By their own reckoning the Nunamiut Inupiat have always lived among Alaska's northernmost mountains, the Brooks Range. Oral traditions passed from young to old and, stretching far back before the beginning of recorded time, tell of their creation by a giant man named Ayagumalhaq who taught them how to survive and to make a living from the land. In a magnificent gesture to assure that he and his teachings would never be forgotten, Ayagumalhaq took off one of his giant gloves and turned it into a mountain, forming an area of rugged peaks located near the headwaters of the Alatna River called the Arrigich, meaning "Outstretched Fingers."
 
Under his tutelage the Nunamiut gained a deep and detailed knowledge of their world and became highly proficient hunters and gatherers. Ordering their lives around the flow of the seasons, which governed not only the availability of food resources but even where they camped, mobility became the hallmark of the Nunamiut lifestyle. The freedom and capability to move swiftly and sometimes far in pursuit of game or other resources were critical to their success.
 
Their society consisted of a number of semi-nomadic bands, each led by an "Umailik" or head man. Usually made up of several extended families and numbering between 25 and 100 individuals, these bands occupied or seasonally used most of the larger river valleys along the north face of the central Brooks Range. At their peak population it is estimated that there were probably no more than 1,000 Nunamiut scattered throughout the mountains.
 
Although they are related to the Tagiugm Iñupiat of the arctic coast, the Nunamiut consider themselves different and distinct from all others. Their heritage is one of living inland rather than near the sea, their way of life built around the hunting of caribou, mountain sheep, and grizzly bear; rather than the whales, seals and polar bears of their coastal relatives.
 
The Nunamiut were big game hunters, and caribou were not only the focus of their existence but also the foundation of their economics. These animals not only supplied meat, fat and marrow for food, but their skins were used for making clothing and shelter; tendons and ligaments were turned into thread, while the bones and antlers provided the raw materials for making a variety of tools and implements.
 
Twice each year, in spring and fall, huge herds of caribou, which can number into the tens of thousands, stream through the mountain passes of the Brooks Range following ancient patterns of seasonal migration. In spring they begin moving northward from the forested interior where they passed the cold months of winter, scattered in small bunches about the land. They are on their way to traditional calving grounds located far out on the arctic slope where they will give birth to their young and spend the summer grazing and growing fat for the coming winter. Come fall, their meat laden with fat and fur, rich and thick, the animals will again form into large herds as they migrate back through the mountains to their wintering grounds.
 
Long before the introduction of guns the Nunamiut were already possessors and practitioners of a highly refined set of hunting strategies that combined the most effective use of traditional technology with the seasonal movements and behavior of caribou.
 
In summer and winter, when men and animals alike were widely dispersed, hunters armed with bows and arrows stalked game alone or in small groups. During the spring and fall migrations, when the caribou formed large herds numbering in the thousands, the Nunamiut came together to intercept the animals in cooperative hunts.
 
In the spring the caribou were herded into large stone ringed impound corrals called "kanigaq" where the animals would become entangled in snares and then killed by hunters with bows and spears. In early fall, before freeze up, the hunt was often conducted by herding the caribou into lakes or rivers and then spearing them from qayaqs. After freeze up the Nunamiut again returned to using corrals and snares to take the animals.
 
Skilled as they were at hunting and gathering inland resources, their need for marine products, especially the calorie- and nutrient-rich seal and whale oil was acute. To get these and other goods the Nunamiut established interdependent trade relationships with coastal Inupiat Each summer large groups of traders left their mountain homes to travel to Nigliq on the Colville River delta. Here, surrounded in an atmosphere of dancing, feasting, and games of skill, the trading took place between the coastal and inland trading partners who provided one another with the goods each most desired.
 
This way of life continued on, little changed, until the closing decades of the 19th century when the impacts and presence of European and American explorers, whalers and traders began to make themselves felt.

Contact and Change

Western contact between the coastal Inupiat and the occasional Nunamiut visitor became increasingly common from the 1850s onward, it was not until the winter of 1886 that the first party of explorers, led by Naval Lt. George Stone penetrated into the heart of the Brooks Range to make direct contact with the Nunamiut in the midst of their mountainous homeland.
 
