p. 2

...The times into which our Fathers were born were very different from our times. Today, we have many things to make survival on this frozen land easier, but our Fathers had only the land and its resources. Survival was more difficult, yet life was more satisfying. And though it is just a few generations past, it is hard for those who are born in these days to imagine what life was like for our fathers.
It wasn't until the end of the 1800's that any white man explored the regions of the Kobuk River where the families of our Fathers lived. During the years of which we speak, no one among our Fathers had ever seen or heard of a white man. They did not know that there were any people different from them. They were Inupiat, which to them meant "the real people."
There was another thing that our Fathers and their families did not know. Our Fathers and their families did not know of someone or something we now call God. Their religion, as we would now call it, had been the teachings of the shamans. But the shamans did not speak of a God; they spoke only of spirits who enforced their will. And it was only the shamans who could receive mystical powers to control these spirits.
No one had ever talked to our people of another power. No one had ever talked of a God.
In these days of our Fathers there were among them many shamans. Some were good shamans: seers, and teachers, and healers. These shamans used the things they knew and the power they held to better the lives of our Fathers and their families. They removed the harmful spirits that caused disease, and calmed the spirits that caused the storms to rage. But many were bewitching shamans. In days of great sickness, the shamans came to the people and told them the reasons that many were sick and the reasons that many would die. They sometimes said that the people had angered the spirits. They told the people the things they must do to end the sickness and to stop death from coming to their families.
When the shamans told our Fathers the things they should do, they would do them. When the shamans told our Fathers the ways they should live and what they should eat and where they should hunt, that is what they did. When one on whom a shaman had invoked blessings was later healed, our Fathers honored and thanked the shaman. However, such blessings often came at a great cost: choice foods, supplies, even the favors of their daughters.
When one who had been blessed did not recover, our Fathers believed it was because that person had not obeyed the shamans. And their fear would grow stronger.

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