For the Yup'ik people of southwestern Alaska, masked dancing has long been a focal point of ceremonial activity. Performed traditionally inside the qasaiq (communal men's house) during festivals, the dances feature face and finger masks that make visible the world of helping spirits and extraordinary beings, and are specially made to tell particular stories. Although masks are infrequently used today, elders still remember their powerful presence and increasingly appreciate them as touchstones of cultural pride - as agayuliyararput, "our way of making prayer". Often used by shamans to facilitate communication and movement between worlds (human and animal, the living and the dead), Yup'ik masks usually were discarded after use. Specimens first found their way into museum collections via nineteenth-century traders and collectors working along the Yukon and Kuskokwim rivers, and soon were displayed internationally. The Living Tradition of Yup'ik Masks brings together masks from museum and private collections all over the world and presents them in their native context. Ann Fienup Riordan describes the natural world of southwestern Alaska and the rich ceremonial life that evolved there to acknowledge and honor the many beings that made possible the sustenance of human life in a precariously balanced environment. Chapters arranged geographically describe the world's major Yup'ik mask collectors and collections and the circumstances that made each unique. The voices of Yup'ik elders are present throughout the text, recounting stories, describing traditional Yup'ik life, and responding to particular masks.

Organized through a collaboration among Yup'ik elders of southwestern Alaska, the Anchorage Museum of History and Art, and the Anchorage Museum Association, the Agayuliyararput (Our way of making prayer) exhibit features more than 200 masks from international collections. The masks are displayed in the context of dance performances, ceremonies, the stories they tell, and the complex cosmology of the Yup'ik people who created them.

The Yupiit in southwestern Alaska are members of the larger family of Inuit cultures. Including more than 20,000 individuals in seventy villages, the Yupiit continue to engage in traditional hunting activities, carefully following the seasonal shifts in the environment they know so well. During the twentieth century, especially after the construction of the trans-Alaska oil pipeline, the Yup'ik people witnessed and experienced explosive cultural changes. Anthropologist Ann Fienup-Riordan explores how these subarctic hunters engage in a "hunt" for history, to make connections within their own communities and between them and the larger world. She turns to the Yupiit themselves, joining her essays with eloquent narratives by individual Yupiit, which illuminate their hunting traditions in their own words. To highlight the ongoing process of cultural negotiation, Fienup-Riordan provides vivid examples: How the Yupiit use metaphor to teach both themselves and others about their past and present lives; how they maintain their cultural identity, even while moving away from native villages; and how they worked with museums in the "Lower 48" on an exhibition of Yup'ik ceremonial masks. Ann Fienup-Riordan has published many books on Yup'ik history and oral tradition, including Eskimo Essays: Yup'ik Lives and How We See Them, The Living Tradition of Yup'ik Masks and Boundaries and Passages. She has lived with and written about the Yupiit for twenty-five years.

Living Our Cultures, Sharing Our Heritage: The First Peoples of Alaska features more than 200 objects representing the masterful artistry and design traditions of twenty Alaska Native peoples. Based on a collaborative exhibition created by Alaska Native communities, the Smithsonian's National Museum of Natural History, the Smithsonian's National Museum of the American Indian, and the Anchorage Museum at Rasmuson Center, this richly illustrated volume celebrates both the long-awaited return of ancestral treasures to their native homeland and the diverse cultures in which they were created. Despite the North's transformation through globalizing change, the objects shown in these pages are interpretable within ongoing cultural frames, articulated in languges still spoken. They were made for a way of life on the land that is carried on today throughout Alaska. Dialogue with the region's First Peoples evokes past meanings but focuses equally on contemporary values, practices, and identities. Objects and narratives show how each Alaska Native nation is unique—and how all are connected. After introductions to the history of the land and its people, universal themes of “Sea, Land, Rivers,” “Family and Community,” and “Ceremony and Celebration” are explored referencing exquisite masks, parkas, beaded garments, basketry, weapons, and carvings that embody the diverse environments and practices of their makers. Accompanied by traditional stories and personal accounts by Alaska Native elders, artists, and scholars, each piece featured in Living Our Cultures, Sharing Our Heritage evokes both historical and contemporary meaning, and breathes the life of its people.

Drawing on the remembrances of elders who were born in the early 1900s and saw the last masked Yup’ik dances before missionary efforts forced their decline, Agayuliyararput is a collection of first-person accounts of the rich culture surrounding Yup’ik masks. Stories by thirty-three elders from all over southwestern Alaska, presented in parallel Yup’ik and English texts, include a wealth of information about the creation and function of masks and the environment in which they flourished. The full-length, unannotated stories are complete with features of oral storytelling such as repetition and digression; the language of the English translation follows the Yup’ik idiom as closely as possible. Reminiscences about the cultural setting of masked dancing are grouped into chapters on the traditional Yup’ik ceremonial cycle, the use of masks, life in the qasgiq (communal men’s house), the supression and revival of masked dancing, maskmaking, and dance and song. Stories are grouped geographically, representing the Yukon, Kuskokwim, and coastal areas. The subjects of the stories and the masks made to accompany them are the Arctic animals, beings, and natural forces on which humans depended. This book will be treasured by the Yup’ik residents of southwestern Alaska and an international audience of linguists, folklorists, anthropologists, and art historians.

