ABSTRACT The Beringian Yupik Heritage Project Krupnik, Walunga, Metcalf 9812881 This project analyzes and integrates the historical data accumulated in archival documents, old population censuses, genealogies, historical records, and early publications related to the Yupik community of St. Lawrence Island, Alaska. Collected by scientists, missionaries, teachers, and government officers since the 1880s, these data remained for decades hardly known to the island residents. Together with oral histories and genealogical memory (local knowledge), these diverse sources of data will be integrated to produce an extended analysis of the last 120 years of island history and its relations with the Yupik people of Siberia. The material will form a "St. Lawrence Island Sourcebook" and be introduced into the local school, language, and heritage curricula. The project will enhance access to and use of historical resources by local residents of the Beringia area and pioneer a new pattern in ethnohistorical research aimed at bridging a modern community of some 1,500 people with its ancestral population via documentary records, genealogies, and oral tradition. As a cooperative effort with the Yupik people of Siberia, the research fosters understanding of a common legacy among Beringian communities.
