Honorable mention for the Victor Turner Award for Ethnographic Writing from the Society for Humanistic Anthropology

Honorable mention for the 2008 William Mills Prize for Non-Fiction Polar Books

Survival in the harsh subarctic environment requires great resourcefulness and ingenuity. The Yup'ik people of southwest Alaska meet the challenge by using traditional technology and by following a philosophy that recognizes the personhood of all living things and the environment. Their use of nature's resources is a testament to the mutual respect and generosity that exists between...

Yup'ik elders of southwest Alaska recall, "Our ancestors were never heavy with a tool kit." They carried in their minds what they needed to live rich lives in the harsh environment of the Bering Sea coast. Frank Andrew, Sr. (1917-2006), was one of the few elders to bring this knowledge into the twenty-first century.

Not only did Frank Andrew possess knowledge and wisdom--he shared it. For five years before his death he worked tirelessly with Yup'ik translators Alice Rearden and Marie Meade and anthropologist Ann Fienup-Riordan to document his knowledge of life on the Bering Sea...

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 both 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...

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 both 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...

Ellavut / Our Yup'ik World and Weather is a result of nearly ten years of gatherings among Yup'ik elders to document the qanruyutet (words of wisdom) that guide their interactions with the environment. In an effort to educate their own young people as well as people outside the community, the elders discussed the practical skills necessary to live in a harsh environment, stressing the ethical and philosophical aspects of the Yup'ik relationship with the land, ocean, snow, weather, and environmental change, among many other elements of the natural world.

At every gathering, at...