Inupiat Pins and Buttons
Description: MAX's True Detective Season 4 brings its audience to Alaska after a group of scientists mysteriously vanished. What is the true TSALAL meaning in True Detective Season 4? In Hebrew, the word "TSALAL" was used in the Old Testament to say "to be, to become, or to grow dark." In the literary industry, the first English writer to have gained notoriety for using this word was Edgar Allan Poe. He used the word in his 1838 story, entitled The Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym of Nantucket. In the story, Tsalal was the name of the mysterious Antarctic island that a group of violent and cannibalistic natives inhabited. This story was later continued by Julius Verne, 50 years after Poe died in his 1897 story, entitled An Antarctic Mystery.
Description: During the gold prospecting period of the early 1900s, non-Natives named the village north of the Nome Census Area in Alaska "Mary's Igloo," after an Inupiat woman named Mary, who welcomed miners, trappers and others into her home for coffee. During that period, Mary's Igloo was a transfer point for supplies for the gold fields upriver on the Kuzitrin and Kougarok rivers. The supplies were offloaded from ocean boats onto barges, which were towed to their destinations. A post office and store were opened at Mary's Igloo in 1901. By the 1910 census, Mary's Igloo was a community of 141 Inupiat and Anglo-Americans, who were miners, innkeepers, missionaries and support crews for the barges. It had schools, a post office and other services.
