Remembering Beringia (page 77)
In the Incan Empire on the Andes, infants were called wawa, and after they were a certain amount of old, for instance at three years of age, a celebration is held and their hair is shorn. It is like that in Cathay. Infants are called wawa, and there are staggered celebrations of their continued aliveness, of their tenacity in the face of infant mortality, and the shaving of the hair they had grown in the womb, literally womb-hair. The celebrations in Cathay come at the close of the first cycle of the moon (month), the first hundred days (three moons), and the first age (year).
I can’t help but be struck by these ancient practices and names for their babies that remember each other in the new world and the old, just as I am struck by the faint but there familiarities in the faces I see, of connections from north Asia eastward across Beringia. A long, long time ago, lost to memory, but kept in the names mothers called their babies, the way fathers cut their new born hair.
Here is an article in Alaska Magazine by Michael Engelhard on modern crossers of the Bering Strait, in both directions:
the German trader Max Gottschalk, channeling the Beringians, mushed from Dezhnev to Shishmaref in 1913, while a companion perished. Gottschalk was wanted for murder. A second sledder chasing him lost both hands to frostbite.