Word: tlingits
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: during 1990-1999
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...mythologies of many Native American tribes feature a character known to anthropologists as the trickster. He is both good and bad; a creator but also a mischief maker. Above all, he is duplicitous: joyously, energetically deceptive. Among the Tlingit people of western Alaska, the trickster figure is known as the Raven. At the moment, however, someone bearing a striking resemblance to him is roaming the Ketchikan area under another name...
...best. And as the bath water cools around the islands of his knees, he follows Wilkinson through nearly 100 pages of close observation of a small village called Angoon, burned in 1882 by the U.S. Navy in a bloody-minded show of force. The author does not argue that Tlingit culture before the coming of white men was noble (arguing is not his style), but clearly it was strong and coherent. Now in Angoon, after successive incursions by Russian fishermen, the Navy, Stateside Presbyterian missionaries of ineffable arrogance, and present-day loggers, pickup-truck sellers and fish-and-game regulators...
...dips and rises of the ground at hand, is satisfying but not showy. Observing such deliberate construction can be marvelously soothing, as when Alec Wilkinson, one of the magazine's younger fact writers, lays down a long list of house names toward the beginning of an article on the Tlingit-speaking Native Americans of Admiralty Island, off the mainland of southeast Alaska...