Craig Mishler, in collaboration with longtime research and writing partner Kenneth Drizhuu Frank, offers a comprehensive collection of essays about Gwich’in culture in Crooked on the Stretcher Board (Ch’ats’ą’ Vizhit Teech’iriikii). The title of the collection comes from a poetic nickname that Kenneth’s daughter, Crystal Frank, received from her great-grandmother, Sarah Frank, in a subtle parental critique. The hidden social cues, linguistic play, and interpersonal references wrapped up in the title appear periodically and captivatingly throughout the text, many times signaling the clear and committed relationships Mishler has maintained among Gwich’in communities in Alaska. The book itself is an impressive, well-researched, and wonderfully written testament to these relationships that Mishler has cultivated over a lifetime of fieldwork in the region.
While many of the essays have been previously published in other scholarly venues, this “family of papers,” intentionally selected and arranged into a single volume, provides “a deep look and multiple points of entry into Gwich’in daily life as [Mishler] saw it and knew it over five decades” (25). Some of the motivation for compiling twenty papers into one text stems from Mishler’s concern about access, now rendering journal articles and conference papers attainable for non-academic audiences. And fortunately for those audiences, Mishler’s clear and approachable tone throughout the text transforms the book from a purely scholarly study into a useful cultural resource with broader resonance. The end product is a diverse assortment of case studies ranging from brief, eight-page analyses to longer-form meditations on multiple facets of Gwich’in culture that traverse Mishler’s fifty-year timeline.
The book is structured in four sections—History and Biography, Language, Folklore and Folklife, Rituals and Festivals—flanked by an introduction and Leslie McCartney’s foreword at the beginning and Mishler’s afterword to conclude. While Mishler and McCartney both emphasize the possibility of reading each chapter out of order, there remains a steady flow from piece to piece as key characters and events persist through both time and theme. For instance, it’s helpful to meet John Fredson and Elijah John, two remarkable Gwich’in knowledge keepers, near the beginning to better appreciate their brief but meaningful appearances in subsequent chapters.
The first section, comprised of five essays, addresses key periods and individuals from Gwich’in history—the actions of Anglican and Catholic missionaries from 1861 to 1865; three geologists’ depictions of the Gwich’in from 1898 to 1937; individual profiles of John Fredson (1896–1945) and Elijah John (1892–1985); and stories of the Alaska-Canada boundary line surveyed 1911–12. This section provides an early glimpse at Mishler’s consistent focus on intercultural contact and adaptation, with special attention paid to Gwich’in modes of persistence in their language, lifeways, and land stewardship.
The second section highlights Mishler’s affinity for linguistic analysis, offering six essays—half co-authored with Kenneth Frank—that tease out the nuances of Gwich’in language. Beginning with an essay of personal names and one of naming ceremonies, the authors describe how Gwich’in naming has persisted and adapted through years of cultural change, largely driven by missionization. The next essay, chapter 8, comparatively analyzes reported speech in Native American folk narrative discourse, teasing out the culturally specific uses of “they say” as means of dating, regulating, or mediating present performances of past speech. Mishler helpfully provides a table of reporting idioms and their glosses for two dozen Native languages. The linguistic section closes with essays about verb stems, Slavey jargon, and pronoun shifts, each a useful dive into Gwich’in speech patterns and characteristics.
The third and fourth sections may prove of particular interest to this readership, examining narratives, games, rituals, festivals, music, dance, and memorial practices among the Gwich’in. Chapters 12 and 13 analyze, respectively, a riddle cycle and tall tales, the latter featuring a concise collection of Sam Peter stories, a figure Mishler describes as the Gwich’in equivalent of the Munchausen folk hero. The four-player card game Mizhur appears in the subsequent chapter, combining practical instructions with an insightful analysis of Gwich’in money usage related to Hudson’s Bay Company’s and Alaska Commercial Company’s presences in the area. The last of the Folklore and Folklife chapters addresses lobsticks, or evergreen trees with central branches chopped off to create locational landmarks or personal tributes, as representative of both Hudson’s Bay voyageur memorials and northern peoples’ highly symbolic cultural practices. More cultural performances appear in the five case studies of rituals and festivals, examining New Year’s celebrations, northern Dene gatherings, old-time fiddling festivals and square dances, memorial potlatches, and gravesite restoration. Though highlighting fieldwork from over twenty years ago, the descriptions and analyses of such festivities serve as synchronic snapshots of Gwich’in life at the turn of the twenty-first century, keeping in line with the book’s running theme of cultural consistency amid larger societal change. Mishler’s afterword revisits that subject quite overtly with a lucid reflection on the impacts of new technology, transportation, and language education initiatives throughout his career in the field.
Because the book is primarily based on fieldwork and publications from the late twentieth century, I found myself yearning for a longer afterword or even additional essays examining more recent developments in Gwich’in communities. The political, economic, and environmental changes in Alaska in the last decade alone are ripe for continued analysis of cultural adaptation. This is not any discredit to Mishler’s and Frank’s present work, but rather a notice that potential readers should anticipate the earlier time frame for most of the text and seek supplemental sources for understanding Gwich’in culture today. This book certainly offers a comprehensive, recently historical foundation for contemporary researchers and culture bearers.
Crooked on the Stretcher Board stands as a useful and versatile text for Gwich’in studies, Alaska and Arctic studies, and Native studies more broadly. Many folklorists will find helpful cases to consult or assign in graduate or advanced undergraduate seminars in the later chapters, while historians and linguistic anthropologists may find the same in the earlier ones. Mishler’s book reveals a careful, collaborative approach to fieldwork through detailed anecdotes and dozens of black-and-white photos sprinkled throughout the chapters, along with twenty-one photographic plates, some spanning two pages, on eight leaves in the center. His collaborations with Kenneth Frank also demonstrate an effective model for writing, revising, and thinking in partnership with research communities. Taken as a whole, Mishler combines history, folklore, anthropology, and linguistics compellingly and creatively, demonstrating not only a holistic approach to studying people in place, but also the powerful potential of conducting longitudinal ethnographic research that documents cultural changes over time.
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[Review length: 1074 words * Review posted on December 12, 2025]