Alaska Natives at the Time of the Invasions: A Cultural Profile Project

Draft 3

Do not quote or copy without permission from Mike Gaffney or from Ray Barnhardt at the Alaska Native Knowledge Network, University of Alaska-Fairbanks. Mike Gaffney suggests that one read the Teacher's Manual Preview first to get a good idea about the purpose and design of this secondary school textbook.

Mike Gaffney

Chapter 10
The Lament of Tiger Burch

Who is Ernest “Tiger” Burch Jr.? Since we rely heavily on the work of Dr. Ernest S. “Tiger” Burch Jr., it seems only right that we know something about this highly respected scholar. Since 1979 he has been a research associate with the Arctic Studies Center at the Smithsonian National Museum of Natural History in Washington D. C. On their website the Center has a short biography of him. We even find out how he got the nickname “Tiger.” Of the other “Tiger” – Tiger Woods – we know that he has been the best golfer in the world for a number of years. Of this “Tiger” – Tiger Burch – we know that he is the very best at using oral histories to advance our understanding of the traditional social organization of Iñupiaq nations in Northwest Alaska. Here is part of what the Arctic Studies Center says about Tiger Burch:

Dr. Ernest S. Burch, Jr. is a social anthropologist specializing in the early historic social organization of Eskimo peoples. Geographically, his primary interests are northwestern Alaska and the west coast of Hudson Bay [Canada]. Dr. Burch was born in New Haven, CT on April 17, 1938. The next day some of his father's bachelor buddies started calling him "Tiger." Except for a few brief interludes, that is what he has been called ever since.

The Arctic Studies Center has more to say about Burch. Please pay special attention to the last sentence which is emphasized in Italics:

Initially, Tiger was interested primarily in studying contemporary Native life in the arctic. However, he soon became more interested in reconstructing life as it had been during the early contact period, which ranges from the late 17th century to the late 19th, depending on the region. This change in focus was stimulated by his rewarding experience working with elders in northwestern Alaska, and by his research in the archives of the Hudson's Bay Company. Both the oral and the documentary [written]sources yielded more and better new information on early 19th century Eskimo life than he had previously believed could be found a century and a half later.

So how did Burch become a believer in Native oral history as a legitimate and essential field of scholarship? To answer this question we go back to the 32nd Alaska Science Conference held in 1981at the University of Alaska–Fairbanks. At an evening session of the Conference, Dr. Burch gave a speech entitled “Studies in Native History as a Contribution to Alaska’s Future.” What he said in the speech became one of the most important statements ever made about conducting historical research in Alaska. Ten years later he made several revisions to that speech and it was published in the Alaska History Journal under the title, “From Skeptic to Believer: The Making of an Oral Historian.” Now let’s see how Tiger Burch became a believer in Native oral history.¹

The big mistake. In his 1981 speech and again in his 1991 article, Tiger Burch’s main purpose is to show how sad it is that non-Natives, including many educators and scholars, have dismissed Alaska Native oral histories as unreliable accounts of Alaska’s past. If historical information is not based on written primary source material, then they treat it as almost nonexistent. At the very least, they view it as highly suspect information.

But what makes Burch’s speech and later article truly profound is that he uses himself as a prime example. Early in his studies of Iñupiaq life in Northwest Alaska, he shared with most other scholars the same deep skepticism about the value and reliability of Native oral history. Years later, however, he admits that this was a serious mistake and he wasted almost a decade of valuable research time. He says:

Regrettably, there are rather few people who have any knowledge of the history of Native societies before they ceased to exist due to European influence. I am one of the lucky ones. However, I did not achieve that status very easily or in a manner of which I am very proud. Since the way in which I did so is indicative of both the richness of Native history, on the one hand, and of the inept manner in which it has been studied on the other.

He claims to be one of the fortunate few now having reliable knowledge of what Northwest Iñupiaq life was like before the invasions triggered massive social change. But what does he mean when he says he did no achieve this knowledge “easily or in a manner of which I am very proud?” Herein lies the lament of Tiger Burch. Herein lies his deep regret that for too many years he also dismissed Native oral histories as simply interesting stories but unreliable information. Now let’s join him on his intellectual journey from oral history skeptic to firm believer in Native oral historical legacies as key to achieving the fullest picture of Alaska’s past.

