"In a sense, I felt I grew up among the Nunamiut.” It took Dr. Benedicte Ingstad, daughter of explorer and author Helge Ingstad, 18 years before she finally met the people whose picture her father had drawn so vividly in his 1951 book, “Nunamiut: Among Alaska’s Inland Eskimos.” Yet, in more ways than one, the then-23-year-old had the feeling she already knew the Eskimo people as she stepped onto Alaskan soil in 1968. “Perhaps an unavoidable result of so many stories told throughout my childhood,” Ingstad speculates. Even though Helge Ingstad appeared to be an ordinary dad to his young daughter, it is clear that family life among the Ingstads might have been a little out of the ordinary, muchly due to Helge’s ever-returning adventurousness. “But this was how he made a living for his family, and we got used to it,” Dr. Ingstad recalls.
While arctic Alaska was rapidly embracing modernity at the time of Benedicte Ingstad’s arrival, her father encountered different conditions in 1949, when he stepped off a bush plane that had taken him to the eastern shore of Tulugak Lake. There is something fairytale-like and fascinating in his description of his first encounter with the Nunamiute people, with whom he was to tie such strong bonds with over the next nine months:
“I landed, and met smiles and curious looks from hunters, women, and a pack of children of all ages. I greeted each of them separately. They were tall, strong people with the wiry agility characteristic of mountain dwellers. Open, friendly faces; gleaming white teeth. The children crowded round me without shyness and chattered away in Eskimo with boldness. They were all dressed in caribou-skin anoraks, splendidly edged with the skin of wolf and wolverine.”
The Ingstads were on vacation in California in 1949 when Helge decided to take a quick detour to Alaska, leaving his wife, Anne Stine, and daughter with his brother, who at the time served as consul general in San Francisco. When Helge Ingstad returned, his mind was made up: He was going to spend three quarters of a year – including the arduous winter months with average temperatures as low as -8F – with the Nunamiut, a 65-person community of hunters and gatherers of the north-central Brooks Range. “I don't think mom was too happy about his decision, especially since they’d only been married for five or six years. But off he went,” his daughter remembers.
Helge brought data and photographs back to Norway in 1950 that later proved invaluable to the scientific community as well as the Nunamiut themselves, and, not least, an outline for a new addition to an already rich body of literary work. As Grant Spearman notes in the preface of the newly released commemorative edition of the book, “his work quite literally brought these remarkable people to the attention of the world” According to Benedicte Ingstad, the Nunamiut’s own appreciation of Helge’s work, was what made this particular book take on a special meaning for the author himself. “Together with The Land of Feast and Famine and The Apache Indians: In Search Of The Missing Tribe, Nunamuit made up the core of his authorship,” she said.
“That this long-out-of-print book is being republished is a great event for the family. Hopefully people will appreciate it as much as they did when it was initially released back in 1951,” Ingstad said. She believes Spearman’s foreword adds another dimension to her father’s book. “While the book for the most part is a travelogue from passed times, his preface will provide answers for readers who’re interested in learning about my father’s life – both before and after his visit to Alaska – and how Nunamiut society has evolved.”