Living Wisdom of the Far North: Tales and Legends From Chukotka and Alaska

by Alexander Dolitsky, Tamara Semenova (Illustrator), Leigh Rust (Illustrator)

Overview

Living Wisdom of the Far North: Tales and Legends from Chukotka and Alaska compiles several traditional oral stories of the aboriginal peoples of the Russian and North American Far North and includes two new literary stories created in the spirit of those traditions.

In this edition, each story is set out in both Russian and English, not only to make the story available to Russian readers, but also for the purpose of providing a comparative study of the effects of each language’s writing conventions on the oral narratives. As is evident from the linguistic variations found in the side-by-side English and Russian versions printed in this volume, different punctuation and other grammatical rules influence each written rendition of the old oral narrative, which, in turn, influences the voice in which the reader “hears” the story told.

This volume is designed with four groups of readers in mind: first, young children who like an engaging picture story; second, young adult readers interested in deepening their intercultural understanding of circumpolar traditions and Far North lifestyles; third, English-speaking students of the Russian language and Russian-speaking students of the English language; and, finally, ethnographers, academicians, and others seeking to engage with the oral folk creations of the Far North in order to learn more about not only that area’s geography and geographic origins, its cultures, and its historical events, but also some of the issues surrounding the recording and modern day written presentation of its indigenous tales.

The stories of the aboriginal peoples of the Chukchi Peninsula and Alaska provide a window through which one can glimpse, across time, not only the ideology, customs, and beliefs of the Siberian Yupik and Chukchi peoples, but also geological and historical events and the particulars of everyday life that shaped their economy and core values, which in turn shaped their cultural traditions.

Product Details

BN ID:	2940014518505
Publisher:	Alaska-Siberia Research Center
Publication date:	03/09/2012
Sold by:	Barnes & Noble
Format:	eBook
Pages:	121
File size:	11 MB
Note:	This product may take a few minutes to download.

About the Author

Alexander Dolitsky was born and raised in Kiev, in the former Soviet Union. He received an M.A. in history from Kiev Pedagogical Institute, Ukraine, in 1976; an M.A. in anthropology and archaeology from Brown University in 1983; and attended the Ph.D. program in anthropology at Bryn Mawr College from 1983 to 1985, where he was also a lecturer in the Russian Center.

In the U.S.S.R., he was a social studies teacher for three years and an archaeologist for five years at the Ukrainian Academy of Sciences. In 1978, he settled in the United States after living one year in Austria and Italy. Dolitsky visited Alaska for the first time in 1981 while conducting field research for graduate school at Brown. He then settled in Alaska - first, in Sitka in 1985, and then in Juneau in 1986. From 1985 to 1987, he was the U.S. Forest Service archaeologist and social scientist. He was an Adjunct Assistant Professor of Russian Studies at the University of Alaska Southeast from 1985 to 1999; Social Studies Instructor at the Alyeska Central School, Alaska Department of Education and Yukon-Koyukuk School District from 1988 to 2006; and Director of the Alaska-Siberia Research Center (see www.aksrc.org) from 1990 to present. He has conducted approximately 30 field studies in various areas of the former Soviet Union (including Siberia), Central Asia, South America, Eastern Europe, and the United States (including Alaska).

Dolitsky has been a lecturer on the World Discoverer, Spirit of Oceanus, and Clipper Odyssey vessels in the Arctic and sub-Arctic regions. He was the Project Manage for the WWII Alaska-Siberia Lend-Lease Memorial erected in Fairbanks, Alaska in 2006. Dolitsky is the founder and Program Manager of the "White Nights Festival of Russian Culture" that is held annually in the Southeast Alaska.

He has published extensively in the fields of anthropology, history, archaeology, and ethnography in Current Anthropology, Artic, American Antiquity, Ultimate Reality and Meaning, Siberia, and in many other professional journals. His more recent books include: Fairy Tales and Myths of the Bering Strait Chukchi; Tales and Legends of the Yupik Eskimos of Siberia; Ancient Tales of Kamchatka; Old Russia in Modern America: Russian Old Believers in Alaska; Allies in Wartime: The Alaska-Siberia Airway During World War II; and Spirit of the Siberian Tiger: Folktales of the Russian Far East.