This book brings together as complete a record of traditional Yupik rules and rituals as is possible in the late twentieth century. Incorporating elders' recollections of the system of ruled boundaries and ritual passages that guided their parents and grandparents a century ago, Ann Fienup-Riordan brings into focus the complex, creative Yupik world view - expressed by ceremonial exchanges and the cycling of names, gifts, and persons - which continues to shape daily life in communities along the Bering Sea coast. Her analysis is illustrated with many contemporary and historical photographs. Identifying "metaphors to live by, " Fienup-Riordan tells of "the Boy Who Went to Live with Seals" and "the Girl Who Returned from the Dead." She explains how in Yupik cosmology their stories illustrate relationships among human beings, animals, and the spirit world - the "boundaries and passages" between death and the renewal of life.

Re-Imagining Nature: Environmental Humanities and Ecosemiotics explores new horizons in environmental studies, which consider communication and meaning as core definitions of ecological life, essential to deep sustainability. It considers landscape as narrative, and applies theoretical frameworks in eco-phenomenology and ecosemiotics to literary, historical, and philosophical study of the relationship between text and landscape. It considers in particular examples and lessons to be drawn from case studies of medieval and Native American cultures, to illustrate in an applied way the promise of environmental humanities today. In doing so, it highlights an environmental future for the humanities, on the cutting edge of cultural endeavor today.

Norwegian adventurer Johan Adrian Jacobsen collected more than two thousand Yup'ik objects during his travels in Alaska in 1882 and 1883. Now housed in the Berlin Ethnological Museum, the Jacobsen collection remains one of the earliest and largest from Alaska’s Yukon-Kuskokwim Delta. When Ann Fienup-Riordan first saw the collection being unpacked in 1994, she was "stunned to find this extraordinary Yup'ik collection, with accession records still handwritten in old German script and almost completely unpublished." In 1997, Fienup-Riordan and Yup'ik translator Marie Meade returned to Berlin with a delegation of Yup'ik elders to study Jacobsen's collection. Yup'ik Elders at the Ethnologisches Museum Berlin recounts fourteen days during which the elders examined objects from the collection and described how they were made and used. Their descriptions, based on oral history and firsthand experience with similar objects, are imparted through songs, stories, and personal narratives. Woven together with Jacobsen’s writings, technical descriptions, and accession information, the narrative presents a vast array of knowledge. For example, Jacobsen had observed that large grass mats were woven for use as sleeping mats in houses and were often taken on journeys; a Yup’ik elder demonstrates how the grass mat would be folded and fitted into a kayak. Another elder describes a dance in which fox masks similar to those in the collection were used. Yet another elder, inspired by a carving of a paalraayak, launches into a story about the creature, which was sometimes encountered in the mountains near her home. An introductory essay describes Jacobsen's life and trip to Alaska and the region as it was then and as it is today. Informal snapshots show the elders interacting with the objects and miming their use, while Barry McWayne's large color photographs make possible the "visual repatriation" of this extraordinary collection. Yup'ik Elders at the Ethnologisches Museum Berlin also includes extensive notes summarizing accession information, a glossary of Yup'ik object names, and a detailed index. This is the first time a major Arctic collection has been presented from the Natives' point of view, an example of "reverse fieldwork" that can enrich understanding of Native American collections the world over.

'Chew On This' reveals the truth about the the fast food industry - how it all began, its success, what fast food actually is, what goes on in the slaughterhouses, meatpacking factories and flavour labs, the exploitation of young workers in the thousands of fast-food outlets throughout the world, and much more.

Before it was written, this book was spoken. For ten winter days in 1977, the orator Paul John—widely respected as a dean of Yup’ik elders, and recognized for his tireless advocacy of Yup’ik language and traditions—held an audience of Yup’ik students rapt at Nelson Island High School, in southwest Alaska. Hour after hour he spoke to the young people, sharing life experiences and Yup’ik narratives, never repeating a tale. Now, more than a quarter-century after Paul John’s extraordinary performance, Sophie Shield’s translations and Ann Fienup-Riordan’s editing have brought his words back to life, and to a new audience. This book records one elder’s attempt to create a moral universe for future generations through stories about the special knowledge of the Yup’ik people. Tales both authentically Yup’ik and marked by Paul John’s own unique innovations are presented in a bilingual edition, with Yup’ik and English text presented in facing pages. As Paul John says, "In this whole world, whoever we are, if people speak using their own language, they will be presenting their identity and it will be their strength."