Anthropologist at the Kitchen Table : RAVEN’S CHILDREN; An Alaskan Culture at Twilight <i> By Richard Adams Carey (Houghton Mifflin/A Richard Todd Book: $19.95; 377 pp.)</i>

We are seldom at a loss for words when describing an unfamiliar culture like that of the Yupik Eskimos portrayed here: “traditional lifestyle” or “subsistence hunting and fishing,” we say, confidently and with a trace of condescension.

But after living on and off since 1973 in Kongiganak, a small coastal town in the Alaskan subarctic, Richard Adams Carey came to realize that terms like these fail to capture an entirely separate “mode of being; a character of mind and social interaction that Western culture has historically dismissed as naive, but whose ambitions are simply distinct from the needs or desires that produced Western cultures and artifacts. The essence of this mode to those who stand outside it is as elusive as smoke, or it wouldn’t be so casually discounted.”

A Harvard graduate who became the principal of Kongiganak’s high school, Carey attempted to stand inside the culture by accompanying his native friends Oscar and Margaret Active throughout one summer fishing season. The result is intellectually brilliant, often heartbreaking--and possibly a little shady from an ethical point of view.

Documenting private sufferings and failures with an outsider’s clarity makes for fascinating reading, of course, but is it fair? I honestly don’t know. In my writing I’ve sometimes played the spy, too. The best way to write about real people is to take notes on them. And yet, what if everyone else is taking notes on them, too?

The Canadian Inuit have a bitter joke about this: The average Arctic family, they say, numbers five: a husband, a wife, two children and the resident anthropologist. There is something very sad about a resident alien writing reports on people for the other aliens back home. Still, Carey mostly does respect and care about the Active family, and “Raven’s Children” could not have achieved its goal in any other way. So does the end justify the means here? Probably.

Carey portrays a three-cornered war among Moravian missionaries, Russian Orthodox priests and native shamans. In effect, it’s the same sad story as the conversion of Canada’s Amerindians by the French in the 1600s.

The basic point should surprise no one. “A culture is being lost in the icy graves of the old men,” wrote Richard K. Nelson in his “Hunters of the Northern Ice,” and just about every other study of Native Americans says the same. For his part, Carey focuses on the various political and economic mechanisms by which the Eskimos in Kongiganak are being disfranchised. Consider, for instance, commercial-fishing permits. Subsistence hunting and fishing continues to play an important role in Kongiganak, not only because store-bought food is more expensive and less healthy but also because one of the traditional ways of keeping the community together is to share wild food.

Nonetheless, the Active family is busy leaving the subsistence economy behind, so Oscar and Margaret find themselves in serious debt. When you’ve traded dogs for snowmobiles, when you like to drink whiskey now and then, when you want a powerboat, then you’re stuck in the cash economy. But how is someone in Kongiganak to get cash? One thing that people up North used to do for money was fur-trapping.

Thanks to well-meaning naifs in the “animal rights” movement and Greenpeace (in my visits to Canada and Greenland, I’ve never met an Inuit who didn’t despise the latter organization), trapping is pretty much finished except for subsistence. That’s one reason why there is so much unemployment, alcoholism and suicide in the North. Carey doesn’t talk about trapping at all, probably because the summer fishing season is not the best time to trap animals (summer furs aren’t as warm), but also, I suspect, because it’s not much of a money-maker in Kongiganak, either.

For someone who wants to make a living in at least a semi-traditional way, that leaves commercial fishing. To do that, you need a special permit. These permits are transferable and in one person’s name. That means that a fisherman lucky enough to receive one will have to make the hard choice of which son to give it to. Oscar Active’s father solves the problem by selling his permit out of the family.

Because Oscar was fishing during the two years when the U.S. Department of Fish and Game established the permit system, he was awarded a permit, too. But he spiraled into debt one day and sold it to a white woman. Now, whenever Oscar wants to catch fish to sell to the Japanese, he has to coax his brother Charlie to come along. Charlie still has a permit, but drinks a lot and might sell his at some point, too. The end result is that more and more of the locals in Kongiganak are losing their birthright. Sport fishermen are buying up all the permits.

The story gets worse. When Oscar goes out to catch herring, the processing ships only want the roe. And the roe is all that Oscar is paid for. “Twenty bucks,” he says when he comes back, speaking evenly and without emotion: for 378 pounds of herring; for six hours on Kinak Bay in hard weather, and for 10 gallons of gas, this costing a little more than $2 per gallon. Oscar’s wife Margaret is a secretary at the high school, and it is a humiliation to this man who is still partly of the hunter tradition that her earnings are essential to support the family.

I’ve often thought that the only way to preserve the North would be to banish all non-natives except those who were given permission by the locals to stay. Of course, not only is such a fantasy politically absurd but it’s also insufficient. The Japanese trawlers that respect the 200-mile offshore boundary can still suck up a significant percentage of the fish migrating to Kongiganak. The world is simply too small.

So what is there to do, really? Carey has no solutions to suggest. I don’t know if there are any. Obviously the commercial-licensing procedures could be improved, but that won’t matter when the fish populations continue to dwindle.

In the Canadian Arctic there are still a few tiny outpost camps, but most people live in towns now because most people want to live in towns. One old man in Resolute Bay told me that he would be glad to live in the original way but that his grandchildren were too softened by central heating: They’d die. I take it from Carey’s book that living on the land isn’t even a hypothetical option any more in Kongiganak.