ELOKA Spotlight

Yup’ik youth add Indigenous Knowledge to online atlas

Matt Enoch and Brittany Sallison
Matt Enoch and Brittany Sallison are fluent in the Lower Kuskokwim Yup’ik dialect, interning with Calista Education and Culture to update the Yup'ik Atlas. — Credit: Corey Joseph

ELOKA is partnering with Calista Education and Culture (CEC) to host the Yup'ik Environmental Knowledge Project Atlas. The atlas is an online resource containing the rich history and named places of the Yup’ik homeland, including features such as camp and settlement sites, rivers, sloughs, rocks, ponds, and even sandbars and underwater channels. Youth play an important role in this project, and we are grateful for CEC interns Brittany Sallison and Matt Enoch from Nunapitchuk, Alaska, for contributing their time this summer to expand the content of the Yup'ik Atlas. These two students, who are fluent in the Lower Kuskokwim Yup’ik dialect, are transcribing and translating tape recordings of several elders from the 1990s and prior. They are also uploading photos from the Akulmiut region dated from the 1960s to the atlas.

 
 
ELOKA is generously supported by the US National Science Foundation through awards 2032423, 2032417, 2032419, and 2032445.