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GUIDE TO THE INUPIAQ LANGUAGE COLLECTION (1791-2003)
Alaska Native Language Archives
University of Alaska Fairbanks
Box 757680
Fairbanks, AK 99775
INFORMATION FOR RESEARCHERS
ADMINISTRATIVE INFORMATION
BACKGROUND INFORMATION
COLLECTION ORGANIZATION
COLLECTION SUMMARY:
Title: Inupiaq Language Collection.
Extent: 51 manuscript boxes, 7 8x24 boxes, 5 3x5 card files, 5 ft of books, covering 20 linear feet.
Repository Location: Alaska Native Language Archive, 406 Brooks Building, University of Alaska Fairbanks. Please consult with the Alaska Native Language Center for information regarding the specific location of materials within the archive.
Forms of Material: The collection includes both original and photocopied manuscript and typescript documents comprised of academic research papers; fieldnotes, particularly pertaining to Inupiaq place names, phonology, and verb forms; wordlists; ethnographic, religious, and traditional texts; and educational materials.
Languages: Collection languages are primarily Inupiaq and English, although some materials are in Russian, and one or two are in French or Danish. Some documents offers Inupiaq words in comparison to other Eskimo languages in Alaska.
Abstract: All materials in the Inupiaq collection are either written in or about the Inupiaq language. The earliest documents date from the late 1700s and early 1800s. Materials prior to the 1970s largely relate to ethnographic accounts, wordlists, and, especially in the 1900s, religious texts. The bulk of the collection dates from the 1970s and includes a large number of educational materials such as literacy manuals and children’s primers and stories in the various Inupiaq dialects. Also significant are the materials relating to the lexical and phonological work of Lawrence D. Kaplan and Edna MacLean. Traditional texts are also well represented. Some of the collection consists of photocopied material representing original material held by other repositories, and certain reproduction and use restriction apply.
INFORMATION FOR RESEARCHERS:
Access: Collection access is permitted during regular business hours, Monday through Friday, 8:30 to 4:30, and further by appointment throughout the year.
Preferred Citation: Please list author, date, and title of publication, whether item is a photocopy or original, location of original document if different than ANLC, then note folder title, Inupiaq Language Collection, Alaska Native Language Center Archive, University of Alaska Fairbanks.
Restrictions: Visitors to the collection may copy non-restricted items, though lack of clerical support prohibits ANLC from processing photocopy requests online or by mail at this time. In addition, many items in the collection are restricted in their use by their authors or by the repositories from which we obtained our copies, and may not be further copied here without permission of the original repositories.
ADMINISTRATIVE INFORMATION:
Acquisition Information: Dr. Michael Krauss of the Alaska Native Language Center began collecting materials now in the Inupiaq collection when he arrived at the University of Alaska Fairbanks in 1960. Krauss made great effort to assemble a near-comprehensive collection of primary and secondary source material, in the form of wordlists, fieldnotes, manuscript texts, journal articles, and previously published articles on the language. The staff of the Alaska Native Language Center have also contributed primary material to the collection through their fieldnotes, class lectures and notes, and academic research papers. In addition, many of the educational materials were provided by local school districts and by the national Bilingual Materials Development Center and by the Alaska State Operated Schools in Anchorage.
Processing History: The first major organization of the Inupiaq Collection occurred in the late 1970s and led to the publication of an annotated catalogue based on folder titles. This system has been retained, and recent work (2002-2006) has concentrated on document preservation, the development of an electronic database, and the creation of a finding aid.
Acknowledgements: Some of the photocopies obtained by Krauss were made from originals held in other repositories, including the Alaska and Polar Regions Collection, Elmer Rasmuson Library, University of Alaska.
Funding: The National Endowment for the Humanities (grant # PA-50139-03) funded collection processing and finding aid development.
BACKGROUND INFORMATION:
Language Information: Inupiaq is spoken throughout much of northern Alaska and is closely related to Canadian Inuit and to Greenlandic, all three of which form the Inuit branch of Eskimo (as opposed to its other branch, Yupik). Alaskan Inupiaq includes two major dialect groups: North Alaskan Inupiaq and Seward Peninsula Inupiaq. North Alaskan Inupiaq comprises the North Slope dialect spoken along the Arctic Coast from Barter Island to Kivalina, and the Malimiut dialect found primarily around Kotzebue Sound and the Kobuk River. Seward Peninsula Inupiaq comprises the Qawiaraq dialect found principally in Teller and in the southern Seward Peninsula and Norton Sound area, and the Bering Strait dialect spoken in the villages surrounding Bering Strait and on the Diomede Islands. There are about 10,000 Inupiat in Alaska, of whom about 3,000 speak one of the dialects of Inupiaq. Several orthographies have been produced for Inupiaq; the current accepted orthography was developed in the 1970s, and there is a large collection of educational materials in Inupiaq.
Scope and Content Note: The scope of the Inupiaq language collection is quite broad in that it strives to include all material written or published in or about the Inupiaq Language. Dr. Michael Krauss made an effort to collect all things Inupiaq, and has developed a nearly comprehensive collection. For the purposes of the collection, Inupiaq is understood to pertain strictly to Alaskan Inupiaq and Western Canadian Inuit up to the Mackenzie River. Although Canadian Inuit and Greenlandic are considered part of the same large language group, materials from most of Canada and from Greenland are organized as separate collections. Western Canadian Inuit is included with Inupiaq because of the historical migrations of Alaskan Inupiaq speakers within this area and the near-identity of the dialects. Collection development has slowed in the late 1990s, and the later part of the collection is currently not comprehensive.
