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evening sitdown
Your evening longread: An Alaskan island that humans keep trying to conquer
It’s a coronavirus-free zone as we bring you an interesting longread each evening to take your mind off the news.
EVERY WEEK, WE bring you a round-up of the best longreads of the past seven days in Sitdown Sunday.
And now, every weeknight, we bring you an evening longread to enjoy which will help you to escape the news cycle.
We’ll be keeping an eye on new longreads and digging back into the archives for some classics.
St Matthew Island is the most remote place in Alaska. And though humans have tried to ‘conquer’ it, they keep failing.
(Hakai Magazine, approx 13 mins reading time)
The Unangan, or Aleut, people from the Aleutian and Pribilof Islands to the south tell a story of the son of a chief who discovered the then uninhabited Pribilofs after he was blown off course. He overwintered there, and then returned home by kayak the following spring. The Yup’ik from St. Lawrence Island to the north have a similar story, about hunters who found themselves on a strange island, where they waited for the opportunity to walk home over the sea ice. Griffin believes something similar may have befallen the people who dug this house, and they sheltered here while waiting for their chance to leave. Maybe they made it, he will tell me later. Or maybe they didn’t: “A polar bear could have gotten them.”
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