Thomas F. Thornton

Klondike Gold Rush National Historical Park Ethnographic Overview and Assessment

Haa Leelk'w Has Aan' Saaxu/ Our Grandparents' Names on the Land presents the results of a collaborative project with Native communities of Southeast Alaska to record indigenous geographic names. Documenting and analyzing more than 3,000 Tlingit, Haida, and other Native names on the land, it highlights their descriptive force and cultural significance. With community maps, tables, and photographs, this book will be invaluable for those seeking to understand Alaska Native geographic perspectives. As Tlingits from the Hoonah Indian Association explain in the book: "Long before Russian, French, Spanish, and British explorers mapped and named the mountains and bays of the Huna Tlingit homeland, we identified special places in our own vibrant, descriptive ways. Tlingit place names reflect important natural resources, ancestral stories, sacred places, and major geological and historic events. Our place names describe more than just inanimate locations for we perceive the mountains, glaciers, and streams to be as alive and aware as ourselves. Rather, they capture the history, emotions, and stories of our enduring relationship with a living, evolving landscape." "The new benchmark against which all future work will be measured." -Richard Dauenhauer, author of Russians in Tlingit America "Thomas Thornton and his Tlingit colleagues show how 'grandparents' names on the land' provide exquisite scaffolding for human ecologies in North America's far northwest--a moral universe inhabited by a community of beings in constant communication and exchange. This book will be a resource for the ages." -Julie Cruikshank, author of Do Glaciers Listen? Local Knowledge, Colonial Encounters, and Social Imagination "Restoring Tlingit placenames and their meanings will root our people back in place and decolonize the landscape, and Thornton has provided us with a fundamental tool to do exactly that. Sh t--oghaa xhat ditee--I am grateful." -Lance A. Twitchell, Xh'unei, University of Alaska Southeast Thomas F. Thornton is senior research fellow and director of the Environmental Change and Management Program at the Environmental Change Institute, School of Geography and the Environment, University of Oxford He is the author of Being and Place among the Tlingit.

Our Grandparents' Names on the Land

George Thornton Emmons

Andrew Hope

In 1993 the Tlingit tribes and clans convened a landmark conference in Haines, Alaska, which brought Native peoples from Alaska and Canada together with scholars of their language, history, and culture to exchange information and develop a collaborative agenda for future research and policy initiatives. This volume represents the fruits of that unique exchange and collaboration. It includes original contributions by Native and non-Native scholars alike on a variety of key topics, including Tlingit historiography, migrations, warfare, kinship and property tenure, language and literacy, ethnogeography and cultural resource management, subsistence, and naming. Bridging past and future, this source book fills an important niche in the literature and is designed especially to be accessible to all students of Tlingit culture.

Thomas F. Thornton

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