The Alaska Native Language Center Inupiaq manuscript holdings contain approximately 700 items dating between 1791 and 2006. Materials prior to the 1920s largely relate to expedition reports, e.g. extracts of the report of the Billings expedition of 1791, or Jenness’s report of the Canadian Arctic Expedition of 1913-1918; ethnographic accounts, such as Murdoch’s 1890 notes on astronomical and mathematical knowledge among the Eskimo of Point Barrow; and wordlists, such as Beechey’s Western Eskimo vocabulary of 1826 or Kelly’s Eskimo vocabularies of 1890. In some cases, where Inupiaq is secondary to the work, only the relevant pages of a work have been photocopied and included in the Inupiaq collection; thus, only the pages containing place names on the Seward Peninsula and in Bering Strait, pages 54-58, of the Billings work are included.
From the 1920s to about the early 1960s, many of the materials are religious in nature, such as the translation of the Gospels into various Inupiaq dialects by Oscar Brown and Milton Adams in the 1940s. There are, however, significant numbers of items relating to the development of an orthography and literacy in Inupiaq, e.g. Roy Ahmaogak and Donal H. Webster’s work in this field. There are also a number of lexical and grammatical studies, such as Donald Webster’s morphological and grammatical work on the North Slope dialect. An important inclusion is the work of G.A. Menovshchikov on the Eskimo language of Big Diomede, on the Russian side of the Bering Strait. This work was photocopied from the National Archives of Russia, in St. Petersburg. Despite the diversity of materials, however, it should be noted that a majority of the work of this period focuses on the North Slope dialect; for example, there are only about 3 or 4 works on Qawiaraq during this period, only 9 or 10 from the Bering Strait dialect, all but 3 of which are religious in nature, and only 2 from the Malimiut dialect.
The bulk of the collection dates from the mid-1960s to the present; well over half of the items are educational materials, including literacy manuals, children’s primers and stories in the various Inupiaq dialects, and workshop or classroom notes. Inupiaq has been taught at the University of Alaska Fairbanks as well as at Ilisagvik College in Barrow, and some of the class materials are found in the Inupiaq collection. There is also significant fieldwork on the lexicon, particularly relating to efforts to produce an Inupiaq dictionary (e.g. Edna Ahgeak MacLean and Lawrence D. Kaplan), and on phonological studies by Kaplan. Traditional texts are also well represented, both in English and Inupiaq, a number of them with word-by-word analyses of the Inupiaq; some notable texts include Inupiaq belief systems as told by Emily Ivanoff Brown. Although grammatical analyses are generally less-well represented, some notable items are MacLean’s draft pedagogical grammars.
There are fewer linguistic items from the late 1980s and 1990s, due more to less active collection activity; student and staff work at the Alaska Native Language Center is reflected in more recent donations to the Archive.
COLLECTION ORGANIZATION:
The Inupiaq Language Collection adheres to the organizational schema developed and applied to each language within the Alaska Native Language Archives by Michael Krauss and Mary Jane McGary in the late 1970s. It involves a system of call numbers (folder numbers) aimed at arranging items chronologically by author. The files are generally organized by author, and thereunder by date of ‘publication’ or ‘work’. In files with multiple authors, the first or earliest author is used. ‘Authorship’ should be interpreted loosely to include not only author in the traditional sense, but also collector, translator, transcriber, speaker, editor, compiler, or informant; these roles are generally indicated. The call number system codes the language series, author, and date. A brief explanation of the call number system follows:
The call number first notes the language, Inupiaq, with the two-letter code “IN”. In addition, a third letter denotes the dialect of Inupiaq represented by the item; thus, “INN” refers to ‘North Slope Inupiaq’, and “INM” refers to Malimiut Inupiaq. Because of the large number of school books, many of which are duplicated in the different dialects by the same authors, a recent convention has been to indicate this with (S) following the two-letter language code and before the dialect code: “IN(S)M” refers to a schoolbook in Malimiut Inupiaq.
The second element of the call number is a three-digit number consisting of the last three digits of the year of the author’s first known work on or in the Inupiaq language. When an item has more than one author, the date is that of the first-named author.
The third element of the call number is the first letter of the author’s surname, or several letters in the case of co-authors. For example, K refers to Kaplan; BBAU refers to Bodfish, Baumgartner, Aiken, and Ungarook.
The fourth element of the call number gives the date of the item. The given date on the published item is used as the item date. When an item includes several editions, translations, or reprinting of a single item, the date of the specific edition in the archive is listed. In some cases, and academic year date appears on educational publications, such as 78/79; here the first year has been used as an item date. In the dating of unpublished materials, if a date appears on the item, it is used as the publication date, except in rare cases where we have concrete knowledge that the date is in error. Undated items have been assigned dates based on our knowledge of the authors work. Some of theses dates are quite approximate and this is usually noted in the description. If multiple items were published in the same year, they are distinguished by letters of the alphabet following the date, e.g. “1973a”, “1973b”.
Some examples:
IN973K1979c reads as the third of several items produced in 1979 by Kaplan, who began working on the Inupiaq language in 1973. INN973BBAU1977 reads as an item in the North Slope dialect, produced in 1977 by Bodfish, Baumgartner, Aiken, and Ungarook; Bodfish began working on Inupiaq in 1973.
List of Authors and Contributors
Subject List
Container List
To date the data-entry of the Inupiaq holdings is incomplete; most of the educational materials are in the database, but many of the early materials and the fieldwork have not yet been entered.
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