Customer Reviews

Neets'aii Gwiindaii: Living in the Chandalar Country

5 star:		(0)
4 star:		(1)
3 star:		(0)
2 star:		(0)
1 star:		(0)

 

 

Neets'aii Gwiindaii: Living in the Chandalar Country

The significance of this work is that it is written in the Gwich'in language (Interior Alaska)and one of the author's longest pieces. The text is both in the original Gwich'in language and translated in English on the opposing page. It's a quick read in English, 72 pages in double spaced text as it follows the oral tradition. Katherine Peters tells of her life after she marries and covers about ten years through the birth of four of her eventual eight children.

They live a subsistence lifestyle moving frequently following caribou, hunting moose and sheep as well as fishing according to the seasons. She travels with various relatives and their families, camping along the way. There are years of abundance and years of famine. She is the first of her people to travel in an airplane. Their lives consist of hunting, fishing, gathering firewood, dancing, traveling usually by walking with dogs packing their goods, and encountering hardships along the way, as well as friends from the surrounding villages who share food with her. Various people turn ill and died in the narrative and she looses one of her children in infancy. It's a simple lifestyle and a simple narrative, written fairly matter of fact without much emotion. It ends rather abruptly.

The Introduction helps explains more of her life and explains what happens to her after the book ends. Many pages of period photos of the villages and various people mentioned in the story are included as well a map at the ends showing the various place they visited and lived.