Central Yup'ik Eskimos - Settlements



Prior to the arrival of the Russians in the early 1800s, the substantial population of western Alaska was socially divided into a number of overlapping extended family networks, which in turn were united into territorially centered village groups, ranging in size from 50 to 250 people. At various seasons family groups, married couples, or groups of hunters moved to outlying camps for resource extraction. During the more settled winter season, extended families gathered Together into large permanent winter villages, residentially Divided between a communal men's house ( qasgiq ) and smaller individual women's houses. The population moved annually, but within a fixed range; it was thus relatively settled compared to other Eskimo peoples. Exchanges of food, women, names, feasts, and visits also served to unify village groups into at least thirteen larger, more comprehensive regional confederations, which alternately traded and warred with each other.

The population decline owing to diseases introduced from the early 1800s on put an end to interregional warfare and undercut interregional social distinctions. Beginning in the early 1900s along the rivers and somewhat later along the more isolated Bering Sea coast, people began to gather into permanent year-round villages focused on a school, cannery, store, church, and post office. At present the population is Divided into some seventy year-round villages ranging in size from one hundred to six hundred, along with two major Regional centers, Bethel and Dillingham.

The aboriginal Yup'ik winter dwelling was a semisubterranean sod-insulated log structure with a central smokehole and underground tunnel entryway. These well-insulated but damp sod houses began to be replaced by airier log cabins along the rivers where timber was more accessible beginning in the early 1900s and somewhat later along the coast. Beginning in the 1950s, cabins were replaced by frame houses, often government-subsidized. Although log cabins are still used in timbered areas, standardized frame dwellings are the dominant form of housing in the region today.


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