Ethnography
Lantis’s "Social Culture of the Nunivak Eskimo," published in 1946, was the earliest full ethnography of the native peoples of southwest Alaska. She published four additional major works from her Nunivak Island field experience on ceremonialism (1947), personality and mythology (1953), folk medicine (1959), and childhood and interpersonal relations (1960).
Her ethnography emphasizes social organization, religion, folklore, human development, and the relationships between culture and individual and collective personality.
Her long-term contact with Nunivak Island over the course of 60 years prompted her interest in acculturation studies and longitudinal analysis.
During the years of Lantis's early fieldwork, social scientists classified the native people of Alaska into four main cultural groups: the Aleuts, the Athapascans, the Native American tribes of southeastern Alaska, and the Eskimos of the north and west, who lived along the coast of the Bering Sea and Arctic Ocean.
Lantis worked primarily in the southwest, thus most of the people among which she conducted her fieldwork fell into the “Eskimo” cultural grouping.
Sociocultural Characteristics
Although multiple marriages over the course of a lifetime were common, many of the Nunivak islanders exhibited enduring marital attachments. The social organization was characterized by horizontal relationships in which forming and maintaining strategic partnerships was vital to ensuring cooperative work, personal defense, and behavior mediation. During much of the year, men and women maintained separate living quarters, maintaining cross-sex formality and distance.
The use of a person’s real name, which represented the essential being or essence of a person, was routinely avoided. Lantis recorded just under 100 masculine and 82 female nicknames during her field work, only a fraction of which were etymologically discernible. Some of the recorded nicknames translate to "shining-one" and "polar bear." Others include "no-thumb," "smells-of-smoke," "ran-away," "always-winking," and "going-out."
The use of nicknames was so pervasive, children would often not know the names of their parents or other adults until well into adulthood. When learned, the names could never be used in direct address.
The supplanting of real names by nicknames and the historical inconsistent usage of surnames confounds current genealogy research efforts. Many of today's researchers rely upon Lantis’s recorded biographies and genealogy studies to research their personal and collective histories.
Religion & Ceremonialism
Lantis depicts the mid-20th century Nunivak religion as centering on spirit powers, the objects containing those powers, and the songs derived from and invoking those powers.
Wooden hunting hats were painted and adorned with carved ivory pieces representing inherited spirit powers. The ceremonial dog mask featured on this page is carved in wood, painted with white clay, red ochre and blue vivianite, and bears teeth made from walrus ivory. This mask was made by Harold Weston, now deceased, at Mekoryuk, Nunivak around 1946. This mask did not cover the face, but projected from the forehead.
The most prevalent carved ivory objects were amulets either worn or attached to tools, sleds and kayaks. The carved figures featured on this page were created around 1940 from walrus teeth and tusks.
Surrounding the individual and the biological family was the lineage—a social and biologic continuum extending from generation to generation. In this heritage, the central concept is the i'noyo, also sometimes called ki'lka. The basic meaning of this concept varies, but it conveys the sense of a specific power, amulet, charm, or magic helper. Inoyos were innumerable. In all their forms, each person had as many as two dozen inoyos.
Lantis describes Nunivak islanders wearing strings around their necks with various inoyo charms. Charms were also carried in pockets, on suspenders, or on tools and weapons. Most inoyos were inherited—not the physical bit of carving or tooth, but the right to use a whale’s tooth as a talisman, for example. Inoyos were also given to people by shamans to prevent or cure illness.
Lantis observed and documented several ceremonies during her years in the field. This research interest culminated in her 1947 monograph, "Alaskan Eskimo Ceremonialism." This work is widely consulted for her thorough, vivid descriptions of ceremonies, including the Bladder Festival of the Feast for Seals' Souls—a communal ceremony to dispatch hunted seals back to the sea. Sacred hunting songs were sung, sometimes for hours, and each hunter's bundle of sea mammal bladders were hung for the annual festival.
In this mongraph, Lantis also conveys the beliefs that the souls of sea mammals, if treated properly, could be reincarnated, and that animals could take on human form. The great Spirit of the World, although occasionally heard, was never seen.