He began his research in Northwest Alaska in 1960. This is when he first heard elders talk about major battles among Iñupiaq groups. But he assumed this talk was simply tales of long ago family feuds. As he says:

… in order to have had wars, the Iñupiaq had to have had different countries, or at least different tribes. Everyone knew that they lacked anything of the kind. For these reasons, I pretty much ignored everything that I was told about ancient Eskimo warfare.

He returned to Northwest Alaska four years later in 1964 to do more research. Soon after he arrived, he found that talk among elders about ancient Iñupiaq warfare persisted. But now this warfare was beginning to sound more like historic conflicts among Lower-48 Indian tribes, even like conflict among early European nations. He writes:

I again heard the occasional story about ancient Iñupiaq warfare. This time, apparently because people knew me better , they admitted that sometimes the home side had lost. Furthermore, some of the older people began to tell me a bit about what they called "Eskimo nations." These nations, they claimed, had existed in northwestern Alaska at some time in the past, and it was the citizens of these nations who had engaged one another in war.

War as history. From the very beginning of his journey into the oral historical legacy of the Northwest Iñupiaq, Burch finds warfare to be a main theme in the retelling of this history. We should not be surprised. It seems clear that war has a central place in the historical legacies and mythologies of all human groups down through time. So let’s take an extra minute to explore the connection between warfare and history. It is a sad historical fact that warfare has always been with us and most likely always will be. There seems no escaping warfare as a fundamental driving force of history. It was the Greek philosopher Plato who made the famous statement that “only the dead have seen the end of war.”

Chris Hedges is a American war correspondent who has lived and worked in the midst of conflicts in many parts of the world. In his thoughtful book, War is a Force that gives Us Meaning, he begins with Plato’s observation on war. He then argues that war is not just something that happens when two human groups have exhausted all other means to resolve their dispute peacefully. Using his own war experiences and examples from history, he shows how men seem easily persuaded to go to war on behalf of country, tribe, or religious beliefs. They are easily persuaded because already they accept the idea of the “warrior” as noble and glorious in defense of the virtuous society. Cultural traditions expressed in oral and written literature have always taught young men everywhere it is the “heroic” traits of the warrior that society most admires and most expects of its men.

But Hedges does not stop there. He explains that with very rare exceptions, the warrior ideal of nobility, glory, and heroism is a mythology that fades quickly in actual combat. Suddenly the soldier’s overwhelming reality is absolute fear – fear of horrible wounds and death, even utter humiliation in front of fellow warriors. Living through such extremely violent conditions over a period of time, moreover, makes it very difficult to sustain our usual sense of morality – of clearly distinguishing right from wrong. We are now emotionally primed to commit the most shocking acts against other humans.

And if you do survive war and your behavior in battle was that of a normal human being with all the fear and rage war entails, then what? The rest of your life can be taken over by a roaring psychological war within yourself. You know that your actions rarely, if ever, match the warrior myths. You are told by professional counselors and loved ones that your reactions were simply human and in no way tarnish your character or lessen their respect for you. But often this isn’t enough. The mythology maintains its stranglehold on your mind. The intensity of this mental conflict – usually called Post Traumatic Stress Disorder or PTSD – can become unbearable if you believe you committed acts which, under ordinary circumstances, you would consider brutal and inhumane. Or if your fear was so constant and so deep, you are now certain that your actions, however normal under the conditions, revealed some extraordinary character flaw.

After some fifty years of studying and writing history – mainly Western history – Will Durant gives added meaning to Plato’s statement and to the observations of Chris Hedges. According to Hedges, Will Durant “calculated that there have been only twenty-nine years in all of human history during which a war was not underway somewhere.” This bears repeating: only twenty-nine years out of all of recorded human history!²

So again, it should not surprise us that war is a main theme of any society’s historical legacy , whether Iñupiaq or Tlingit or French or American. War and its mythology is that part of our historical legacy we think tells us most about ourselves. War, including civil war and violent revolutions, also highlight periods of dramatic social change. If the study of history is about anything , it is about the study of social change. It is indeed those events which have changed the course of history that get our attention. The idea that war dominates all historical legacies led the 19th Century German philosopher Georg Hegal to say that “times of happiness are history’s empty pages.”³ The English novelist and poet, Thomas Hardy, made much the same point in 1904 when he said: “War makes rattling good history; but Peace is poor reading.”⁴

Back to Tiger Burch’s lament. We took a short detour into war and history just as Tiger was telling us about how the elders persisted in making significant connections between ancient warfare and what they called “Iñupiaq nations.” But he remained unconvinced that any of these stories reflected accurate history. The research he was doing on family genealogies indicated that during traditional times the Iñupiaq were “highly mobile geographically, and that a high percentage of the inhabitants of any particular region were related to the inhabitants of several others.” He still held on to the idea that:

… the Iñupiaq could not have been divided into separate tribes, not to mention separate countries. The notion that anything usefully referred to as "warfare" occurred in such a context was absurd. I therefore concluded that my informants were talking about interfamily feuds, not wars.

