WOMEN’S HISTORY MONTH: fossil records, ravens, and layering with dg nanouk okpik
This week we feature Alaskan poet dg nanouk okpik (b. 1966). Born in Anchorage, okpik is Inupiaq, Inuit, though she was raised by a white adoptive family. She’s taught at the Institute of American Indian Arts and served as resident advisor for the Santa Fe Indian School. Her most recent collection blood snow was a finalist for the 2023 Pulitzer Prize in Poetry. The poems featured here are drawn from her first collection, corpse whale, published in 2012 by University of Arizona Press as part of the Sun Tracks series. Sun Tracks was established in Tuscon in 1971 to highlight the creative work – writing as well as visual arts – of Native Americans. corpse whale won an American Book Award and the May Stanton Award.
In his foreword to corpse whale, Arthur Sze highlights the layering of time in okpik’s poems, and suggests a “visionary quest” for some eternal element at the core of the work: “Past, future, and present co-exist, and this underlying conception of time strengthens the mythical elements in her work.”
Speaking with Southeast Review after the release of blood snow, okpik explains Sze’s profound influence on her own work – she studied with him at the Institute of American Indian Arts – and the way her poetics is shaped and layered by such influences, as well as her travels: “my diction is a composite of these travels and many stories told. It is comprised of beauty and the agony of man’s struggles. In eight types of symbolism that come naturally to me. I let the writing speak for itself.”
View other posts on Natives American/First Nation Women Writers.
The narwhal (Monodon monoceros), is a medium-sized toothed whale that, along with the beluga whale is one of two living species of whale in the Monodontidae family. It lives year-round in the Arctic waters around Greenland, Canada, and Russia. The most conspicuous characteristic of the male narwhal is a single long tusk, a canine tooth that projects from the left side of the upper jaw, through the lip, and forms a left-handed helix spiral. A tusk grows throughout life, reaching a length of about 5-10 feet in length. It is hollow and weighs around 22 pounds. About one in 500 males has two tusks, occurring when the right canine also grows out through the lip. Only about 15 percent of females grow a tusk, which typically is smaller than a male tusk, with a less noticeable spiral. Collected in 1684, there is only one known case of a female growing a second tusk.
The narwhal’s name is derived from the Old Norse word nár, meaning "corpse", in reference to the animal's greyish, mottled pigmentation, like that of a drowned sailor and its summer-time habit of lying still at or near the surface of the sea (called "logging"). The scientific name, Monodon monoceros, is derived from the Greek: "one-tooth one-horn".
Found primarily in Canadian Arctic and Greenlandic and Russian waters, the narwhal is a uniquely specialized Arctic predator. In winter, it feeds on benthic prey, mostly flatfish, under dense pack ice. During the summer, narwhals mostly eat Arctic cod and Greenland halibut, with other fish such as polar cod making up the remainder of their diet. Each year, they migrate from bays into the ocean as summer comes. In the winter, the male narwhals occasionally dive up to 1,500 m (4,920 ft) in depth, with dives lasting up to 25 minutes. Narwhals, like most toothed whales, communicate with "clicks", "whistles", and "knocks".
The tusk is an innervated sensory organ with millions of nerve endings connecting seawater stimuli in the external ocean environment with the brain. he rubbing of tusks together by male narwhals is thought to be a method of communicating information about characteristics of the water each has traveled through, rather than the previously assumed posturing display of aggressive “male-to-male rivalry“. In August 2016, drone videos of narwhals surface-feeding in Tremblay Sound, Nunavut showed that the tusk was used to tap and stun small Arctic cod, make them easier to catch for feeding. The tusks are surrounded posteriorly, ventrally, and laterally by several small vestigial teeth which vary in morphology and histology. The varied morphology and anatomy of small teeth indicate a path of evolutionary obsolescence, leaving the narwhal's mouth toothless.
Narwhals normally congregate in groups of about five to ten, and sometimes up to 20 outside the summer. Groups may be "nurseries" with only females and young, or can contain only post-dispersal juveniles or adult males ("bulls"), but mixed groups can occur at any time of year. In the summer, several groups come together, forming larger aggregations which can contain from 500 to over 1000 individuals.
Narwhals can live up to at least 50 years. Mortality often occurs when the narwhals suffocate after they fail to leave before the surface of the Arctic waters freeze over in the late autumn. Entrapment can affect as many as 600 individuals, most occurring in narwhal wintering areas such as Disko Bay. In the largest entrapment in 1915 in West Greenland, over 1,000 narwhals were trapped under the ice. Narwhals can also die of starvation.
Almost all modern predation of narwhals is by humans. Other predators are polar bears, which attack at breathing holes mainly for young narwhals, Greenland sharks and walruses. Killer whales (orcas) group together to overwhelm narwhal pods in the shallow water of enclosed bays, in one case killing dozens of narwhals in a single attack. To escape predators such as orcas, narwhals may use prolonged submergence to hide under ice floes rather than relying on speed.
Narwhals are one of many mammals that are being threatened by human actions. They are considered to be near threatened and several sub-populations have evidence of decline. In an effort to support conservation, the European Union established an import ban on tusks. Many other countries have quotas on catches, which will be important also in newly opening areas caused by decreasing sea ice cover.
In Inuit legend, the narwhal's tusk was created when a woman with a harpoon rope tied around her waist was dragged into the ocean after the harpoon had struck a large narwhal. She was transformed into a narwhal, and her hair, which she was wearing in a twisted knot, became the characteristic spiral narwhal tusk.
Some medieval Europeans believed narwhal tusks to be the horns from the legendary unicorn. As these horns were considered to have magic powers, such as neutralizing poison and curing melancholia, Vikings and other northern traders were able to sell them for many times their weight in gold. The tusks were used to make cups that were thought to negate any poison that may have been slipped into the drink. During the 16th century, Queen Elizabeth I received a carved and bejewelled narwhal tusk worth 10,000 British Pounds—the cost of a castle (the equivalent of approximately £1.5–2.5 million in 2007) from Sir Humphrey Gilbert, who proposed the tusk was from a "sea-unicorne".
SPACE NARWHAL! It’s like a regular narwhal but sparkly and he swims through stars and stuff. BTW; did you know that “narwhal” is old Norse for “corpse whale”? Apparently to Vikings they looked like the bloated corpses of humans buried at sea!
dg nanouk okpik's book of poems, corpse whale is a refreshing and thoughtful look into liminality. It explores the topics of adoption and of existing between two cultural worlds through both words and form, questioning the concepts of self, meaning, and linearity. Simultaneously lovely and othering/othered, it is certainly worth the read.
