Paul Silook, also known as Koneak, was born at Gambell, St. Lawrence Island, Alaska, sometime in September 1892. Largely taught by watching others, Paul Silook grew up trading for supplies, fishing for Auklets, and hunting for seal, walrus, and other local wildlife. As an adult he apprenticed to a reindeer herder for less than a year, worked as an assistant teacher and later as translator, transcriber, boat captain, and general handyman. He married Miriam shortly before 1919. They had 7 living children, a miscarriage, and a still-born. At age 73 he managed to kill his first whale. (Leighton & Leighton, 1983)

Paul Silook is best known for his anthropological work on St. Lawrence Island. Paul Silook gathered data on the Bering Strait and northern Alaska from 1912 to around 1945. After he became a man by shooting his first polar bear, and before 1922, Paul Silook first began assisting Otto Geist in his archaeological field-work on St. Lawrence Island. During these years Paul Silook assisted other researchers and scientists such as Henry Collins, and Froelich Rainey. Paul Silook was an avid recorder of the stories, traditions, and life and times of his village as well as those around him. His granddaughter, Suzie Silook, reported that he wrote “over 1,000 pages. All the rituals, how they were conducted, how animal spirits were treated … He wrote a 200 page autobiography for Alex Leighton at Cornell, he did most of the ethnographic detail work for Otto Geist at the University of Alaska” (Dunham, 1997, p. E5). During the Great Depression he wrote to Henry Collins at the Smithsonian expressing his desire to keep the St. Lawrence Island excavations going without the expense of continued chartered flights to Alaska, stating, “If I am satisfactory to you … you would not have to send a white man” (p. E5). The offer was not considered. His collections can be found at the Natural History Museum of the Smithsonian Institution, the University of Alaska Fairbanks's Alaska and Polar Regions Collections, and the Alaska State Historical Library.

Information from: Dunham, M. (1997, January 12). Silook’s Legacy. Anchorage Daily News, pp. E1, E5.

Leighton, A. H., & Leighton, D. C. (1983). Koneak’s Story. In Eskimo Recollections of Their Life Experiences. Northwest Anthropological Research Notes, 17(1/2), 107-199. [This biography can be found at the Alaska State Library Historical Collections. Call Number: E78.N77N67]