Again Burch leaves Northwest Alaska, not to return until 1969. Now nine years have past since he first began his research among the Iñupiaq. This time, however, he returns with a research objective that is clearly Native history. But as he says, “My interest had shifted [to history] for theoretical reasons, not because I had altered my opinion about the accuracy of the stories I had heard earlier.”

With the gathering of Native historical information as his new goal in 1969, he traveled widely in the region, “seeking out individuals whom the Iñupiaq regarded as knowledgeable historians.” And what he finds along the way is a field of study he had dismissed for years – the study of Native oral history. He says, “I was excited, and frankly surprised, to find that there were quite a few [Native historians].” This is when he says that some of these Iñupiaq historians “were truly brilliant scholars and intellectuals in the most genuine senses of those words.”

Some of the Iñupiaq historians he worked with are known to us for their work in other fields and with other researchers. We might recognize such names as Della Keats, Simon Paneak, Martha Swan, Charlie Jensen, Robert Cleveland, and Frank Glover. Now, finally, they had Tiger’s full attention. Now that he was listening more carefully, he found that indeed there existed what rightfully can be called “Iñupiaq nations,” each with well defined territorial boundaries which were vigorously defended. He found that these historians could vividly recount significant historical events that happened before sustained contact with outsiders changed Iñupiaq life forever. He also learned that many of these events were battles involving many fighters who used at least two different war strategies called “shock” tactics and “fire” tactics.

Burch also points out that he had shared the outsider’s most common view that, as he says, “Indians and Eskimos were always at each others' throats.” But now he is not so sure. Apparently Iñupiaq relations with nearby Athabaskan Indian groups were in many ways cordial, even involving intermarriage. He now finds that what he thought was a historical fact of widespread Eskimo – Indian hostilities appears to be a period of conflict with just one Athabaskan group. Further research by Burch and others indicate that this hostile Indian group must have been the mysterious tribe known as the Di’haii Gwich’in.

For a period of years in the early 1800s the Di’haii Gwich’in apparently inhabited the upper Noatak River area which, obviously, is far from their traditional Gwich’in homeland in the Chandalar river region. Exactly who were the Di’haii Gwich’in and how they ended up in Northwest Iñupiaq country are questions still puzzling other researchers as well. Along with Tiger Burch, the Gwich’in historian, Adeline Peter Raboff, and the University of Alaska-Fairbanks (UAF) anthropologist, Craig Mishler have written on this historical puzzle.⁵

Investigating the Di’haii Gwich’in led to possible resolution of yet another historical puzzle. An ancient event Burch had heard stories about was an Indian raid on an Iñupiaq settlement in the area of present day Point Hope. He could never accept these stories as convincing because Point Hope is located out on the Chukchi Sea coast at least 600 very rugged and treacherous walking miles from Athabaskan territory. But what about the Di’haii Gwich’in when they occupied part of the upper Noatak river area? Could they have been the raiders of the Point Hope settlement? But again, what about the distance even they had to travel to carry out such a raid? They had to complete at least a 500 mile round trip which included avoiding Iñupiaq settlements along the way. Now we have another interesting historical mystery indeed.

Researchers in any field can be easily thought of as detectives. Certainly researchers are not doing police work. But they do approach a research question as a mystery or puzzle to be solved, and the methods they use to collect evidence have similarities to police work. As any good detective should, Burch looked for solid evidence and followed that evidence wherever it led.

Figure 11
Point Hope, Alaska. c. 1953

And just as a detective seeks witnesses to a crime, Burch sought out Iñupiaq oral historians and began to work closely with them. It is now quite clear that he had better listen carefully to what they had to say. This is because he found the historical accounts told to him by different Iñupiaq historians were “mutually consistent.” That is, the different oral historians he consulted were reinforcing each other’s telling of an ancient event by providing basically the same description of it. Therefore the accuracy, hence reliability, of this historical information was perhaps far greater than he had previously thought. He says:

My disbelief in these stories was shaken, not only by the conviction and manifest knowledge with which these people spoke, but also by the fact that their separate accounts were mutually consistent. For example, a historian from Kotzebue claimed that his people had once defeated the Point Hopers in a battle fought around a stockade built at Sheshalik, across the inlet from the modern town of Kotzebue. Inquiries among the Point Hopers a few months later confirmed the story in all essential details. But I was still skeptical, and wanted additional corroboration. [Emphasis added]

A two-part reliability test. Let’s say it again – we want to be as confident as possible that the oral historical data we might collect ourselves or the data collected by others like Burch is as reliable as one can make it at this point in time. So how do we achieve such reliability? Is there a test for reliability that we can apply? There is such a test and it has two parts.

