A descendant of the King Island community, OSU anthropologist Deanna Kingston leads a team documenting the island's natural and cultural history. (Photo courtesy of Deanna Kingston)

King Island, a two-and-a-half-mile long garrison of rock jutting up out of the Bering Sea, is now uninhabited. But Native Americans lived there for centuries and created a rich culture that still survives among the King Island community on the mainland. Kingston is interviewing native elders from the community as part of a National Science Foundation-funded effort to document the cultural ecology, biogeography and the traditional ecological knowledge of the island.

“All I was looking for was just a list of names,” she told an audience May 2 at Oregon State University’s Center for the Humanities, “but whenever they talked about a particular name they told a story about it.”

An anthropologist, Kingston saw those stories as research questions.

“We’re going with the assumption that if they created folklore about it, that bird must have been important in some way to the people,“ she said. “Why it is important is the question I want to answer.”

Crested and least auklets, King Island (Photo: Kim Nelson)

To help her, Kingston brought in Kim Nelson, an ornithologist with the OSU Department of Fisheries and Wildlife. Nelson was excited because the King Island colonies of auklets, murres and kittiwakes had not been previously studied. “It’s a significant colony,” she said. “It has hundreds of thousands of birds. Nobody has done any research on the island.”

Most of the academic literature concerning the island’s wildlife has to do with the walrus and seals that the islanders hunted. But the stories that Kingston documented showed that the migrating seabirds living on the island from spring to fall also played a large part in the lives of the inhabitants.

Spring brings seabirds and a welcome respite from a diet of marine mammals. King Islands ate both the meat and the eggs of birds. So happy were the islanders to see the first arrival, the snowbird, that stories about them credit the birds with creating people.

Similarly, cormorants, the last birds to leave in the fall, also feature prominently in King Island stories.
Kingston and Nelson documented these stories along with the native bird names and colony place names and created a guide to the birds of King Island.

Kingston is conducting a similar effort on the island’s flora with OSU biologist Jesse Ford. She hopes to include fisheries and marine mammals if funding will allow.

Kim Nelson is co-author of an online book, Guide to the Birds of King Island (Photo courtesy of Kim Nelson)

For Nelson, the experience changed how she will work in the future. Nelson told the audience that involvement with local indigenous peoples will be part of her approach to new study sites from now on. “Ornithologists hunted for Marbled Murrelet nests for a hundred years,” she said. It wasn’t until after they were located in coastal old-growth forests that scientists found artwork by local Indians showing the birds nesting in trees, not the offshore cliffs where ornithologists had been looking.

“They knew,” she said, “but nobody bothered to ask them.”

Finally someone is bothering to ask.

On May 13, 2011, Kingston and Nelson gave a talk on their King Island research at the Traditional Ecological Knowledge in Ecosystem Sustainability Conference at OSU.

Deanna Kingston, OSU Dept. of Anthropology (photo taken in 2006)

The official launch of the King Island Place Name website Monday afternoon in the Memorial Union was the culmination of a decade of research led by OSU anthropologist Deanna Kingston, whose ancestors were among the walrus hunters who once populated the now-deserted Alaskan island.

The personal and professional magnitude of the project came to life as the site was projected on a screen before a gathering of colleagues, family members, students and friends. An interactive map of the tiny island in the Bering Sea was dotted with nearly 200 place names that have been collected and documented by researchers working with elder natives who grew up on the island. Audio clips let users hear native speakers pronouncing the words in a dialect of Inupiaq. The site also features a gallery of thousands of photos documenting the plants and birds native to this place where tusked pinnipeds were hunted for centuries on massive ice floes during winter months. The work was supported by the National Science Foundation.

Kinsgton’s mother, son and uncle were on hand to celebrate the site’s unveiling, as were a legion of students and collaborators. Kingston, who wore a jaunty hat in place of the hair she has lost during her battle with breast cancer, choked up when she thanked the people who have worked with her tirelessly to save the linguistic and geographic history of this unique place.

“I told myself I wasn’t going to cry,” Kingston said, smiling sheepishly. “I guess I should just cry and get it over with.”

You can view the website at www.kingislandplacename.com.

Read “The Ice Sages,” a 2007 Terra story about the King Island community and Kingston’s research.