Nunakun-gguq Ciutengqertut/They Say They Have Ears Through the Ground
400 pages, 7 x 10
50 halftones
Paperback
Release Date:01 Sep 2020
ISBN:9781602234123
Nunakun-gguq Ciutengqertut/They Say They Have Ears Through the Ground
Animal Essays from Southwest Alaska
By Ann Fienup-Riordan; Translated by Alice Rearden, Marie Meade, David Chanar, Rebecca Nayamin, and Corey Joseph
University of Alaska Press
Lifeways in Southwest Alaska today remains inextricably bound to the seasonal cycles of sea and land. Community members continue to hunt, fish, and make products from the life found in the rivers and sea. Based on a wealth of oral histories collected over decades of research, this book explores the ancestral relationship between Yup’ik people and the natural world of Southwest Alaska. Nunakun-gguq Ciutengqertut studies the overlapping lives of the Yup’ik with native plants, animals, and birds, and traces how these relationships transform as more Yup’ik people relocate to urban areas and with the changing environment. The book will be hailed as a milestone work in the anthropological study of contemporary Alaska.
Great it is that Fienup-Riordan and her collaborators, with the support of the Calista Education and Culture organization, have brought together what amount to encyclopedias of Yup'ik knowledge, for the benefit of younger generations and the world at large. The value of what can be learned from and about the more-than-human world, especially in a time of change, is matched by lessons in how we all might live more responsibly.
Ann Fienup-Riordan is an anthropologist who has lived and worked in Alaska for more than forty years. She has written and edited more than twenty books on Yup’ik history and oral traditions.
