This book is the first life history of a Northwest Coast Indian woman. Florence Davidson, daughter of noted Haida carver and chief Charles Edenshaw, was born in 1896. As one of the few living Haida elders knowledgeable bout the culture of a bygone era, she was a fragile link with the past. Living in Masset on the Queen Charlotte Islands, some fifty miles off the northwest coast of British Columbia, Florence Davidson grew up in an era of dramatic change for her people. On of the last Haida women to undergo the traditional puberty seclusion and an arranged marriage, she followed patterns in...

This is the life history of the daughter of Asianggataq, an Eskimo woman, and her husband Charles Bower, the first white settler in Alaska's northernmost community of Barrow. One of ten children, Sadie Brower was raised with a mixture of Inupiat and white traditions. Sent Outside for modern schooling, she returned to Barrow to use her education on behalf o her people. Now in her seventies, she has devoted a lifetime to public service, first as a Bureau of Indian Affairs schoolteacher, than as a health aide, a foster parent, a welfare worker, and, for twenty years, as Barrow's magistrate....