By: Susan A. Kaplan
Eskimos and North American Indians first came to the attention of Europeans ca. A.D. 1000, when the Norse journeyed to the coasts of Greenland and North America. The Norse called the strangers they encountered on the shores “skraelings,” and noted that when skraelings were wounded they turned white but did not bleed (Gad 1971:88). Beginning […]
By: Susan A. Kaplan and Richard H. Jordan and Glenn W. Sheehan
In 1912 William B. Van Valin, an elementary school teacher stationed in Sinuk, Alaska, ushered his students aboard the schooner New Jersey. The class sailed to Sledge Island, or Ayak, a small uninhabited island off the south coast of Seward Peninsula (see map on p. 5), to have a picnic celebrating the end of the […]