Paper short abstract:

The Beringian crossroads has long served as a passageway between Asia and North America. Folkloristic materials such as creation myths and migration narratives from the Aleut, Athabaskan, and Inuit peoples help illuminate the geographical dimensions of the human migration through Beringia.

Paper long abstract:

The traveling museum exhibition "World on the Move: 100,000 Years of Human Migration" (anticipated to open in 2021) makes clear that people have always been on the move, and that migration is a shared human experience that connects us all. Geography plays a central role in the exhibition, particularly through the use of four key crossroads—defined as intersections where people from different places meet and where consequential decisions are made about moving. One of those crossroads is Beringia, which has long served as a passageway between the continents of Asia and North America. Under very different environmental conditions from today, Native peoples crossed Beringia by land and by sea to places all along the Pacific Coast of the Americas.

This paper will utilize the discipline of folkloristics to better understand the geographical dimensions of the human migrations through Beringia. The focus will be an analysis of creation myths and migration narratives among the Aleut, Athabaskan, and Inuit peoples—much of which was collected by anthropologists and folklorists in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. These folkloristic materials supplement and complement other forms of anthropological and geographical evidence, such as what has been gathered through archaeological and linguistic investigations. The folkloristic materials offer rich resources for illuminating the shared humanity of the prehistoric and protohistoric peoples at the Beringian Crossroads.