Robert Redford, Apanuugpak, and the invention of tradition

• Published in: American Ethnologist
• Main Author: FIENUP‐RIORDAN, ANN
• Format: Article in Journal/Newspaper
• Language: English
• Published: Wiley 1988
• Subjects: Anthropology; eskimo*; Yup'ik; Alaska
• Online Access: http://dx.doi.org/10.1525/ae.1988.15.3.02a00020; https://api.wiley.com/onlinelibrary/tdm/v1/articles/10.1525%2Fae.1988.15.3.02a00020; https://anthrosource.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/pdf/10.1525/ae.1988.15.3.02a00020

This paper describes a full‐length feature film in production in the western Alaska village of Toksook Bay. Discussion focuses on the traditional Apanuugpak story cycle and stories of traditional bow and arrow warfare from which the screenplay was developed. It analyzes discrepancies between Yup'ik Eskimo history, as understood by the anthropologist, and as both the scriptwriter and people of Toksook Bay choose to present it in the film. Detail is given on how one of the most dramatic oral accounts from the period of traditional Yup'ik bow and arrow warfare has been used by the filmmaker as a vehicle for denouncing not only warfare, but the concepts of property and territory that lie behind it. Discussion of the filmmaker's reconstruction of the indigenous world leads to a consideration of the anthropologist's reconstruction of a society as well as the natives' reconsideration of their own past. Insofar as the filmmaker's project coincides with the natives' creative re‐formation of their own history, the role of the anthropologist is not to insure “authenticity” in reference to a precelluloid past. Rather, it is to promote open dialogue between the artist seeking new symbols to carry his culture's old meanings and a community seeking new meaning in the symbols of its past.