Qaluyaarmiuni Nunamtenek Qanemciput / Our Nelson Island Stories

Meanings of Place on the Bering Sea Coast

Translated by Alice Rearden
Edited by Ann Fienup-Riordan

• $50.00s paperback (9780295991351) Add to Cart
• hardcover not available

• Published: August 2011
• Subject Listing: Native American Studies, Environmental Studies
• Bibliographic information: 496 pp., bilingual text, 97 illus., 2 maps, 7 x 10 in.
• Territorial rights: World
• Published with: Calista Elders Council, Anchorage
• Contents

Recipient of a 2012 American Book Award from the Before Columbus Foundation

In this volume Nelson Island elders describe hundreds of traditionally important places in the landscape, from camp and village sites to tiny sloughs and deep ocean channels, contextualizing them through stories of how people interacted with them in the past and continue to know them today. The stories provide a rich, descriptive historical record and detail the ways in which land use has changed over time.

Nelson Islanders maintained a strongly Yup'ik worldview and subsistence lifestyle through the 1940s, living in small settlements and moving with the seasonal cycle of plant and animal abundances. The last sixty years have brought dramatic changes, including the concentration of people into five permanent, year-round villages. The elders have mapped significant places to help perpetuate an active relationship between the land and the people who continue to rely on the fluctuating bounty of the Bering Sea coastal environment.

Alice Rearden is the primary translator for the Calista Elders Council. She translated Paitarkiutenka / My Legacy to You by Missaq / Frank Andrew, Sr., among other bilingual works. Ann Fienup-Riordan is the author of many books on the Native peoples of Alaska, including Yuungnaqpiallerput / The Way We Genuinely Live: Masterworks of Yup'ik Science and Survival.