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“This novel brilliantly explores the lives of one bloodline of Alaskan women struggling to make a home for themselves in a small fishing community.” —Devin Murphy, national-bestselling author of Tiny Americans In 1939, everything changes for Anne Girl when outsider John Nelson grounds his sailboat on the shores, into Anne Girl’s skiff, and into her life during a rare storm in the Alaskan fishing village of Nushagak. When Anne Girl and her mother Marulia find their skiff flattened by John’s boat, Anne Girl decides she both hates and wants him. Thus begins a generational saga of strong, stubborn Yup’ik women living in a village that has been divided between the new and the old, the...
This fable of an indigenous Arctic people “offers profound considerations about stewardship of and people’s relationships to the natural world” (Publishers Weekly). Nau cannot remember a time when she was not one with the world around her: with the fast breeze, the green grass, the high clouds, and the endless blue sky above the Shingled Spit. But her greatest joy is to visit the sea, where whales gather every morning to gaily spout rainbows. Then one day, she finds a man in the mist where a whale should be: Reu, who has taken human form out of his Great Love for her. Together these first humans become parents to two whales, and then to mankind. Even after Reu dies, Nau continues on, s...
Menadelook showcases nearly one hundred photographs taken by the Inupiat photographer Charles Menadelook that document life in Wales in the Bering Strait between Alaska and Russia, in the early 1900s. Photographs of Inupiat life in the early twentieth century are rare, and photographs taken by an indigenous person are nearly nonexistent. These photographs provide a unique view into the Inupiat world during the early twentieth century and give both a pictorial and Native perspective on Inupiat traditions and historical events.
Longlisted for the 2018 Scotiabank Giller Prize Shortlisted for the 2019 Amazon First Novel Award Shortlisted for the 2019 Kobo Emerging Writer Prize Winner of the 2019 Indigenous Voices Award for Published Prose in English Winner of the 2018 Alcuin Society Awards for Excellence in Book Design – Prose Fiction Longlisted for the 2019 Sunburst Award From the internationally acclaimed Inuit throat singer who has dazzled and enthralled the world with music it had never heard before, a fierce, tender, heartbreaking story unlike anything you've ever read. Fact can be as strange as fiction. It can also be as dark, as violent, as rapturous. In the end, there may be no difference between them. A gi...
Nursed back to health by Arctic aborigines, a Canadian sailor finds his loyalties torn between his new people and the life he left behind—a novel full of “passion, strength, and beauty of a world we . . . have never understood” (Farley Mowat) John MacLennan, a Canadian sailor is left behind by his ship, stranded on the northeastern tip of Siberia. Having had his hands amputated, crippled with little hope of returning home, the Chukchi community decides to adopt this wounded stranger and teaches him to live as a true human being. From thinking of Chukchi as savages, John comes to know his new companions as real people who share the best and worst of human traits with his own kind. He be...
These linked essays form a memoir exploring the American outback from eastern Oregon horse trails to the arctic and subarctic river towns of Alaska. In Mostly Water, Alaska-based journalist and nature writer Mary Odden shares a series of personal essays celebrating the beauty and independent spirit of America’s remote and rural Northern spaces. In these landscapes, human dwellers are entwined in histories and anecdotes as loopy as northern rivers. Odden invites the reader to a vivid patchwork of characters and seldom-seen places, with a soundtrack from fiddle dances and a menu that is “half potlatch and half potluck.” Each essay features a recipe for a traditional regional dish, such as mincemeat, creamed salmon, and lingonberry sauce. As the stories unfold, events of the churning twenty-first century rise like the sea—as does a love of human togetherness and the precious otherness of nature.
Winner of the 2021 AHA John H. Dunning Prize Longlisted for the 2020 Cundill History Prize Named a Best Book of the Year by Nature, NPR, Library Journal, and Kirkus Reviews "A monument to a people and their land… an allegory of the world we have created." —Sven Beckert, author of Pulitzer Prize finalist Empire of Cotton: A Global History Floating Coast is the first-ever comprehensive history of Beringia, the Arctic land and waters stretching from Russia to Canada. The unforgiving territories along the Bering Strait had long been home to humans—the Inupiat and Yupik in Alaska, and the Yupik and Chukchi in Russia—before American and European colonization. Rapidly, these frigid lands and waters became the site of an ongoing experiment: How, under conditions of extreme scarcity, would modern ideologies of capitalism and communism control and manage the resources they craved? Drawing on her own experience living with and interviewing indigenous people in the region, Bathsheba Demuth presents a profound tale of the dynamic changes and unforeseen consequences that human ambition has brought (and will continue to bring) to a finite planet.
In Mostly Water, essays form a linked memoir that explores the American outback from eastern Oregon horse trails to the arctic and subarctic river towns of Alaska. In these landscapes, Native people and later-comers are entwined in histories as loopy as northern rivers. Odden invites the reader to a vivid patchwork of characters and seldom-seen places, with a soundtrack from fiddle dances and a menu "half-potlatch and half-potluck." In Mostly Water, readers will hear dance music ring through little towns and watch as friends conspire to stoke the fires and fading memories of an old pioneer. The danger of giving birth takes a crooked path through a mystical elk hunt on its way to the miracle ...
Fierce Climate, Sacred Ground is an ethnographic account of the impacts of climate change in Shishmaref, Alaska. In this small Iupiaq community, flooding and erosion are forcing community members to consider relocation as the only possible solution for long-term safety. However, a tangled web of policy obstacles, lack of funding, and organizational challenges leaves the community without a clear way forward, creating serious questions of how to maintain cultural identity under the new climate regime. Elizabeth Marino analyzes this unique and grounded example of a warming world as a confluence of political injustice, histories of colonialism, global climate change, and contemporary development decisions. The book merges theoretical insights from disaster studies, political analysis, and passages from field notes into an eminently readable text for a wide audience. This is an ethnography of climate change; a glimpse into the lived experiences of a global phenomenon.--(Source of description unspecified.)