Did Pele Get His Start Here?

Click on the map for a larger view.

The village of Point Hope is on a spit, which separates the Arctic Ocean and the Chuckchi Sea. It is the most westerly point reached by the continental shore line north of Kotzebue Sound.

The Iñupiaq call Point Hope, Tigara, a word for the index finger when extended, as that is what the land formation resembles. The old village site is near the point of that spit; the current site is closer to the "fat" part of the land. Just to the east of the village is Jabbertown.

Now, Jabbertown has an interesting history. As Stevie related to us, the commercial whalers had made their way up to Alaska, finding the waters yielded a much more abundant harvest in a fraction of the time it took them to fill their quota as they traveled out of San Francisco, Seattle and other ports. 

However, because they had to wait for the sea ice to melt in order to make their trip North, they missed much of the more fruitful hunting season. So, they decided to move whaling crews up North so they'd already be on site when the whales came through. The whaling crews consisted of a conglomeration of nationalities: Russian, Japanese, EuroAmerican, German, etc. Think about what the mixture of these various languages must have sounded like and you can figure out how the site got its name.

The Jabbertown inhabitants built their sod houses out of driftwood. The Tigaramiut (Point Hopers (miut means people) built their sod houses out of whale bone. As you may expect, you can still see some remnants of the whale bone houses, but the driftwood from the other houses is long gone.

Anthropologists have discovered that in this area, the sod houses had a number of rooms (sometimes 10 or 12) as opposed to the single "family" room in which cooking, eating, and sleeping occurred in the sod houses on the old village site. One could speculate that more people lived in each of these sod houses than in the sod houses in the old village, but I don't think we can prove that. Maybe more than one family at a time lived in these houses, maybe they were more like bunkhouses for whaling crews, rather than for families.

For recreation, the Jabbertown residents and the Point Hopers in the old village played soccer. You will have to try to imagine what this game was like. It was not a soccer field as we know it today. This soccer field was 7 (yes seven) miles long. We speculate that they played a game until someone scored. That was a long way to run, after all, and no way to score within the designated time period we have today. It makes sense that you just played until one of the teams scored. Must have been a heck of a game to watch from the sidelines. The spectators probably got as much exercise as the players (if there were spectators).