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Library | Material Type | Shelf Number | Child Count | Shelf Location | Status | Item Holds |
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Searching... Branch | Book | 306.089971 CAR | 1 | Non-fiction Collection | Searching... Unknown | Searching... Unavailable |
Searching... Branch | Book | 917.98 C189 | 1 | Non-fiction Collection | Searching... Unknown | Searching... Unavailable |
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Reviews (4)
Publisher's Weekly Review
This thoroughly researched, engagingly written sociological study puts Kongiganak, Alaska, on the literary map. The dramatic thread of the book is a 1989 summer fishing expedition that Carey, who teaches in Kongiganak, spends with Yupik Eskimos Oscar and Margaret Active. He intersperses regional history and cultural anthropology with the psychology of Oscar's extended family, including older brother Charlie's ``chemical obsession'' with alcohol. A poignant Memorial Day visit to family graves unravels the desperate past; another haunting chapter ends with the gift of Stove Top stuffing for a child's birthday party in exchange for a meal for the Active family. The author explains the intricate process of obtaining and retaining fishing permits and how the ``land of wealth'' maintains its frontier status with ``deep shadows of poverty,'' as Oscar feels an ``iron collar'' of debt when herring fishing barely brings in gas money. Carey brings this world alive with compelling examination of modern mores descended from ancestral values, proving that ``time collapses, accordions together.'' Illustrations not seen by PW. (June) (c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved
Kirkus Review
A compassionate, elegiac, and unsparing account of a way of life that's being irretrievably lost, if not heedlessly destroyed, in one of the remotest regions of the US. Alaska hired Carey shortly after his 1973 Harvard graduation to teach high-school English in Kongiganak, a village near the mouth of the Kuskokwim River in the southwestern corner of the state. Less than two generations ago, this backwater hamlet was far removed from the cash economy's mainstream; its inhabitants survived in their bleak, beautiful environment by dint of subsistence fishing and hunting. Today, the men still go to sea--in manufactured boats, not sealskin kayaks--and they rely on selling their catch to Japanese food-processing ships that hover offshore. The modern world has intruded in other, more damaging ways, e.g., through alcohol, bureaucratic insistence on fishing permits, consumer goods like VCRs or refrigerators, and installment debt. Here, Carey offers an affecting appreciation of an indigenous people, the Yupik Eskimo, who are caught in a sort of 11th-hour time warp between an isolated past and a future that promises only the colder comforts of Western culture. He does so by focusing on the workaday lives of a single couple grappling with sociopolitical and economic forces beyond their control. Without patronizing or romanticizing his subjects, Carey conveys the harsh, desperate realities of their existence--e.g., how the husband's self-esteem depends, frustratingly, on being able to survive on terms established by storied forebears. There's also fascinating detail on Yupik legends and folkways, plus briefings on the role missionaries played in vanquishing shamanism and opening the area to the increasingly dubious benefits of civilization. Engrossing perspectives from a thoroughly engaged observer on Native Americans whose humanity still fits no stereotypical molds. (Maps.)
Booklist Review
Social scientists will compete with novelists, Lionel Trilling foretold four decades ago. Today the social science narrative encompasses academic field notes, just a hint of plot and characterization (as in Tedlock's The Beautiful and the Dangerous, reviewed in this issue), and much redaction. Raven's Children covers a year in the lives of a Yupik couple--schoolteacher Margaret Active and her husband Oscar, a fisherman who is "big, astonishingly so" for an Eskimo, "something over six feet tall, something beyond 260 pounds, most of it square and thick, bone and hard muscle, although in recent years his belt buckle has been safely outside the weather"--who live in Kongiganak along the Kuskokwim River in Alaska. Keenly observant, never tendentious, attentive to history and nature, Carey's evocative, meticulous prose is something more than participant observation, something beyond the realistic novel. Disregarding the confines of academic disciplines, this is an example of the best recent Alaskan literature . ~--Roland Wulbert
Library Journal Review
Carey is a gifted writer who in 1977 began teaching high school English in the Alaskan village of Kongiganak. In his beautifully conceived and written book, he acquaints readers with the Yupiks (the native Eskimos) and their culture--its sophistication, its virtues, and its traditions. Carey brings vividly to life the Yupik shamans and the Moravian missionaries, especially Native American John Kilbuck, and highlights the problems brought about by interlopers. Detailing the Yupiks' economic life, he clarifies the perennial subsistence versus sport (hunting/fishing) debate. The book's lead roles are played by Oscar the fisherman and his wife, Margaret, while the U.S. Bureau of Education and the U.S. Bureau of Indian Affairs are not among its heroes. This masterpiece of life along Alaska's Kuskokwim River is better than any ethnographic study. Every library should own it.-- Katherine Dahl, Western Illinois Univ., Macomb (c) Copyright 2010. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.