Last updated: November 9, 2021
Person
Herbert O. Anungazuk
NPS photo, Peter Richter.
Quick Facts
Significance:
Worked for NPS Region 11: Alaska Native liaison and Cultural Anthropologist
Place of Birth:
Wales, Alaska
Date of Birth:
July 16, 1945
Place of Death:
Anchorage, Alaska
Date of Death:
August 24, 2010
Herbert Okoyohuk Anungazuk was born in 1945 and raised in a traditional Iñupiaq family in Wales, Alaska. Trained as a hunter, Anungazuk continued his education at Mount Edgecumbe High School in Sitka and then at Haskell Institute in Lawrence, Kansas. In 1967, he was drafted into the Army and served for two years in Vietnam. He stayed connected with his fellow Vietnam veterans for the rest of his life. After his discharge in 1969, he returned to Wales, where the bowhead whale hunt had declined to the point of near-disappearance by the mid-twentieth century. Anungazuk and other returning veterans were instrumental in reviving the whale hunt. In April of 1971, residents of Wales took a whale for the first time in decades.
Anungazuk was employed by the National Park Service as a Native Liaison and Heritage Specialist in Alaska starting in 1985, and worked for NPS until the time of his death. Beginning in 2003, he worked as a cultural anthropologist for the Cultural Resources Team at the Alaska Regional Office.
Anungazuk was well known and respected for his ethnographic skills, particularly as an interviewer and facilitator. His knowledge of Iñupiaq language and the history of the Bering Straits communities and his training by the elders of his community as an Iñupiaq hunter and whaler informed his work as an anthropologist. Within the broader Iñupiaq community, Anungazuk was respected for his deep knowledge of kinship connections throughout the Bering Strait region and beyond. He was also a gifted writer and orator, presenting papers at professional anthropology meetings and publishing articles in books and journals.
In 2003, Anungazuk was invited to participate in the annual reading of Moby Dick at New Bedford Whaling National Historical Park in New Bedford. His role was to read several pages of Herman Melville’s book in Iñupiaq. That year, there were also readings in Portuguese, German, Japanese, and Danish. Anungazuk was accompanied by his wife Lena and a group of Iñupiaq dancers from Barrow (now Utkiagvik), Alaska. He said the Alaska visitors were treated like royalty at the ceremonial reading.
Within and outside the National Park Service, Anungazuk frequently worked in partnership with anthropologists and scientists conducting research in Iñupiaq communities. He was invaluable in work carried out in northern Alaska, particularly on the Seward Peninsula. Because of his long service and significant contribution to Alaskan anthropology, Anungazuk was presented with the Alaska Anthropological Association’s Professional Achievement Award in 2010.
Anungazuk’s skills as a translator and transcriber of Iñupiaq were in high demand. He was a major contributor to the Wales Sea Ice Dictionary. One of his last projects was to develop a more comprehensive Wales Iñupiaq dictionary, and he had added 4,000 entries by the time of his death.[i] Wherever he went, he took his small green pocket notebook with him. Over the years he filled many small green notebooks with kinship connections, words, and any information that might contribute to preserving the history and culture of Iñupiaq people. Although several of these notebooks went through the laundry, almost all of them survived.
Anungazuk’s special interest and expertise was traditional Iñupiaq whaling. One of his first published articles was a chapter in an anthology on indigenous whaling.[ii] After his trip to New Bedford Whaling NHP in 2003, he wrote:
Whaling is an activity that gets the interest of man, woman, and child alike especially in northern latitudes because of the continuance of indigenous whaling. It is an activity that is indelibly etched into a whole community such that when the time to whale comes those who are masters of the hunt do so with quietude, respect, and honor to a mammal that is seen as the ultimate of species which provides for their sustenance.[iii]
Herbert Anungazuk’s work is greatly appreciated by the National Park Service and contributed much to the agency’s understanding of Alaska Native cultures and relationship with Native communities, especially in the Bering Straits region.
[i] This paragraph and other parts of this article draw from a notice of Herbert Anungazuk’s passing written by Rachel Mason and Carol Zane Jolles that appeared in the May 2011 NPS Archaeology Program newsletter.
[ii] “Whaling: A Ritual of Life” in Hunting the Largest Mammals: Native Whaling in the Western Arctic and Subarctic. Allen P. McCartney, ed. Occasional Publication No. 36. Edmonton, Alberta: University of Alberta, 1995.
[iii] Herbert Anungazuk, Trip Report to New Bedford Whaling Historical Park, January 2003.