited for 2,000 years by the Nuniwarmiut, or Threatened Cup’ig Language Nunivak Cup’ig people, the island is the second largest Finds New Life in Song island in the Bering Sea, and the eighth largest in the United States. Nunivak plateaus out of the sea about 30 miles By Brendan Jones from the mainland, at the vertex of the triangle between the Yukon and Kuskokwim delta. Dwarf willows grow along the edge of rivers, which swell with salmon in the summer months. Summers hover around 60, and snow flies October through May, with the temperature rarely dropping below zero. Musk oxen—introduced from Greenland in 1934—and reindeer are the largest inhabitants, with humans right behind them. Wool from the musk-ox are woven into sweaters and hats, while reindeer are culled each year for food. “It is a paradise,” Amos said.
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HISTORIES THAT MUSIC HOLDS
In the summer of 2018, Indra Arriaga Delgado, president at the time of Out North, an Anchorage-based arts organization supporting under-represented voices, traveled to Nunivak, flying from Bethel into Mekoryuk, on the northern shore. As the Language Compliance Manager for the Division of Elections, she was introduced to Howard and Muriel Amos, to work on election materials translations.
“We were sitting around eating and talking,” Arriaga recalled. “Then Muriel said, ‘I have these tapes. My motherin-law recorded them.’”
As a Mexican woman with her own indigenous roots,
Arriaga said that the project struck a chord with her. The hymns, introduced to the island by missionaries in the early 20th century, represent some of the most comprehensive recordings of the Cup’ig dialect in existence. Just as the hymns were once used to teach Cup’ig people English, so today the hymns help revitalize the Cup’ig language.
“I love music, all kinds, and the histories that music holds. When Muriel told me about the tapes, there was never a second thought. How could I not help?” Arriaga said. “There was such immediacy to the project, due to the loss of people speaking the language.” Arriaga mobilized Out North, and secured a grant from the Alaska Humanities Forum in 2019.
Arriaga, who has a background in political science and is currently the Grants and Operational Director for the Alaska Institute for Justice, split the project into three phases: preserving the music, teaching the music, and producing the hymns. The first phase, she says, is the most pressing. “The audio tapes are deteriorating due to their age and environmental conditions,” she wrote in the grant.
With funding from the Forum, Out North hired J.W. Frye, a sound engineer, songwriter, and music producer, to digitize the audio cassette tapes.
Frye, 37, who describes his job as “letting my fingers do the work of other people’s brains,” said that he tried to make himself invisible, working less as a producer and more as a scribe.
Frye said that the project came about in the nick of time. The more audio tapes are played, the more endangered they become. “It was critical. Now we are at a crossroads, with this renewed sense of the value of learning and speaking your indigenous tongue,” Frye said. “By digitizing them, you’re ensuring that they’re not just sitting in someone’s box in an attic. It’s a remarkable project.”
DIFFERENT WAYS OF SAYING THINGS
Nona Amos has a lilting, sunny voice. “Amazing Grace,” for example, is performed lightheartedly, the hum of what sounds like the ocean behind it. In the hymn, “Yet There Is Room,” you can hear the far-off clanging of a bell, perhaps one of the churches established by missionaries a century ago.
The Nuniwarmiut first came into contact with Europeans in 1821, when explorers from the Russian-American Company arrived on the island. The Russians recorded 400 people living on 16 different settlements around the island. A census in 1880 recorded 117 people at Koot, near present-day Mekoryuk. In 1920, the Spanish flu epidemic depleted this village to only four families. In 1939 an anthropologist from Berkley recorded 200 people spread across 16 villages.
PHOTOS BY KEVIN SMITH
Today, Mekoryuk, the central village on the northern shore, is home to just under 200 people. The Nuniwaarmiut School teaches preschool through high school. There are 50 students.
A graduate of University of Fairbanks, Amos taught elementary education for 33 years at the Mekoryuk Day School and the Lower Kuskokwim School District, which covers an area the size of West Virginia, and in Bethel. She now works as a substitute teacher in the Anchorage School District.
Peter Hawkins, the site administrator for the school, said that “The Herders,” as they’re known in reference to the reindeer herd on the island brought to slaughter each year, use a dual enrichment program. Students from kindergarten until fifth grade learn social studies and science and Cup’ig language arts in Cup’ig. Afterward, students get 50 minutes of Cup’ig a day. Hawkins has also been working with elders in Mekoryuk to translate textbooks into Cup’ig.
“The village is filled with wonderful people,” Hawkins said. “The textbook project is coming along great, helping to ensure that we don’t lose the language and the culture.”
