From its roots in the 17th century through the turbulence of the Revolutionary War, the Three Village community of New York has faced the challenge of maintaining its own identity in a constantly shifting world.

People are often able to identify change agents. They can estimate possible economic and social transitions, and they are often in an economic or social position to make calculated—sometimes risky—choices. Exploring this dynamic, A Tale of Three Villages is an investigation of culture change among the Yup’ik Eskimo people of the southwestern Alaskan coast from just prior to the time of Russian and Euro-North American contact to the mid-twentieth century. Liam Frink focuses on three indigenous-colonial events along the southwestern Alaskan coast: the late precolonial end of warfare and raiding, the commodification of subsistence that followed, and, finally, the engagement with institutional religion. Frink’s innovative interdisciplinary methodology respectfully and creatively investigates the spatial and material past, using archaeological, ethnoecological, and archival sources. The author’s narrative journey tracks the histories of three villages ancestrally linked to Chevak, a contemporary Alaskan Native community: Qavinaq, a prehistoric village at the precipice of colonial interactions and devastated by regional warfare; Kashunak, where people lived during the infancy and growth of the commercial market and colonial religion; and Old Chevak, a briefly occupied “stepping-stone” village inhabited just prior to modern Chevak. The archaeological spatial data from the sites are blended with ethnohistoric documents, local oral histories, eyewitness accounts of people who lived at two of the villages, and Frink’s nearly two decades of participant-observation in the region. Frink provides a model for work that examines interfaces among indigenous women and men, old and young, demonstrating that it is as important as understanding their interactions with colonizers. He demonstrates that in order to understand colonial history, we must actively incorporate indigenous people as actors, not merely as reactors.

This work has been selected by scholars as being culturally important, and is part of the knowledge base of civilization as we know it. This work was reproduced from the original artifact, and remains as true to the original work as possible. Therefore, you will see the original copyright references, library stamps (as most of these works have been housed in our most important libraries around the world), and other notations in the work. This work is in the public domain in the United States of America, and possibly other nations. Within the United States, you may freely copy and distribute this work, as no entity (individual or corporate) has a copyright on the body of the work. As a reproduction of a historical artifact, this work may contain missing or blurred pages, poor pictures, errant marks, etc. Scholars believe, and we concur, that this work is important enough to be preserved, reproduced, and made generally available to the public. We appreciate your support of the preservation process, and thank you for being an important part of keeping this knowledge alive and relevant.

In this volume Mr. Howells has collected three short pieces which show his power under various aspects. The pleasantest and in a literary sense the best of the three is the charming paper on 'Lexington,' originally contributed to Longman's Magazine. It is distinguished by that happy faculty of description, that sure artistic eye, and that genial spirit which constitute so much of the fascination of his larger works; flashes of characteristic humor surprise us in its delicate pages; and it has all that strong individual flavor which makes the best writing of Mr. Howells so different from the rest of the good writing which is getting to be abundant in books. The second village in his collection is the Shaker settlement of 'Shirley.' If Lexington was a theme for a dainty literary exercise, Shirley served him rather for a plain and sympathetic account of a community which he seems to have regarded with a tender interest. The quiet and simple tone of the paper is in perfect accord with the life it portrays. The story of the Moravian Indian settlement of 'Gnadenhütten,' on the Muskingum, and the brutal massacre by which the white frontiersmen blotted it out in 1782, is vigorously told in the last chapter of the book, where Mr. Howells shows his skill in tragic narrative rather than description.