You may have to Search all our reviewed books and magazines, click the sign up button below to create a free account.
The Middle Tanana Valley in Alaska remains one of the most important regions of the continent for archaeological research. In The Gift of the Middle Tanana: Dene Pre-Colonial History in the Alaskan Interior, Gerad Smith explores the history, ethnography, and archaeological record of the Native people in this region during the late Holocene. Smith creates an interpretive framework informed by Alaskan Native traditions, focusing on traditional place names and the deep-play rituals of reciprocity. Smith sets forth the case that the local themes and oral traditions of the potlatch are better understood not as singular ceremonial events but as a mechanism of regional social cohesion that dictated everyday life. The Gift of the Middle Tanana illustrates how the role of reciprocal deep-play shaped a traditional society that has lasted over a thousand years.
This volume focuses on how landscape is represented in language and thought and what this reveals about the relationships of people to place and to land. -- Back cover.
In Telling Animals, Jasmine Spencer offers a comparative yet personal approach to Dene/Athabaskan stories, both Northern and Southern. It examines the animating effects of animal stories, the transformative power of animacies in Dene stories, and the effects of narrative revitalization through animal grammar. It takes as its first premise the teachings of many Elders, who have shared that the stories are alive. Jasmine Spencer's comparative approach combines literary, linguistic, anthropological, and philosophical theories and methods using a deictic framework for closely reading the stories in both their Dene languages and in English translation. The narrative epistemologies enacted by Dene stories counterbalance many of the ethical problems inherent within Euro-Western approaches to ontology and experience. These stories revive those who listen and read, offering hope.
Linguistic and Genetic (mtDNA) Connections between Native Peoples of Alaska and California: Ancient Mariners of the Middle Holocene traces the linguistic and biological connections between contemporary Aleut people of southwest Alaska and historic Utian people of central California. During the Middle Holocene Period, Aleut and Utian languages diverged from their common parent language, Proto-Aleut-Utian (PAU), spoken by people who resided on or near Kodiak Island in coastal southwest Alaska. Around the time of divergence, Utians departed the PAU homeland, migrating by watercraft along the eastern Pacific coast to the San Francisco Bay Area. The affiliation between Aleut and Utian languages i...
Witsuwit'en is an endangered First Nations language spoken in western-central British Columbia. A member of the Athapaskan family of languages, the language had been known to have some intriguing characteristics of consonant-vowel interaction, the details of which have been in dispute among scholars. Witsuwit'en Grammar presents acoustic studies of several aspects of Witsuwit'en phonetics, including vowel quality, vowel quantity, ejectives, voice quality, and stress. Information about the sound system and word structure of Witsuwit'en is also provided, revealing many unusual features not previously described in this level of detail for an Athapaskan language. Witsuwit'en has elaborate morphology, even by the standards of the Athapaskan language family. Witsuwit'en Grammar will be of interest to anthropologists interested in the history of the Athapasakan language family, linguists interested in comparative Athapaskan grammar, or any linguist interested in phonetics-phonology or phonology-morphology interaction.
A Grammar of Upper Tanana, Volume 1 provides a linguistically accurate written record of the endangered Upper Tanana language. Serving as a descriptive grammar of Upper Tanana, the book meticulously details a language that is currently fluently spoken by approximately fifty people in limited parts of Alaska’s eastern interior and Canada’s Yukon Territory. As part of the Dene (Athabascan) language group, Upper Tanana embodies elements of both the Alaskan and Canadian subgroups of Northern Dene. This is the first comprehensive grammatical description of any of the Alaskan Dene languages. With the goal of preserving a language no longer consistently taught to younger generations, Olga Lovic...
None
"The program that ultimately developed in response to Section 14(h)(1) of the Alaska Native Claims Settlement Act (ANCSA) ... result[ed] in the largest and most diverse single collection of information ever compiled about the history and cultures of Alaska Natives ... Through this publication the Bureau of Indian Affairs seeks to both increase public awareness of this important program, and offer a glimpse of the valuable information the agency maintains concerning Alaska history and the traditions of Alaska Native peoples."--Ed. preface.
This handbook provides broad coverage of the languages indigenous to North America, with special focus on typologically interesting features and areal characteristics, surveys of current work, and topics of particular importance to communities. The volume is divided into two major parts: subfields of linguistics and family sketches. The subfields include those that are customarily addressed in discussions of North American languages (sounds and sound structure, words, sentences), as well as many that have received somewhat less attention until recently (tone, prosody, sociolinguistic variation, directives, information structure, discourse, meaning, language over space and time, conversation structure, evidentiality, pragmatics, verbal art, first and second language acquisition, archives, evolving notions of fieldwork). Family sketches cover major language families and isolates and highlight topics of special value to communities engaged in work on language maintenance, documentation, and revitalization.