Description
Book SynopsisThis collection of 41 Alaskan Indian tales includes wood engravings by Alaska artist Dale DeArmond. It features the exploits of the roguish Crow and the intrepid "Man Who Traveled Among All the Animals and People" and range from serious myths to slyly humorous misadventures.
Trade Review"This is a book that can be appreciated on many levels: as an important archive of Native American oral literature; as a set of stories that can be enjoyed by a wide range of readers; as a source of ethnographic insight into the Dena people of interior Alaska; and as a culturally specific manifestation of the universal human desire to explain the world and provide it with moral and narrative drama." - Pacific Northwest Quarterly "My favorite book of the year is a handsome volume called Tales from the Dena. ... [This] is a brilliant and important new book." - Anchorage Daily News "A thoroughly enjoyable and very valuable contribution to the literature on Atha-baskans, particularly their oral literature... The stories themselves can continue to delight young and old alike from almost any culture." - Arctic "This handsome, appealing volume...is at present the most easily accessible collection of stories from the Dena. It includes raven myths, a cycle about an apparent culture hero's adventures on the Yukon, and humorous animal tales." - Choice "Frederica de Laguna, one of the few anthropologists still alive who was trained by Franz Boas himself, is an icon among ethnographers who worked in northwestern North America... [Tales from the Dena] is a superbly edited and produced collection, and is a tribute to the well-rounded and intense training in ethnographic recording which de Laguna and others of her generation had received." - Anthropos
