Tikiġaġmiut
Open-knowledge reference entry
The Tikiġaġmiut (Inupiaq: [tikeʁɑɴmiut]), an Iñupiat people, live two hundred miles north of the Arctic Circle, 330 mi (530 km) southwest of Utqiagvik, Alaska, in the village of Point Hope (Inupiaq: Tikiġaq). The Tikigaq are the oldest continuously settled Native American site on the continent. They are Native whale hunters with centuries of experience co-existing with the Chukchi Sea that surrounds the Point Hope cape on three sides. "Tikiġaq" means "resembles an index finger (point of land)" in the Iñupiaq language.
History
About 1,500 years ago, when Tikiġaġmiut first settled the Point Hope area, they did not depend on whale hunting. Instead, early Tikiġaġmiut were notable for producing elaborate and beautiful art in an artstyle called Ipiutak, after the place where archaeologists first found the artwork. But the Tikagaq's past is a present-day mystery with no explanation for where the ideas for the art came from, nor how a large population was sustained during their earliest centuries without whale dependence.
The Tikigaq relied on berries and roots for food, local willows for house frames, and moss or grass for lamp wicks and insulation.
Today, distribution and movement of game, especially the beluga, bowhead whale, caribou, seal, walrus, fur-bearing animals, polar bear and grizzly bear, directly affect the lives of Tikigaq.
Daily life
While ancillary health care is provided by the local volunteer fire department, the closest physician is in Kotzebue, Alaska, 180 mi (290 km) away.
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This entry incorporates text from “Tikiġaġmiut” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.