Vazaagìhdzak's Hat

Dr. Craig Mishler presenting at UAF

On May 3 the Alaska Native Language Center hosted a presentation by Dr. Craig Mishler entitled Vazaagìhdzak's Hat.  Mishler outlined research that he proposes to undertake with the sponsorship of a recently-awarded grant from the National Science Foundation. The project will document Gwich'in words for parts of the caribou, contributing to a Gwich'in ethnobiology, or what Mishler calls "zoosemiotics."

As Mishler relates, the importance of caribou to the Gwich'in became apparent to him very early in his work -- even as early as his first visit with Johnny and Sarah Frank in Gold Camp in 1972. (That work eventually led to a collection of texts, Neerihinjik, published by ANLC.) David Salmon has remarked on the importance of the different animals associated with the various Gwich'in bands. As Sarah James says, "we are the caribou people." A 1995 study by Wein and Freeman revealed that Gwich'in people eat caribou on average 240 times per year. The caribou is so essential to Gwich'in life that, as Mishler says, what you see in the caribou may reflect who you are. If you see a butchered caribou and recognize many different useful items, then you just may be a Gwich'in.

The importance of caribou even extends metaphorically across the Gwich'in language. For example, the word for 'lace fat', ch'itseezhu', is also the word for 'cirrus clouds'. And the word for 'clavicle', ch'ikii druu, is also the name for the northern hawk owl. The connection here is that the clavicle can be used to make a device which, when thrown, falls like a descending hawk owl, causing hares to freeze in their tracks so that they can be caught.

Mishler's study will document the various uses of these different parts of the caribou, for the first time taking an inward rather than outward view. Many studies have examined the caribou from outside -- migration, distribution, mortality, etc. -- but no previous study has looked inside the caribou to examine its significance for and relation to the Gwich'in people. Mishler will work closely with the Alaska Native Language Center and plans to make the results of the study widely available.