Marie (Nick) Arnaq Meade (born 1947) is a Yup'ik professor in the humanities and also a Yup'ik tradition bearer. Meade's Yup'ik name is Arnaq which means "woman."[1] She also works and travels with the International Council of Thirteen Indigenous Grandmothers.[2] Meade is also part of the Nunamta Yup'ik Dance Group.[3] Meade has been documenting the cultural knowledge of Yup'ik elders, including the values, language and beliefs of the Yup'ik people for over twenty years.[1] She is currently an instructor at the University of Alaska Anchorage.[4]
Meade was born and raised in Nunapiciaq which is located between the Kuskokwim River and the Bering Sea.[1] It was a small village of about 300 people.[2] Her knowledge of the Yup'ik language and culture came from her father and mother, Upayuilnguq and Narullgiar, and her community.[5] Her parents were strict, and an arranged marriage was a distinct possibility for Meade, one which she was against.[5]
Meade attended the University of Alaska in Fairbanks.[5] In 1970, she was chosen by the community to teach the first bilingual program in the village of Nunapiciaq in conjunction with the Bureau of Indian Affairs.[2] She already spoke Yup'ik fluently, but had to learn to read and write in Yup'ik, which she learned at the Alaska Native Language Institute in Fairbanks.[5] She taught for a year and then moved on to work at the Yup'ik Language Workshop, where she was involved in creating curriculum for Yup'ik language instruction.[5]
Meade met her husband in Fairbanks where he was stationed with the United States Army.[5] They moved to Bethel, where Meade taught Yup'ik at the Kushokwim Community College.[5] She and her husband had two sons together, and it was while she was raising her children that she "discovered the positive energy of Yup'ik dance--much of which had been stamped out by missionaries in the 1960s."[5] She has three grown sons and many grandchildren.[4]
Meade was the replacement speaker at an international conference in Fairbanks taking place in 1990. The anthropologist, Ann Fienup-Riordan, was in attendance and the meeting started "two decades of partnership in the documentation of the Yup'ik culture, language and practices."[5]
Along with Fienup-Riordan, she has worked on cultural exhibits, identified Yup'ik artifacts in Berlin which were collected from Alaska in 1883 and worked on translations together.[5] Mead and Fienup-Riordan created the show, "Agayuliyaraput," a display of Yup'ik masks.[6] The exhibition opened in 1997 in Toksook Bay, and was shown in Anchorage, New York, Washington, D.C., and Seattle.[5] For the work on the Berlin artifacts in the Ethnologisches Museum, Meade translated conversations of Yup'ik elders and worked on a book, Ciuliamta Aklui, Things of Our Ancestors, which documents the art and the words of the Yup'ik elders.[7] Her transcription was described by Arctic as "absolutely excellent, as is the translation: it is literal enough to be helpful in understanding the Yup'ik but free enough to present the substance of the elders' speech without eclipsing their eloquence."[7]
Meade received the Governor's Award for Distinguished Humanities Educator in 2002.[8] Meade was inducted into the Alaska Women's Hall of Fame in 2015.[9] The Hall of Fame recognized her for "achievements in Yup'ik language and culture education."[4]