It was a meeting symbolic of the fact that now, no part of the arctic was immune from change. Over the next three decades the Nunamiut were subject to a series of catastrophic events leading to widespread loss of life through disease and starvation, the complete breakdown of their social structure and, by 1920, the abandonment of both their traditional lifestyle and their mountain homeland.
 
Starting in the late 1880s a series of events had a great impact on the traditional Nunamiut lifestyle. Outside contact brought diseases to which they had no immunity and epidemics of flu and measles killed many. With the cyclical decline of caribou herds between 1890 and 1910 the inland people abandoned the Brooks Range for the coast They became more and more dependent on modern tools, guns and foods introduced by white whalers and traders.
 
During this same period the New England whaling fleet maintained a strong presence along the arctic coast, offering not only access to a wide variety of trade items like guns, ammunition, kerosene lamps, and alcohol, but also jobs.
 
Driven by hunger and the need for relief, many Nunamiut families moved coastward during these years. Large numbers of them continued eastward toward Canada where caribou herds were still plentiful. Others were hired on as hunters and seamstresses to supply meat and clothing to the ships of the whaling fleet which were over-wintering in arctic waters.
 
Whalers also introduced a number of new diseases such as measles and flu for which the Nunamiut had no immunity The resulting epidemics periodically swept inland, carrying away even more of those who still remained in the mountains, further depleting the Nunamiut population and profoundly disrupting their social structure to the point of collapse. The survivors were forced to migrate to the coast where they would be close to trading posts and jobs. With the possible exception of a few scattered families, by 1920 the north central Brooks Range had been essentially abandoned and Nunamiut society destroyed.

As the whaling industry began its own decline, the arctic fur trapping industry arose in its place. Between 1910 and 1930 trapping provided the now coastal dwelling Nunamiut with a firm economic base and ready access to a wide variety of western trade goods. Based with their families in small houses and camps scattered all along the length of the Beaufort Sea coast, a number of Nunamiut trappers ran trap lines far inland to the mountain valleys of the central Brooks Range where trapping was good and caribou were once again plentiful.
 
With the onset of the great Depression the worldwide demand for furs collapsed, wiping out the trapping industry and most of the associated trading posts. Faced with what appeared to be a bleak economic future along the coast, and encouraged by the abundance of game inland, the stage was set for the movement of Nunamiut families back to their ancestral territories. 

Returning Inland

In the years between 1935 and 1940 a handful of highly motivated and traditionally oriented families living around the Colville River delta area elected to return to the mountains on a full time basis to reestablish their band based society and resume their old way of life.
 
While one group of families focused their activities around the Ulu Valley of the Itqiliq River drainage, others reestablished themselves in and around the Killiq River and Chandler Lake drainages. Breaking trade and personal ties with the coast, they now opened trade links with distant communities on the south side of the mountains, along the Koyukuk and Kobuk rivers. Twice each year; in spring and fall, parties of men would travel a hundred miles and more each way by sled to trade their furs for the supplies they needed to last the coming season.
 
Despite their isolation in what was then one of the most remote areas on earth, even the Nunamiut were not immune from the economic impacts of World War IL Manpower needs and good paying job opportunities in Fairbanks contributed heavily to the break up of the Ulu Valley band in 1942, though after the end of the war one family returned to the mountains and joined the other families still there. Additionally, the fear of ammunition shortages led the Chandler families to conserve their shells by building a small fleet of qayaqs and conducting a traditional style caribou hunt in which the animals were driven into the lake and speared.
 
Undoubtedly the most important and far reaching impact upon the Nunamiut during the war years was the establishment of regular air contact This came about as a result of U.S. Navy oil exploration efforts on the north slope. It was an event which, unwittingly at the time, set the Nunamiut on the path to village life.

Paths to Village Life

First air contact occurred in the spring of 1943 when Sigurd Wien, a pioneer arctic bush pilot then flying in support of the Navy encountered several Nunamiut families at Chandler Lake. Thereafter in the course of his flights for the Navy he arranged to stop over and fly out their furs to traders in Fairbanks and bring in ammunition and other supplies.
 
