"One of Alaska's premier ethnographers, Robert A. McKennan (1903-1982) spent the years between 1929 and 1933 in several remote Native villages where he documented Interior Athabaskan life in a series of books and journals. McKennan's journals are a window onto Athabaskan culture before World War II. While McKennan's two major ethnographies - on the Tanana and the Gwich'in (Kutchin) - represent the scientific aspects of his work, his voluminous letters and journals form an equally significant part of anthropology's humanistic tradition." "McKennan chronicles both his day-to-day struggles to survive in the Alaska wilderness and his frustrations as an anthropologist. He recorded his field methods and the difficulties he encountered in pursuing his research. The result is a personal memoir of a dedicated researcher and sensitive observer."--BOOK JACKET.

Hospital and Haven tells the story of an Episcopal missionary couple who lived their entire married life, from 1910 to 1938, among the Gwich’in peoples of northern Alaska, devoting themselves to the peoples’ physical, social, and spiritual well-being. The era was marked by great social disruption within Alaska Native communities and high disease and death rates, owing to the influx of non-Natives in the region, inadequate sanitation and hygiene, minimal law enforcement, and insufficient government funding for Alaska Native health care. Hospital and Haven reveals the sometimes contentious yet promising relationship between missionaries, Alaska Natives, other migrants, and Progressive Era medicine. St. Stephen’s Mission stood at the center of community life and formed a bulwark against the forces that threatened the Native peoples’ lifeways and lives. Dr. Grafton (Happy or Hap) Burke directed the Hudson Stuck Memorial Hospital, the only hospital to serve Alaska Natives within a several-hundred-mile radius. Clara Burke focused on orphaned, needy, and convalescing children, raising hundreds in St. Stephen’s Mission Home. The Gwich’in in turn embraced and engaged in the church and hospital work, making them community institutions. Bishop Peter Trimble Rowe came to recognize the hospital and orphanage work at Fort Yukon as the church’s most important work in Alaska.

Living Our Cultures, Sharing Our Heritage: The First Peoples of Alaska features more than 200 objects representing the masterful artistry and design traditions of twenty Alaska Native peoples. Based on a collaborative exhibition created by Alaska Native communities, the Smithsonian's National Museum of Natural History, the Smithsonian's National Museum of the American Indian, and the Anchorage Museum at Rasmuson Center, this richly illustrated volume celebrates both the long-awaited return of ancestral treasures to their native homeland and the diverse cultures in which they were created. Despite the North's transformation through globalizing change, the objects shown in these pages are interpretable within ongoing cultural frames, articulated in languges still spoken. They were made for a way of life on the land that is carried on today throughout Alaska. Dialogue with the region's First Peoples evokes past meanings but focuses equally on contemporary values, practices, and identities. Objects and narratives show how each Alaska Native nation is unique—and how all are connected. After introductions to the history of the land and its people, universal themes of “Sea, Land, Rivers,” “Family and Community,” and “Ceremony and Celebration” are explored referencing exquisite masks, parkas, beaded garments, basketry, weapons, and carvings that embody the diverse environments and practices of their makers. Accompanied by traditional stories and personal accounts by Alaska Native elders, artists, and scholars, each piece featured in Living Our Cultures, Sharing Our Heritage evokes both historical and contemporary meaning, and breathes the life of its people.

The great expanse of Arctic and Sub-Arctic lands that stretch across the northern edge of the American continent is as difficult and demanding to human beings as any in the world. The Athapaskan-speaking Indians who made it their home never captured the imagination of popular writers as did the Eskimo who lived on their northern borders and the Plains Indians who lived to the south. Except to anthropologists, the Athapaskans have remained in relative obscurity, known intimately only to the missionaries, the traders and trappers, and the prospectors who invaded their forbidding territory. VanStone has captured the elements of the basic adaptive strategy by which these Indians mastered their intransigent environment and made it their home over many centuries, and in doing so, he has perhaps also found the reasons why they have not had as much impact on Western thought as other Native Americans. The Plains Indians, with the blood and thunder of their raidings, the individual drama of their vision quests, appealed to that part of our culture that was forged on the frontier where both action and isolation were primary qualities. The Eskimos, with their elaborate technology for extracting a livelihood from the Arctic ice appealed to Yankee ingenuity. Athapaskan culture was of a different order--less dramatic, but no less adaptive. Northern lands are not richly endowed with sustenance for human life. These adaptations have not only required proficiency with tools and techniques for exploiting this difficult habitat, but also the creation of institutions for collaboration in these endeavors. Hunters and Fishermen of the Arctic Forests illuminates this relatively obscure area of the world and brings it, and the cultures it supported, into the context of modern anthropological research.