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For YK Coast, Winter Solstice Once Meant Bladder Festival To Reunite Seal's Body And Soul

NOAA

Today, as the North Pole tilts its furthest point away from the sun, the Northern Hemisphere enters its shortest day and ends its longest night of the year. In Bethel, that day will stretch five hours and 37 minutes between sunrise at 10:57 a.m. and sunset at 6:34 p.m., according to the U.S. Naval Observatory.

Coastal communities of the Yukon Kuskokwim Delta traditionally celebrated the winter’s shortest day, when there was little or no hunting, with the annual Bladder Festival. Dr. Ann Fienup-Riordan recounts this tradition in her book Boundaries and Passages: Rule and Ritual in Yup’ik Eskimo Oral Tradition.

To celebrate the festival, families inflated seal bladders, which were believed to hold the animals’ souls, and hung them along the entrance and back wall of the men’s house. The positions held a place of honor, and Fienup-Riordan writes, the celebration sought "to reverse the separation of body and soul effected at the time of the seal’s death and to insure the animal’s rebirth in the coming harvest season.” 

After butchering a seal, a hunter’s wife would inflate the animal's bladder and carefully wrap the organ in fish skin sacks for safekeeping until that year’s festival. Accounts differ to the length of the festival. Some say five days; others say fifteen. However long it lasted, ritual filled and dictated the days, and at the end, the men returned the bladders through the ice, reuniting the seal's body and soul.

Anna Rose MacArthur served as KYUK's News Director from 2015-2022.