Between 1943 and 1947 Wien periodically resupplied the Chandler families and they became close friends. Motivated by a desire to obtain schooling and Christian spiritual guidance for their children, along with the opportunity for improved air service, the families decided to relocate to the Anaktuvuk Valley where Wien would arrange for teachers and missionaries to visit them. Thus in 1947 these few families moved their base of operations to Tulugaq Lake at the mouth of the valley while the Killiq River Valley families remained in their area for the next two years.
 
Summer of 1949 saw the joining of the Tulugaq and Killiq families at Tulugaq Lake. The Killiq people had made the long journey on foot with very little food and only what few possessions their pack dogs could carry Their arrival was a time of great joy as people feasted and sang and danced in celebration. Although both sets of families remained highly mobile, most of their activities were now centered on the Anaktuvuk-John River valleys area.
 
In 1951 a small post office was established at the summit of the pass, where Homer Mekiana, the new postmaster had established camp on the edge of a huge stand of willows. The first post office was a simple tent, but its presence guaranteed regular, scheduled air service making it easier for people to order supplies. Not long after; a small summer trading post was opened at the summit by Pat O'Connell, an Irish trapper and trader whose store sold a few items like coffee, tea, sugar, salt, flour, ammunition, candy and soda pop. Thus the summit locality became a regular contact and resupply point for the still highly mobile Nunamiut families.
 
Over the next few years the summit locale gained increasing importance as a base camp where families began to build semi-permanent structures - log cabins and sod houses for winter use and spruce pole tent frames for canvas wall tents in summer.
 
By the mid 1950s the willow patch had virtually disappeared, consumed for heating and cooking fuel, transforming the summit location into one large, open, clearing populated with a scattering of log cabins and sod houses and interlaced by a network of trails and paths. In 1958 Presbyterian missionaries from Barrow helped establish a church at the pass. Known as the "Chapel in the Mountains," the entire community became involved in its construction as hunters drove their dog teams and sleds deep into the spruce forests to the south, felling trees, hauling them back to the pass and building the church by hand.
 
The church was then followed in 1961 by the construction of a permanent school building and the presence of full time teachers. Because school attendance was mandatory families with children were required to be present for the entire school year.
 
This event was in many ways the capstone in the transformation of this settlement from a base camp to a true village.
 
Over the years, from the time of its initial settlement to the present day the village site of Anaktuvuk Pass has undergone constant and dramatic change. The first families to stay here lived in caribou skin tents, encamped in small clearings within the shelter of 2O foot-high willows covering an area of more than 50 acres.
 
Beginning in the mid 1960s plywood frame houses began to replace these traditional structures. But with the growth of the community came a critical depletion of the willow resources. By 1967 some village residents were talking about moving the community some 80 miles north to Umiat on the Colville River where willows were still plentiful. This was forestalled through joint action by the State of Alaska and the Bureau of Indian Affairs, which provided the community with oil stoves and a several year supply of heating oil to induce them to stay.
 
The most dramatic changes in the appearance and physical structure of the village began in the late 1970s under the North Slope Borough's Capital Improvement Program. Funded largely by the taxation of the Prudhoe Bay oil fields, the borough has expended billions of dollars to provide villagers with good paying jobs constructing, operating and maintaining new schools, clinics, housing, and fire stations, as well as providing electric, water and sanitation services, in its determination to improve the health and living standards of the Inupiat people.
 
Today Anaktuvuk Pass is a fully modern village and, despite its remote location, is far from being isolated. Close links to the outside world are maintained through daily air service to Fairbanks. In addition, an array of satellite dishes provides residents with long distance telephone and cable TV service.
 
Despite these facilities and conveniences which give the community such a modern face, the Nunamiut people remain closely tied to the land. Away from the village, men and women still carry on with the hunting, trapping, fishing and gathering that have sustained them in this demanding environment for hundreds of years, employing the same skills and values that have been passed down to them from generation to generation.
 
The people of Anaktuvuk Pass have adopted a unique blend of old and new ways. Hunters still intercept caribou along traditional migration routes, but may travel 200 miles a day by snowmachine checking their trap lines. They enjoy outside TV programs but strive to preserve the folk tales of their ancestors. Villagers combine a wage economy with subsistence activities, adjusting their work schedules to seasonal hunting cycles.