The story
King Island — Ukivok — stands a mile of cliff-walled rock in the Bering Sea off Alaska's Seward Peninsula, and photographs of its village are among the North's most arresting: houses on driftwood stilts stitched to the cliff face, where the Aseuluk, the King Island Iñupiat, lived by walrus, seal and birding with extraordinary skill until government school closure and pressure moved the community to Nome by the mid-twentieth century — a relocation the community did not choose freely, and a homeland King Islanders return to, maintain ties with, and hold as their own; the stilt houses weather on the cliff, and the island's stories, spiritual dimensions included, belong to the King Island community, spoken of here with respect and no appropriation. Any account of presences on Ukivok is theirs to give. The island is remote, hazardous and not visited without community sanction — stated plainly and absolutely. Present King Island as living Iñupiat heritage: a homeland interrupted, not a ruin; a community's story, not a curiosity.