Inuit TraditionCoast
Tikiġaq (Point Hope)
The Iñupiaq whaling village on a gravel spit in the Chukchi Sea, northwest Alaska, whose land, in the community's tradition, is the body of a sea creature harpooned by Raven Man.
About Tikiġaq (Point Hope)
An ancient whaling point
Tikiġaq, whose name refers to its shape as a pointing finger, stands on a long spit extending into the Chukchi Sea. People have lived here for well over a thousand years; the nearby site of Ipiutak, excavated around 1940, revealed an extraordinary early Arctic culture, and the village's later history is bound up with the hunting of bowhead whales from the ice edge each spring.
The land as a whale
In Tikiġaq tradition, as told by elders to Tom Lowenstein and published in Ancient Land: Sacred Whale (1993), the land of the point was once a great creature of the sea, harpooned by Tulunigraq, Raven Man; its body became the land on which the village stands. The story ties the community's home to the hunt that sustains it.
Today
Point Hope remains an active Iñupiaq whaling community in the North Slope Borough of Alaska. Coastal erosion has forced the village to move inland from its old site, and the community, like others in the Arctic, faces rapid environmental change.
On the map
Tikiġaq (Point Hope) among other places of the Inuit Tradition.
Sources and further reading
Source notes
These references are recorded in the catalog. Their passage wording and translation have not been checked, so quotations are not displayed here.
- Tom Lowenstein, Ancient Land: Sacred Whale
About this entry
By Elizabeth Stein for Mythos Atlas. About the author. Editorial notes are grounded in the site's cited sources and can be challenged through the contact page.
Coordinates mark where the myths place a site, or where the tradition locates it today. Mythic realms are left off the map or marked as symbolic placements.