Koonooka, Christopher Petuwaq (transliterator and translator), 2003 Ungipaghaghlanga. Let Me Tell You a Story. Quutmiit Yupigita Ungipaghaatangit. Legends of the Siberian Eskimos, Transliterated and translated from the Chukotka Collection of G.A. Menovshchikov; Stories Told by Ayveghhaq, Tagikaq, Asuya, Alghalek, Nanughhaq, Wiri, Fairbanks, Alaska Native Language Center, 185 pages.

This attractively produced book contains 35 tales, the major portion of a set of 49 tales originally recorded by the Russian linguist and teacher G.A. Menovshchikov from six Siberian Yupik speakers from Chukotka, Russian Far east, and published in the Cyrillic alphabet with Russian translation in 1988. Christopher Koonooka (born in 1978) a native speaker of Siberian Yupik Eskimo from Gambell, St. Lawrence Island, Alaska, transliterated the stories into the Latin letter alphabet used by St Lawrence Islanders, and translated them into English. The presentation is not in the bilingual facing page format; English translations simply follow the Yupik texts. However, the correspondence is facilitated by matching paragraph numbers, and by the fact that the sentences of the Yupik and the English almost always correspond one to one. The book is illustrated with drawings by Native artists Jeffery Apatiki and Percy Avugiak. The preface by senior ANLC linguist Steven A. Jacobson provides the historical background to Koonooka’s project, and points out that there were some errors in the original Cyrillic transcription, which were corrected. It is also good to keep in mind that certain phonological distinctions are more consistently marked in the Latin based spelling system than in the Cyrillic one. Koonooka occasionally changed phraseology to make the sentences agree better with his feel for the language. Jacobson correctly points out that this practice is in accordance with Yupik ideas about the oral transmission. The preface ends with a facsimile of the title page of Menovshchikov’s 1988 book, samples from the text in that book, and a detailed map of Chukotka, with all Yupik villages properly spelled in Yupik, which is a treat in itself. The introduction by Koonooka is remarkable in that it is first written in Yupik, and followed by an English translation. It describes in some detail Koonooka’s procedure in adapting the text for St. Lawrence Islanders. He notes that some words were hard to decipher, and that he was able to figure them out by working back from the Russian translation. Where Yupik speakers from Chukotka use a different word or have a different pronunciation of the same word, Koonooka has wisely retained the original Chukotkan form. He also made a list of the words he did not recognize, and had them explained by elders from St. Lawrence Island. It is interesting that even though some of these more typically Chukotkan words (often words borrowed from Chukchi, an unrelated language) are not used by St. Lawrence Islanders, they have a passive knowledge of them. I had the same experience during my fieldwork on St. Lawrence Island in 1985. This phenomenon points again to the fundamental unity of the Siberian Yupik Eskimo language, regardless of the geographical and political separateness of the territories in which it is spoken. The introduction also acknowledges the help of Russians and Americans, and concludes with a fascinating introduction to the storytellers, translated from Menovshchikov (1988), and edited by the Russian ethnohistorian Igor Krupnik. We learn something about the background of the six storytellers, of their generally energetic lives, and of Menovshchikov’s and other Soviet linguists’ relationship to them. Three are men, three are women. Two were blind. Five appeared to have been Ungazighmiit, natives of Chaplino, and the sixth is an Imtugmii from Sighinek. The stories are of the ungipaghaatet (sg. ungipaghaan) genre. This genre is similar to European style folktales, in that they are traditional fiction, often contain animal or mythological characters, and are intended to entertain and edify. They are not always appropriate for children, as some contain descriptions of shamanistic rites. Other common motifs are fishing, whaling, …