One of the most important ongoing projects in American Indian literary studies is the series of volumes co-published by Sealaska Heritage Institute and the University of Washington Press called “Classics of Tlingit Oral Literature.” Edited by Nora Marks Dauenhauer and Richard Dauenhauer, previous installments in the series, each of which sets a high standard for publication of Native American verbal art, have presented Tlingit-language texts and English translations of oral narratives, oratory, and life histories. Following ethnopoetic protocols, the texts and translations are exemplary, and the editors of the volumes have provided more than ample information on relevant culture contexts and performance situations. The current volume departs somewhat from what its predecessors have accomplished but maintains the standards established by those earlier works.
Russians made contact with Tlingits as early as 1741, when a launch from the packetboat Sv. Pavel captained by Aleksei Chirikov landed on Yakobi Island off what is now Alaska’s panhandle. The fate of the fifteen men who comprised the crew of the launch and of a subsequent boat sent landward to ascertain what had happened to them has never been satisfactorily determined. But the event marked the beginning of a Russian presence among the Tlingit and other Alaskan natives that lasted until the United States purchased Alaska in 1867. Joined by the late historian Lydia T. Black, Dauenhauer and Dauenhauer have assembled a body of materials which provide a multicultural perspective on Russians among the Tlingit. They focus their attention on watershed events early in this period of contact: the landing by Chirikov’s crew in 1741 and two armed conflicts between Russians and Tlingits at Sitka in 1802 and 1804. Tlingit sources, particularly oral histories narrated in Tlingit and in English, provide the core of the volume, and they are supplemented, complemented, and answered by Russian documents, many translated into English for the first time for this book, and by commentaries from later writers, Tlingit and non-Tlingit.
For example, an early section of the book entitled “The Prelude: First Encounters of Russians and Tlingits” focuses primarily on the attempt by Russians to land on Yakobi Island in 1741. It consists of the opening address by Mark Jacobs Jr. (Tlingit) at the Second International Congress on Russian America, held in Sitka in 1987; an excerpt from Captain Chirikov’s report of the event, filed in 1741; historian Allan Engstrom’s researches, based on contemporary records including rock art, into what happened to Chirikov’s crewmen and where it happened; more material from Mark Jacobs Jr. focusing particularly on the circumstances and results of Tlingit contact not only with Russians but with other Europeans; and the ethnopoetic transcription of a tape recording made by Tlingit narrator Andrew P. Johnson which places early European encounters in the context of a cosmohistory beginning with the creation of the world. Similarly, other sections in the volume present trends and events in Russian-Tlingit relations from multivocal perspectives.
Dauenhauer, Dauenhauer, and Black have lavishly illustrated the volume, using maps and artwork from the period they treat as well as photographs of artifacts and of many of their Tlingit consultants. A series of color plates presents Tlingit and European paintings from the early nineteenth century, photographs of museum pieces, and documentation of recent events in the ongoing relationship between Tlingits and Russians.
That history’s continuation into the twenty-first century represents an aspect of the editors’ work that should be of concern even to folklorists with no particular interest in the material itself. While the book focuses on the past through ethnohistory, it stresses how that past figures into the present. For example, an important event relating to the Russian presence in North America was the repatriation in 2003 of the Baranov Peace Hat, a metal hat commissioned by Aleksandr Baranov, agent for the Russian colonialists in Alaska at the time of the two battles of Sitka. The hat was to have been given to Tlingit diplomats as part of the peacemaking process that followed the second of those battles in 1804, but it had not been completed until the 1830s. A part of the collections of the American Museum of Natural History since the late-nineteenth century, the hat was returned with considerable ceremony, which the editors present in scrupulous detail. Readers may take away at least two lessons from the inclusion of an ethnography of this ceremony in this volume of history: one is that among the Tlingit (and, one suspects, among most other communities) the past is far from dead but continues to contribute to a sense of community identity. Secondly, we see that in order to understand the full implications of the 2003 ceremony a familiarity with a context of historical lore that defines the ceremony’s importance for its participants is required. Ethnographers must be ethnohistorians.
Another issue raised by the volume which has significance not only for folklorists and other ethnographers but also for anyone studying historical traditions outside their own community and presenting those traditions to a general readership is right of access. Many ethnographers customarily have assumed that once they have recorded oral traditions in a community, they can use those recordings pretty much as they wish. Dauenhauer, Dauenhauer, and Black, though, recognize that traditions may be owned by individuals, a community as a whole, or a subset of a community. Consequently, not everyone has the right to communicate them, and most certainly the person who records them does not have the right to publish them without permission. The Tlingit materials on the battles of Sitka, for example, are owned by the Kiks.ádi, a Raven moiety clan, since those conflicts took place on their land and their people died in its defense. From a Tlingit perspective, unauthorized use constitutes theft just as unauthorized use of copyrighted materials would constitute theft. The editors are quite sensitive to this issue, which in fact delayed publication of some of the Tlingit materials in the book, and have taken pains to ensure that those who own the material have endorsed their publication of it.
I highly recommend this book as well as the earlier volumes in the “Classics of Tlingit Oral Literature” series. It represents thorough, punctilious scholarship that reflects both multicultural and multidisciplinary perspectives. Even readers who do not study Northwest Coast traditions should examine it as a model for ethnohistorical presentation.
--------
[Review length: 1046 words • Review posted on August 17, 2009]