Athapaskan Matriliny And Trade In Canada And Alaska

Why did native hunters in the wilds of northern B.C, the Yukon and Alaska trace their ancestry through the mother’s side of the family? The author has given a definitive answer to this question which has long puzzled scholars and others.

In this book, lexical reconstruction is used to provide links between cultural and social anthropology and linguistics in Athapaskan languages and dialects.

Over 3900 entries (through June 1984) on the ethnology, linguistics, prehistory, and human biology of the Athapaskan speaking (Dene) Indians of Canada and Alaska and the Metis of the Canadian subarctic. Incorporates and replaces the 1973 edition.

The great expanse of Arctic and Sub-Arctic lands that stretch across the northern edge of the American continent is as difficult and demanding to human beings as any in the world. The Athapaskan-speaking Indians who made it their home never captured the imagination of popular writers as did the Eskimo who lived on their northern borders and the Plains Indians who lived to the south. Except to anthropologists, the Athapaskans have remained in relative obscurity, known intimately only to the missionaries, the traders and trappers, and the prospectors who invaded their forbidding territory. VanStone has captured the elements of the basic adaptive strategy by which these Indians mastered their intransigent environment and made it their home over many centuries, and in doing so, he has perhaps also found the reasons why they have not had as much impact on Western thought as other Native Americans. The Plains Indians, with the blood and thunder of their raidings, the individual drama of their vision quests, appealed to that part of our culture that was forged on the frontier where both action and isolation were primary qualities. The Eskimos, with their elaborate technology for extracting a livelihood from the Arctic ice appealed to Yankee ingenuity. Athapaskan culture was of a different order--less dramatic, but no less adaptive. Northern lands are not richly endowed with sustenance for human life. These adaptations have not only required proficiency with tools and techniques for exploiting this difficult habitat, but also the creation of institutions for collaboration in these endeavors. Hunters and Fishermen of the Arctic Forests illuminates this relatively obscure area of the world and brings it, and the cultures it supported, into the context of modern anthropological research. James W. VanStone was curator emeritus of North American Archaeology and Ethnology and chairman of the department of anthropology at the Field Museum of Natural History in Chicago. He is the author of numerous books and articles including Point Hope: An Eskimo Village in Transition, Kijik: An Historic Tanaina Indian Settlement, and Eskimos of the Nushagak River: An Ethnographic History.