Apanuugpak

Apanuugpak is the great warrior-hero of Yup'ik oral history, a figure of the bow-and-arrow war era that reached from roughly the fourteenth to the early nineteenth century across the Yukon-Kuskokwim delta and Nelson Island. Story cycles recount his extraordinary skill and near-invulnerability in the raiding and feuding of that time, and, at their close, his conviction that warfare was a futile and wasteful thing, so that he turned the people away from fighting. The Yup'ik themselves classify the Apanuugpak narratives as qanemcit, accounts of the more recent, historical past, distinguishing them from the qulirat, the ancient tales of the mythic world. Ann Fienup-Riordan gathered and studied these traditions over decades of fieldwork; the cycle also drew wider notice when it became the basis of an unrealized film project.

Domains

• warfare
• legendary heroism

Powers

• prevail in bow-and-arrow warfare
• turn the people away from war

Sources

• Apanuugpak is a legendary Yup'ik warrior of the Kuskokwim and Nelson Island region during the era of bow-and-arrow warfare, remembered for his prowess and for finally convincing communities that war was futile; his stories are classed as qanemcit (historical narrative) rather than qulirat (ancient myth).: Ann Fienup-Riordan, 'Robert Redford, Apanuugpak, and the Invention of Tradition', American Ethnologist 15(3) (1988): 442-455 (secondary); Ann Fienup-Riordan, Anguyiim Nalliini / Time of Warring: The History of Bow-and-Arrow Warfare in Southwest Alaska (University of Alaska Press, 2016) (secondary)