Wisdom Keeper Read Free

story of remembering who we really are, as we’re all indigenous to someplace. Wisdom Keeper is about cultural healing and communal, collaborative co-creation with our Mother, the Earth. May its beauty and vital life force inspire and enchant you.
    â€”Nina Simons, cofounder and president of Bioneers

Chapter 1
The Unangan (Aleut): Real People Who Live Near the Shoreline
    I come from a truly amazing group of people who are little known in the world. My people, the Aleut people, or Unangan as we say in our language, Unangan Tunuu, have survived and thrived along the remote Aleutian Islands and Bering Sea shorelines for more than ten thousand years. Anthropologists and archaeologists agree that the Unangan had one of the most sophisticated maritime cultures in North America prior to any contact with the outside world. Although they are uncertain about whether the original Unangan people came over from Russia and Mongolia by seacraft or across the Bering Land Bridge, they agree that our people settled on a group of some two thousand islands along an archipelago now known as the Aleutian Islands. Anthropologists and archaeologists have acknowledged that by the time the Russian fur traders, called “promyshlenniki,” found our people, the Unangan people were living in what was to become known as the most densely populated linear mile of shoreline in North America.
    Archaeologists have uncovered an old settlement estimated to have been the home of as many as five thousand Unangan. This discovery later demonstrated how extraordinarily well our people survived harsh environmental conditions; how they thrived on rich traditions of art, dance, music, storytelling, ceremonies, and rituals; and how they successfully used their knowledge of science and technology. They accomplished these feats because they were “real human beings” or “real people” who lived in the present moment and in their hearts. The heart was viewed as the place where a being is in constant communication with “all that is.” It was from this great sense of connection to everything that our laws for living grew, as did our natural laws and our spiritual instructions.It was what kept the people safe while working under and with the often brutal conditions of the Bering Sea. We were a deeply spiritual people. Everything we did and developed, including our technologies, were spiritually based.
    The Aleutian and Bering Sea islands were formed either by volcanic activity or are tops of submarine mountains and as such are relatively barren except for the summer’s rich carpet of green tundra grasses and colorful wildflowers. Other than arctic foxes, there have never been any indigenous land animals. However, the Unangan found the Bering Sea teeming with marine mammals, fish, and birds—wildlife that was to be the foundation for supporting an Unangan population estimated to range from twenty to thirty thousand strong.
    The Unangan, an advanced seagoing people, used their seventeen-to-twenty-foot kayaks, called iqyaxes (one-hole kayaks) or oolooxtahns (two-hole meat boats), to travel to the South Pacific islands, the Russian coast, southern California, and throughout the Bering Sea and North Pacific for weeks. These highly advanced sea kayaks were considered the “second wife” of the Unangan hunter and fisherman, and used to hunt whales, walruses, sea otters, porpoises, Steller sea lions, and northern fur seals. Ingenious methods were designed to catch large halibut from the kayaks, using seaweed rope and V-shaped bone hooks that ensured that the halibut never got loose once hooked. The sea-lion-hide-covered kayaks one made of driftwood, shaped over nearly a year’s time, to create an incredibly quiet, swift, and durable high-seas craft. To this day, Unangan kayaks are considered some of the best open-sea kayaks in the world, designed to take high seas coming or going with amazing stability. The kayaks are built in