The Eskimo Storyteller: Folktales from Noatak, Alaska

Description

Although more than twenty years have passed since it first appeared, nothing has come close to supplanting The Eskimo Storyteller: Folktales From Noatak, Alaska as an authoritative account of the narrative history of place and people in northwestern Alaska. Anthropologist Edwin S. Hall, Jr., provides in this text a careful and gracefully written compendium of the significant stories as they were known in the village of Noatak during the early 1960s, plus offering a full context for the stories and their tellers. Internationally known Alaska artist Claire Fejes provided illumination for the material with elegant line drawings, informed by her own time among the people of the Noatak.Hall was first introduced to the Arctic and its people in 1959, and returned nearly every year for the next thirty-five years to continue his studies of the area’s past and present human activity. In 1965, he recorded the 188 folktales in this collection during lively sessions with the master storytellers of the village, Edna Hunnicutt and Paul Monroe. These are their tales, in content, form, and expression; the local translators worked alongside the storytellers with Hall to ensure accuracy in feeling as well as detail in the English versions of the stories.Edwin S. Hall, Jr., holds a Ph.D. in anthropology, from Yale University. He taught at Ohio State University and the State University of New York at Brockport prior to his retirement. Highly regarded by his peers, he was honored in 1993 by the Society for American Archaeology with a symposium, and by the Alaskan Anthropological Association for Outstanding Service. Dr. Hall now devotes his time.exclusively to writing about the land he considers, home, Alaska’s Arctic