When Emmons died in 1945, he left behind a mass of materials for a 65 line drawings, and 127 bandw photos. book on the Tlingit which he had begun as early as the 1880s, when he was stationed in Alaska with the US Navy. Ethnologist and archaeologist Frederica de Laguna has spent 30 years organizing Emmons ethnographic data, notes, drawings, sketches, and manuscripts, and has made significant additions from other sources and her own information, putting the entirety in chronological order, to present this invaluable ethnography of the Northwest Coast. Includes a biography of Emmons by Jean Low, as well as an extensive bibliography, 37 tables, Annotation copyrighted by Book News, Inc., Portland, OR

Haa Kusteeyi, Our Culture: Tlingit Life Stories is an introduction to Tlingit social and political history. Each biography is compelling in its own merit, but when all are taken together, the collection shows patterns of interaction among people and communities of today, and across the generations. By combining historical documents and photographs with accounts gathered from living memory, the book also enables the present, living generations to interact with their past. The book features biographies and life histories of more than 50 men and women, most born between 1880 and 1910, including a special section on the founders of the Alaska Native Brotherhood. Additional lives are described tangentially. Each biography or life history follows a standard format that includes vital statistics, genealogical information, names in Tlingit and English, and major achievements. But each is also unique. Like the lives they describe, all vary in length, detail, and style, depending on authorship and available human and archival resources. To the fullest extent possible oral and written material from the subjects and their families has been incorporated. Some is more anecdotal, some more historical. The appendixes include previously unpublished historical documents and Tlingit texts with facing translations. The lives in this volume show how individual people both shaped and were shaped by their time and place in history.

The Tlingits, the largest Indian group in Alaska, have lived in Alaska's coastal southwestern region for centuries and first met non-Natives in 1741 during an encounter with the crew of the Russian explorer Alexei Chirikov. The volatile and complex connections between the Tlingits and their Russian neighbors, as well as British and American voyagers and traders, are the subject of this classic work, first published in Russian and now revised and updated for this English-language edition. Andrei Val'terovich Grinev bases his account on hundreds of documents from archives in Russia and the United States; he also relies on official reports, the notes of travelers, the investigations of historians and ethnographers, museum collections, atlases, illustrations, and photographs.

In Being and Place among the Tlingit, anthropologist Thomas F. Thornton examines the concept of place in the language, social structure, economy, and ritual of southeast Alaska's Tlingit Indians. Place signifies not only a specific geographical location but also reveals the ways in which individuals and social groups define themselves. The notion of place consists of three dimensions - space, time, and experience - which are culturally and environmentally structured. Thornton examines each in detail to show how individual and collective Tlingit notions of place, being, and identity are formed. As he observes, despite cultural and environmental changes over time, particularly in the post-contact era since the late eighteenth century, Tlingits continue to bind themselves and their culture to places and landscapes in distinctive ways. He offers insight into how Tlingits in particular, and humans in general, conceptualize their relationship to the lands they inhabit, arguing for a study of place that considers all aspects of human interaction with landscape. In Tlingit, it is difficult even to introduce oneself without referencing places in Lingit Aani (Tlingit Country). Geographic references are embedded in personal names, clan names, house names, and, most obviously, in k-waan names, which define regions of dwelling. To say one is Sheet'ka K-waan defines one as a member of the Tlingit community that inhabits Sheet'ka (Sitka). Being and Place among the Tlingit makes a substantive contribution to the literature on the Tlingit, the Northwest Coast cultural area, Native American and indigenous studies, and to the growing social scientific and humanistic literature on space, place, and landscape.

"Based on research in 13 North American archives (including the Penn Museum's Shotridge Collection), examination of hundreds of photographs, and extensive oral-history interviews with both Tlingit and non-Natives, Sharon Bohn Gmelch presents valuable insights on the reactions of Native subjects to being photographed and their own early use of photography. Today, these now historical images are being reclaimed from public archives by the Tlingit, contributing to a new sense of empowerment and pride in their rich heritage." "This is the first book to explore the photographic imagery of the Tlingit during a critical period of change, from the 1860s through the 1920s. It also provides the first full treatment of the Tlingit photography of Elbridge W. Merrill, a neglected figure in the history of ethnographic photography." "The author has included 129 rare photographic images, a map, bibliography, and index."--BOOK JACKET.

In 1993 the Tlingit tribes and clans convened a landmark conference in Haines, Alaska, which brought Native peoples from Alaska and Canada together with scholars of their language, history, and culture to exchange information and develop a collaborative agenda for future research and policy initiatives. This volume represents the fruits of that unique exchange and collaboration. It includes original contributions by Native and non-Native scholars alike on a variety of key topics, including Tlingit historiography, migrations, warfare, kinship and property tenure, language and literacy, ethnogeography and cultural resource management, subsistence, and naming. Bridging past and future, this source book fills an important niche in the literature and is designed especially to be accessible to all students of Tlingit culture.

The Battles of Sitka (1802 and 1804) were seminal events in the history of the Tlingit people, in the multicultural history of Alaska, and, ultimately, in the history of America. Anooshi Lingit Aani Ka / Russians in Tlingit America covers the period from the frist arrival of European and American fur traders in Tlingit territory to the establishment of a permanent Russian presence in the Pacific Northwest, presenting transcriptions and English translations of Tlingit oral traditions recorded almost fifty years ago and translations of newly available Russian historical documents. Although independent in origin and transmission, these accounts support one another to a remarkable degree on the main historical points. The Tlingit-Russian conflict is usually presented as a confrontation between "whites," with superior arms, and brave but outnumbered and poorly armed Natives. Northing could be further from the truth. The Tlingits saw themselves as victors even as they formally ceded to the Russian the site of their village and fort, now known as Sitka. Setting aside ancient rules of story ownership, a new generation of Tlingit clan leaders has decided to publish the stories told by their ancestors so that the Tlingit point of view would be known and succeeding generations would not forget their people's history. Including Russian historical documents, travelers' accounts of informal interactions between the formerly warring parties after the battles, and Dr. W. Schuhmacher's work on the role played by British and American skippers, Anooshi Lingit Aani Ka inquires into and provides some answers to the fundamental question, Who owns history? Photographs of objects now in Russian and American museums - from the favorite battle hammer of Tlingit war chief Katlian to the metal ceremonial hat Baranov commissioned for the peace ceremony - enrich the book, along with portraits of key historical figures and eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century charts of Tlingit territory. Also included is the journal of Dmitrii Tarkhanov, a gazetteer, a glossary, and Tlingit and Russian name lists.

A detailed look at the The Tlingit from their early history to the modern day.

"Mary Beck’s collection of legends from Tlingit and Haida folklore provides an excellent look at not only the mythology but the value and culture of these Southeast Alaska Natives." - Jan O’Meara Homer News Over uncounted generations the Tlingits and Haidas of Southeast Alaska developed a spoken literature as robust and distinctive as their unique graphic art style, and passed it from the old to the young to ensure the continuity of their culture. Even today when the people gather, now under lamplight rather than the flickering glow from the central fire pit, the ancient myths and legends are told and retold, and they still reinforce the unity of the lineage, and clan and the culture. "Mary Beck opens this collection of legends by setting the tradition scene: ‘…It will be a time of feasting, singing, and dancing, of honoring lineages and of telling ancestral stories.’ In this small, beautifully produced volume, enhanced by the wonderful illustrations by Nancy DeWitt, Becks tells nine traditional ancient myths and legends from the oral literature that are authentic for one group or another from this region, including Fog Woman, Volcano Woman, Bear Mother and The Boy Who Fed Eagles." - Bill Hunt Anchorage Daily News