Part 1: Internal consistency. Tiger already has given us a clue to the first part when he marvels at the mutual consistency of the stories told to him by different Iñupiaq oral historians. Although he expected to get different views on which side won the Kotzebue -Point Hope battle at Sheshalik, he heard essentially the same story with the same ending from both the Kotzebue and the Point Hope historians – that Point Hope was ultimately defeated. And the more he heard the same story from different Iñupiaq historians, the more confident he became in the reliability of the information. Therefore the first part of the reliability test is checking for internal consistency among the historical accounts available to us.

Obviously the internal consistency test is useful only if we have more than one oral account. There is a basic rule followed by investigative journalists which is much like our check for internal consistency. Before reporting on a major news story the journalist must have the story confirmed by more than one source. The key word here is confirmed. A reporter must confirm the information from at least one other source before the story can be printed in the newspaper or announced on television or radio.

The classic film All the President’s Men contains a good example of the confirmation rule. The movie is about how two young reporters for the Washington Post broke the story of the “Watergate Scandal” which ultimately led to President Nixon’s resignation in 1974 and the imprisonment of several high level administration officials. Even when they felt their source of information was very reliable, their editor would not print the story until, among other things, they confirmed it from a separate source. The editor insisted that they have at least two reliable sources, hopefully more. Throughout the investigation, the confirmation rule was applied time and again because the stakes were very high. What they were learning was nothing less than criminal activity by some of the highest officials of the Nixon administration and the President’s reelection committee. And this criminal activity may directly involve the President himself. Of course much of the movie’s drama centers on whether a powerful government official would finally confirm what they had learned from other sources.

So the first part of our reliability test is checking for internal consistency among separate oral historical accounts. And like the confirmation rule in journalism, the more sources we have saying essentially the same thing, the more confidence we have in the reliability of the information. When working with oral history, however, we must add a second part to the reliability test. We call it external confirmation.

Part II: External confirmation. Tiger Burch also leads the way on this part of the reliability test. Like a good detective who has run out of leads, he went back over his files to see if he missed anything. For Burch, this meant rereading historical material on Northwest Alaska written by early visitors to the area and by anthropologists who had published studies of the region and its people. The key word here is reread. He was sure he had already studied this written documentation quite thoroughly. But the picture of Iñupiaq traditional life he had mentally assembled from all of this early academic study did not fit with much of what the Iñupiaq historians were saying. Like our stubborn detective, this forced him to go back over the written documentation to see if he missed anything. He was in for a big surprise.

His rereading of the accounts of such famous arctic explorers as Frederick William Beechey, Alexandr Kashevarov, and Knud Rasmussen shocked him. Burch found that as early as 1826 they were describing Eskimo battle lines and military entrenchments. Perhaps the biggest surprise came when he discovered that:

Kashevarov listed the exact tribes or nations that my sources [Iñupiaq historians] said had been located along that part of the coast. Indeed, he corroborated what the Iñupiaq historians had told me about where the precise boundaries of those countries had been.

Figure 12
Iñupiaq Battlefield

Burch also discovered that Knud Rasmussen had even published a photo of an old Iñupiaq battlefield where bones and skulls marked the site. Figure 12 above shows that photo.⁶ He continues:

I say "shocked" because I had read much of this material before, yet had somehow overlooked these facts. Apparently I had done so for the simple reason that they were so contrary to my expectations that I could not see what was right before my eyes.

What Tiger Burch is talking about here is the psychology of preconceptions, a human failing to which all of us are likely to fall victim from time to time. A preconception is when we so firmly believe or take for granted something that our mind fails to register conflicting but more accurate information, no matter how obvious that information may be to others. And if our mind does grasp new and contrary information, our first impulse is to reject it. Often the stereotyping of other racial, ethnic, tribal, or religious groups is a consequence of unexamined preconceptions.

