CECI Recognized for Yup’ik Culture Books
Calista Education Honored in Alaska Center for the Book 2024 CLIA Awards
eStoryknife, July 2024
Authors Ann Fienup-Riordan, Alice Rearden and Marie Meade are honored in the 2024 Contributions to Literacy in Alaska (CLIA) Awards from the Alaska Center for the Book for their work in publishing books for Calista Education and Culture, Inc. (CECI). The Center is Alaska’s liaison with the U.S. Library of Congress.
The CLIA awards have been presented annually to more than 100 people and institutions making a significant contribution in literacy, the literary arts, or the preservation of the written or spoken word since 1993.
Authors Fienup-Riordan, Rearden and Meade form a collaboration meriting CLIA awards, says the Alaska Center for the Book. The three are tradition-bearers, educators, authors and translators sharing Yup’ik culture, tradition and language through their work.
Along with Mark John, the CECI Cultural Advisor, the authors often work together on many projects. This project started through grants attained through the Calista Elders Council (a precursor to CECI) over the last 25 years.
“We wanted to record the knowledge and stories of traditional Yup’ik life,” said Rearden, in an interview with KYUK. “The interviews with Elders would highlight how they lived before our modern times. Many lived in sod houses and a completely different lifestyle than we know today.”
“It was important to our Elders for us to have bilingual books with Yup’ik and English.”
Alice Rearden, CECI translator and oral historian with ties to Napakiak
Fienup-Riordan is a cultural anthropologist who has written or edited more than 20 books and has lived in Alaska since 1973. Meade, born in Nunapitchuk, is a researcher and translator who also teaches Yup’ik dance, language and traditions at the University of Alaska Anchorage. Rearden, originally from Napakiak, has worked as primary translator and oral historian for CECI and as a teacher for the Lower Kuskokwim School District at Bethel Regional High School.
In the KYUK interview, Rearden says the conversations begin with the group meeting with Elders from the Yukon-Kuskokwim Region to speak in Yup’ik about how things used to be done and how they lived.
“We’ve refined our way of speaking to them over the years, but we gather them together and talk to them about a specific topic,” Rearden said. “We typically record three Elders at a time, guide the discussion with questions, but it’s basically a conversation amongst the Elders.”
Rearden and Meade transcribe all the interviews in Yup’ik, then translate it to English, and provide the English transcripts to Fienup-Riordan, who would work on writing and editing the book from there. Most published books are finalized with one side in English and the opposite side written in Yup’ik.
“It was important to our Elders for us to have bilingual books with Yup’ik and English,” Rearden said. “The vision of the team is led by our Elder council [now the Calista Elders Committee], and they decide what we should highlight in our traditions.”
Some of their latest joint works are Tengautuli Atkuk / The Flying Parka, Yungcautnguuq Nunam Qainga Tamarmi /All the Land’s Surface is Medicine, and Ircenrraat: Other-than-human Persons. Links to the books can be found on the CECI website.
Calista Education & Culture, Inc. is an Alaska Native 501(c)(3) nonprofit charitable organization. CECI’s mission is to celebrate and promote Yuuyaraq, the traditional/cultural way of being in the Calista Region which inspires and encourages our people to achieve their dreams through education. CECI provides scholarships, conducts and publishes cultural preservation research, provides burial assistance, and holds culture camps that facilitate the sharing of traditional knowledge between our Elders and our youth.