Yupik New Testament

The Yupic translation project was split from the start. The Bering strait separated the Yupic people and in 1959, when Wycliffe linguists Dave and Mitzi Shinen began their translation assignment to the Yupik-speaking Alaskan Eskimo, they were unable to collaborate with the Siberian Yupiks due to the Cold War being waged between the USSR and the USA. This changed in 1989, when a group of elated Yupiks from Siberia plowed their way through the freezing arctic sea in three walrus-skin boats to be reunited with their relatives at last. During the time of separation, the Siberians had developed a written form of Yupik, just as the Shinens had done with the same language for the St. Lawrence Islanders. But the Siberians, who had learned to read their Yupik written with a Russian Cyrillic alphabet, could not read Yupik written in the Roman alphabet, developed by the Shinens. In 2018, Dave and Mitzi published the New Testament in both alphabets with help from Jim Brase.