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Ernest S. Burch, Jr. The Inupiaq Eskimo Nations of Northwest Alaska Fairbanks: University of Alaska Press, 1998. xviii + 473 PP. Illustrations, maps, tables, notes, bibliography, index. Cloth, $49.95.
In Behind the Trail of Broken Treaties: An Indian Declaration of Independence (1974), Lakota legal activist Vine Deloria Jr. argued that the limited land bases and small populations of most Native American tribes did not preclude their status as autonomous nations. Ernest S. Burch Jr., a cultural anthropologist and social historian, writes with a different purpose but reaches similar conclusions in The Inupiaq Eskimo Nations of Northwest Alaska. Based on three decades of research, including four years of fieldwork in the Kotzebue region, this exhaustive work of salvage ethnography charts the social geography of eleven Eskimo groups during the nineteenth century. Until roughly the 1880s, Burch contends, these societies "were analogous to countries, or nations, in the modern world, but at the hunter-gatherer level of complexity" (8).
Although the text spans fourteen chapters and seven appendices, readers expecting a detailed defense of this thesis will have to wait for the companion volume Burch plans to write. His primary purpose here is to describe the early historic borders, environments, populations, and subsistence cycles of the Inupiat peoples of northwestern Alaska. The enormity of that task matches the vastness...