Reddit reviews Arctic Passages: A Unique Small-Boat Journey Through the Great Northern Waterway

here's a book by a guy who traveled all the way across the north coast of Canada, west to east, using an umiak covered with walrus hide, though he did have an outboard. Here's one by a guy who went from the PNW to Japan across the Bering strait in a single-seater kayak with two outriggers. Neither of them were "anthropologically correct" in the sense that both used the advantages of 20th century navigation and rescue to keep themselves alive, and both took multiple years traveling separate legs of the journey. Still, there are plenty of islands in the Aleutian chain where a traveling group could stop and establish a fishing camp for a few years before continuing. There's no reason to insist that the trip be made in a single season.

The Aleuts continued to trade with the Chukchi well into the nineteenth century using low-tech boats, too. After the Russians arrived, they enslaved "employed" Aleutian baidarshiki to hunt otters for them, and they (the Aleuts) had no trouble mounting raids on Spanish fur stations as far south as San Francisco.

I did, by the way, eventually find diagrams of the long sewn scarf joints the used in the frame. Basically, they were dependent on driftwood to build boats, and if no full-length logs were available, they'd cut two shorter ones, and overlap them by 6 feet so that each one tapered slowly, Then they'd sew them together longitudinally with wet rawhide or whale sinew, which would shrink as it dried, and coat it with rancid seal oil, which would add waterproofing to the sewing and keep it from coming loose.