WASHINGTON, D.C., September 4, 2006 – “Ingstad Mountain” is the new name of a 4,880-foot summit near Anaktuvuk Pass in the Gates of the Arctic National Park in Alaska. It is named after Helge Ingstad who lived next to the mountain for nine months during his 1949 to 1950 stay among the Inupiaq Nunamiut Eskimos. Through photographs, film and audio recordings, Ingstad documented their disappearing nomadic life style based on caribou hunting. The Eskimos symbolically “named” the mountain in his honor upon his departure. On April 17, 2006, the U.S. Board on Geographic Names made the name official, only 19 days after the required five year wait since Helge Ingstad’s death.On September 10, the local Eskimo community will host a traditional feast as part of a naming ceremony at Anaktuvuk Pass. Norwegian Ambassador Knut Vollebaek, Helge Ingstad’s daughter Benedicte Ingstad and Helge Ingstad’s grandson Eirik Ingstad Sandberg will attend, as will Robert Sørlie, the 2003 and 2005 winner of the Iditarod Trail Sled Dog Race. Helge Ingstad is most known as the discoverer in 1960 of the Norse settlement at L’Anse Aux Meadows in Newfoundland that eventually established that Vikings had reached and settled in the new world 500 years before Columbus.
In his 1954 book Nunamiut – Among Alaska’s Inland Eskimos, reissued in September 2006, Ingstad recalls the Eskimo elder “naming” the mountain after him: “We were sitting in the tent, talking a little bit about my departure. Paneak said, ‘we will give you the mountain which stands at the beginning of the Giant’s Valley. It shall bear your name and we will remember you. Our people remember such things for many generations’”. Ingstad’s material documenting the traditional Nunamiut Eskimo culture laid the groundwork for a local museum that opened in 1985. Today the Inupiaq Nunamiut have settled down and are increasingly connected to the modern world, examples of a changing way of life throughout the Arctic.
The Royal Norwegian Embassy and the University of Alaska Fairbanks co-host the Helge Ingstad Memorial Symposium on Arctic Change, to be held at the University of Alaska Fairbanks Campus on September 8 – 9, 2006. The symposium will explore a changing Arctic, particularly focusing on the human dimension in the Circumpolar North, through historical and current observations. The symposium is open to the public, but pre-registration is required at www.uaf.edu/ingstad.
Norwegian Robert Sørlie, a keynote speaker at the symposium and two-time winner of the Iditarod race, was introduced to dog-sledding by his hero Helge Ingstad at age nine when he borrowed a husky descended from a dog Ingstad had received from legendary Norwegian Leonhard Seppala. Seppala had covered the longest distance by far in the 1925 dog-sled relay of serum that saved the Eskimo community around Nome, Alaska from a deadly diphtheria epidemic. The dramatic relay is commemorated today by the 1150 mile Iditarod Trail Sled Dog Race. “When I was 11, I bought my first dog, Storm, a Siberian husky from Ingstad. From that point until this day dog-sledding has been my passion,” said Sørlie. Nick-named “the silver fox”, forty-eight year old Robert Sørlie of Team Norway will race his fourth Iditarod in 2007, aiming for his third championship.
Pictures: see links at the bottom
About the symposium: www.norway.org/culture/lectures/ingstadsymposium.htm
Symposium registration: www.uaf.edu/ingstad
Media contact:
Christian Hansson, 202-944-8930 or Trude Paulsson, 202-468-8857 (cell, in Alaska)
HIGH RESOLUTION PHOTOS:
Helge Ingstad and Simon Paneak - Courtesy of the Ingstad Family
Ingstad Mountain - Photo by Grant Spearman