On Nunivak, anyone over 50 can fluently speak, Amos said. “But they are getting fewer and fewer every year.” Amos, 65, has passed down Cup’ig to her adopted daughter, who can speak, but seldom practices, Muriel said.
In 2003, with the help of her husband Howard, Amos wrote a Cup’ig dictionary to help codify the spelling of Cup’ig words. Hawkins says that students often disagree over the correct spelling in English of Cup’ig words.
“There’s just no right answer,” he said.
Amos, who has also written a genealogy of the island, a record of the connections between a people separated by 30 miles from the mainland, said that the language differs between families. “People just have different ways of saying things.”
PICTOGRAPHS
The hymns presented unique challenges in the sound booth. Due to the isolation of the island, Nunivak Cup’ig is different from Cup’ik and all other dialects of Yup’ik. “Must I Go Empty Handed?” is filled with a clicking and snapping typical of Cup’ig, Frye says. “An editing program would have gone in and taken out so much of that sound. But that would have been changing the meaning of the words.”
After Frye told me this, I spent some time listening to the hymns, trying to get a sense of the structure of Cup’ig. Slowly, I tried to say, Quyana niicugnillua, which means “Thank you for listening to me.” Speaking the syllables, I had no sense where the emphasis—or the clicks and snaps—should fall.
Frye said that, along with working to make a difficult language more accessible, he also worked as something of a detective. At one point, on the recordings, he noticed that Nona Amos stopped singing, and seemed to explain something. “Muriel translated, and she said that, before one of the hymns, Nona said, ‘This song that I’m about to sing, is going to come from pictographs.’ She was essentially reading a pictograph to sing the hymn.”
In other words, instead of reading the Cup’ig in an English alphabet, Amos’ mother-in-law was announcing that she was using the pictographs to help her sing the hymns.
Amos said that the pictographs were given to her by Nona, who had received them from her mother, to keep safe. The words correspond to symbols and pictures. Symbols represent particular words. One looks like a sun, with streaks. This means God.
“We’re hoping this will be the next part of the larger project,” Arriaga said.
At the moment, COVID-19 has brought a halt to the conversation. Arriaga and Frye were supposed to fly to Mekoryuk this year, but the pandemic made this impossible. Tribal police refuse entry to anyone without a permit from the tribal judge, Hawkins said.
Muriel, who also couldn’t fly from Bethel to Mekoryuk due to COVID restrictions, said she hopes to use the time in Anchorage to finish transcribing all of the songs, a painstaking process. She has been working with other Elders in Anchorage, who have also been scoring the songs.
“It’s not easy,” she said. By way of illustration, she said that the Nunivak Cup’ig word for “go” is Ay-a-tuk. “It’s three instead of one syllables. We couldn’t figure out whether to keep the meaning, or make the music sound better, because the lyrics were too long. They didn’t know how to speak English very well, but they did their best.”
Of all the hymns that he has listened to and digitized, Frye says that it’s the pictographs that remain with him. He hopes one day to see a book published of the images. “It’s just so human, a common language of all earth. You see it all over, symbols scratched in the sand, or on a rock. And it’s happening on this island as well.”
At the moment, Arriaga said, the pictographs are being photographed—the process of scanning risks damaging the already-fragile paper. “It’s incredibly exciting, how this grant has opened another door.”
Following my conversation with Amos, I returned to the Out North website, to listen once more to “I Have Heard of a Land.” I thought, for a moment, that Harry Mike might have been sanding in rhythm with Nona’s voice. I tried to imagine the scene, brother and sister in a single room, Nona Amos singing while her brother works sandpaper. Then the sanding stops, perhaps Mike pausing to brush away ivory or saw dust. Nona Amos continues to sing over his shuffling, her words clear and intentional, as if she could see the lyrics in front of her. A few days later, Arriaga sent five images of the pictographs. The figures are drawn in black ink on paper with wide spaces between the lines, such as one might use in kindergarten to practice spelling. I examined the pictograph for “Watchman Tell Me.” In the last line, two men in widebrimmed hats appear to ascend a ladder toward a sun. A quick check brought up the lyrics.
Pilgrim, yes, I see just yonder, Canaan’s glorious heights arise; Salem too appears in grandeur, Tow’ring ‘neath its sunlit skies. ■
Brendan Jones is the author of the novel The Alaskan Laundry, awarded the Alaskana Prize by the Alaska Library Association, and Whispering Alaska, upcoming with Penguin/ Random House in 2021. He has also written for the New York Times, NPR, and Smithsonian magazine. He lives in Sitka, where he is a builder, with his wife and three daughters.
