Word: tlingits
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...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...
Last Thursday marked the first day of what is without question the most widely publicized legal proceeding in Tlingit history. In the 750-person lumber and fishing town of Klawock, Alaska, 12 self-proclaimed tribal judges pondered the fate of two young criminals. The "tribal court" had the trappings of authenticity: the hall had been ritually purified with a "devil's club" branch, and some of the judges wore red and black ceremonial blankets and gestured with eagle and raven feathers. But there were abundant reasons for skepticism, both of the tribunal and the sentence it was likely to mete...
Enter Rudy James. The 58-year-old Klawock native had long ago moved to Washington and married the ex-wife of one of Allendoerfer's colleagues on the bench. At the behest of Roberts' grandfather, he presented himself as a Tlingit tribal judge and suggested an exotic deal. If Allendoerfer bound the boys over to their tribe, they would undergo a traditional Tlingit punishment: banishment on remote, uninhabited islands, while contemplating their sins and hewing logs with which to build Whittlesey a house...
That was prudent, given the information that had already begun leaking out. Although James has no criminal convictions, he has a history of bad debts, and civil court judgments against him have reportedly reached $60,000. Klawock's only federally recognized Tlingit organization, the Klawock Cooperative Association, sent a letter disassociating itself from the case. Sociologists were up in arms. Says Sasha Hughes, author of two books on Native Alaskan heritage and a longtime James observer: "Banishment is not part of Tlingit culture. Rudy is a con man. He just makes it up as he goes along." Adds Aaron Isaacs...
...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...