Kwigillionok

Day Three: Saturday, July 14, 2012, Kwigillionok, or Kwig for short. We were met at the airport by our tribal village contact, Emma, a wonderful soft-spoken lady with a 4WD vehicle. She provided us with transportation from the airport to the opposite side of town, expertly steering her vehicle along the boardwalks, not even slowing when other 4-wheelers sped past on the narrow wooden paths. In Kwig, the boardwalks are in much better condition than those we saw in Newtok; this town is not threatened, and appears to be thriving in a combination of traditional and modern ways.

Our fieldwork finished, Emma returned to give us a lift to the village store, which doubles as a workshop for a family of traditional kayak builders. Bill, the patriarch of the family, was kind enough to show us around. The tour included a look at his father-in-law's hand-built model, a boat Bill constructed for his son, and one that was built from a grant by the National Park Service and is a museum-quality example of a traditional Inuit boat. The ribs are constructed of drift wood, collected along the water's shores from forests a hundred miles away, and hand formed with knives and teeth. The skin of the boat is seal skin, lashed with seal skin cured in urine and and caulked with a paste made of moss. Everything is done by hand with local materials, down to the paint, made of a paste from local blue or red stones. Bill also showed us paddles, harpoons, and hand-made knives, all of which I would have loved to buy, none of which could I afford. Instead, we purchased the book his father-in-law wrote, which details how to build a traditional kayak and has wonderful pictures of the family building the boat.