"This dissertation explores the verbal arts of the Ayaginar (Nicholas A Charles) family. These verbal arts are expressed in the Yupiaq language. This dissertation focuses on the world-view of a contemporary Yupiaq family and is specific and illustrative rather than exhaustive and extensive. The personal lens through which the family sees and expresses their culture defines Yuuyaraq (The Way of the Human Being), the central overarching guiding life principle of the Yupiaq. The verbal arts explored and analyzed emanate from the life experiences and remembrances of the family. The reader is first situated within the realm of the Yupiaq world, seeing the natural terrain bounded by the ocean, the sky, and the landscape, the Yup'iat (real human beings), and their cultural ecology in order to more fully comprehend the meaning of the family's verbal arts. This study is not an attempt to develop universals but to conduct micro-level inquires in the transmission of religious and cultural knowledge that exist in one family. This study comes out of Religious Studies and follows an integrated approach of Native American Religious Studies developed by Dr. Inés Talamantez of the University of California in Santa Barbara that borrows research methodologies from several disciplines. In this particular case, methodologies from religious studies, ethnography, folklore, orality and literacy from cultural anthropology and linguistics will be utilized. The format of this dissertation is written in the Yupiaq style of narration and remembering, a non-linear circular process. This dissertation reclaims indigenous knowledge and theory. In conclusion, Yupiaq ontology and epistemology as defined by the worldview of the Ayaginar family have their own theories and rhetorical categories and has a self-evident philosophy of its own. These theories and rhetorical categories are best defined in their own linguistic and cultural contexts. To do otherwise would be to recreate the Ayaginar family in the image of the other"--Leaf x