Perhaps as we grew up, we were often told that people from another racial or ethnic group think and behave in a certain way. Now we are absolutely convinced that we know the true motivation and character of every individual member of that group. Now we are psychologically locked into a racial or ethnic stereotype. In turn, these preconceptions deafen and blind us to any knowledge or experience which challenges whatever preconceived ideas we may hold, whether about European-Americans or African-Americans or different Native tribal groups.

For Burch, of course, his preconceptions had nothing to do with stereotyping racial, ethnic, or tribal groups. But it was his false but firmly held ideas about traditional Iñupiaq life that caused him to turn a deaf ear to Native oral history and blinded him to “what was right before his eyes” in the written historical record. He says:

If what the Native historians reported to me was true, then many of my previous conceptions about the nature of traditional life in northwestern Alaska had to have been false. Despite my personal inclinations and my professional training, both of which should have predisposed me to pay attention to knowledgeable Natives, I had been blinded by my own preconceptions. When what people told me did not conform to my expectations, I simply ignored what they had to say. [Emphasis ours]

There was another preconception Burch was able to correct when he reread the written documentation. Remember the detective work he was doing on the Di’haii Gwich’in and their raid on the Iñupiaq of Point Hope? His preconception was that the distance and terrain made speedy foot travel impossible. Upon rereading the written record, however, he came across this historical account:

Early in the spring of 1854 Captain Rochefort Maguire, commander of the Franklin Search Expedition at Barrow, made a lengthy exploration toward the east. On April 25, just east of the mouth of the Colville River, right out on the Arctic coast, he came across a party of Indians. (I [Tiger Burch] should note that another set of preconceptions was destroyed by that observation. Indians were never supposed to visit that part of the coast, since it was Iñupiaq country, and they were not supposed to visit any part of the Arctic coast at that time of year. But there they were!)

Since they were about to leave for Fort Yukon, three hundred miles away, Maguire gave the Indians a letter to take to the manager of the Hudson's Bay Company post. They delivered it on June 27, despite the fact that their trip spanned the breakup season, when travel on foot is nearly impossible; and of course they must have had to stop periodically to hunt. It took them only three more weeks to take another message the 250 miles from the trader at Fort Yukon to Captain Richard Collinson, near Barter Island, when they went out there to trade with the Alaskan Iñupiaq and the Mackenzie Delta Eskimos. Thus, within a period of less than four months they had covered a distance of some 550 miles as the crow flies, crossing the Brooks Range twice in the process, once during the breakup season. Altogether they probably walked 1,500 miles on the ground in about five or six months as part of their ordinary annual cycle of movement.

Burch then makes this connection with the travel mystery of the Di’haii Gwich’in:

If Natsit Kutchin could cover that much ground, presumably so could their cousins the Dihaii. It would appear, in fact, that both Iñupiaq and Indians frequently did this kind of thing in early nineteenth century northern Alaska. A Dihaii raid on Point Hope would not have been an extraordinary event physically to the Native peoples of that period.

Now back to external confirmation, the second part of our reliability test. Along with shattering Tiger’s preconceptions of traditional Iñupiaq life, his rereading of the written historical record also served as external confirmation of the Iñupiaq oral historical record. In other words, the written record actually confirmed what the Iñupiaq oral historians were saying all along. Of course some specific events told by the Iñupiaq historians were not in the documentation reread by Burch. Nevertheless, he found that the written record still supported the overall “historical pattern” outlined by the Iñupiaq oral accounts.

External confirmation is a two-way street. Of course a reverse process of external confirmation was taking place as well. The Iñupiaq historians were confirming the written record. They were providing oral backup to the written record. So we can say that external confirmation is a two-way street, with two very different sources of historical information hopefully supporting each other. Here is a quick and simple equation summarizing the Reliability Test:

Internal Consistency + External Confirmation= Greater Reliability

Most likely, however, you will be using secondary sources to develop different sections of your Cultural Profile, much in the same way we have used Burch to understand aspects of Northwest Iñupiaq history. Even if collected by others, we should apply the reliability test to their work as well. We should ask: To what extent did the recorder of the oral history we are using in our Cultural Profile Project check for internal consistency and external confirmation?

What we should be thinking about – key study questions:

What is Tiger Burch’s lament?

Can you give some reasons why history focuses so much more on war then on peaceful times?

Once Dr. Burch began to take the Iñupiaq oral historians seriously, what did he learned about Northwest Iñupiaq life in traditional times?

Can you explain why applying the two-part reliability test should lead to greater confidence in both oral and written historical material?

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