Clifford J. Looking Several Ways - Anthropology and Native Heritage in Alaska

5C u r r e n t A n t h ro p o l o g y Volume 45, Number 1, February 2004 2004 by The Wenner-Gren Foundation for Anthropological Research. All rights reserved 0011-3204/2004/4501-0001$3.00

Looking Several Ways

Anthropology and NativeHeritage in Alaska

by James Clifford

The ambivalent legacy of anthropologists relations with localcommunities presents contemporary researchers with both obsta-cles and opportunities. No longer justifiable by assumptions offree scientific access and interpersonal rapport, research increas-ingly calls for explicit contract agreements and negotiated reci-procities. The complex, unfinished colonial entanglements of an-thropology and Native communities are being undone andrewoven, and even the most severe indigenous critics of anthro-pology recognize the potential for alliances when they are basedon shared resources, repositioned indigenous and academic au-thorities, and relations of genuine respect. This essay probes thepossibilities and limits of collaborative work, focusing on recentNative heritage exhibitions in south-central and southwesternAlaska. It also discusses the cultural politics of identity and tra-dition, stressing social processes of articulation, performance,and translation.

j a m e s c l i f f o r d is Professor of History of Consciousness atthe University of California, Santa Cruz, and founding director ofthe universitys Center for Cultural Studies (Santa Cruz, CA95064, U.S.A. [[email protected]]). Born in 1945, he was educated atHaverford College (A.B., 1967), Stanford University (M.A., 1968),and Harvard University (Ph.D., 1977). Among his publicationsare Person and Myth: Maurice Leenhardt in the MelanesianWorld (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1984), (editedwith George Marcus) Writing Culture: The Poetics and Politicsof Ethnography (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1986),The Predicament of Culture: 20th-Century Ethnography, Litera-ture, and Art (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1988), andRoutes: Travel and Translation in the Late 20th Century (Cam-bridge: Harvard University Press, 1998). The present paper wassubmitted 25 iii 03 and accepted 30 vii 03.

Gone are the days when cultural anthropologists could,without contradiction, present the Native point ofview, when archaeologists and physical anthropologistsexcavated tribal remains without local permission, whenlinguists collected data on indigenous languages withoutfeeling pressure to return the results in accessible form.Scholarly outsiders now find themselves barred from ac-cess to research sites, met with new or newly publicsuspicion. Indeed, the anthropologistbroadly andsometimes stereotypically definedhas become a neg-ative alter ego in contemporary indigenous discourse,invoked as the epitome of arrogant, intrusive colonialauthority.1

The history of anthropological relations with localcommunities includes many examples of insensitivedata and artifact collection. These, combined with gen-eral assumptions of scientific authority, are understoodas modes of colonial domination from the other side ofa structural power imbalance, and, as histories such asDavid Hurst Thomass Skull Wars (2000) amply docu-ment, the resentment is often justified. At the sametime, the sweeping condemnations of (or jokes at theexpense of) anthropologists by indigenous peoples areoften combined with generous words for individualswhose work has been based on reciprocity, respect, andcooperation (see, e.g., Deloria 1997:210; Hereniko 2000:90).2 And anthropological texts are frequently reappro-priated in Native discourses, invoked in revivals of tra-dition. Indeed, the legacy of scientific research done incolonial situations is ambiguous and open-ended. In Ma-lekula, Vanuatu, A. B. Deacons research from the 1920sis recycled in contemporary kastom discourses (Larcom1982, Curtis 2003). In California, the salvage anthro-pology and linguistics of the A. L. Kroeber/Mary Haastradition at Berkeley is an invaluable resource for tribalheritage activities. If Kroeber is currently condemned forinsensitively sending Ishis brain to the Smithsonian col-lection of Ales Hrdlicka or for pronouncing death sen-tences, in his authoritative Handbook of the Indiansof California (1925), on tribes now struggling for recog-nition, he is also gratefully remembered by Yurok eldersfor loyal friendships and for recording precious lore. Hisextensive, carefully researched court testimony in the1950s on behalf of Native claims prefigures todays ad-vocacy roles (see Buckley 1996:29495; Field 1999).3

This legacy presents contemporary researchersNa-tive, non-Native, insider, outsider, halfie, dias-poricwith both obstacles and opportunities. Les Field

1. The most famous salvo is, of course, chapter 4 of Vine DeloriaJr.s Custer Died for Your Sins (1969)the book title borrowed fromthat of a Floyd Westerman album, which includes the wickedlysardonic Here Come the Anthros. See also Trask (1991), Smith(1999), and, in a more humorous vein, Hughte (1994).2. Deloria (pp. 21819) argues that for Amerindians assessments ofpersonal ethics and integrity far outweigh professional qualifica-tions in determining hospitality and cooperation in research. Thus,he insists, the existence of individual friendships and reciprocitiesshould not be taken as evidence that structural power relations andcolonial baggage have been transcended.3. Kroebers extensive notes for his testimony are in the BancroftLibrary.

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(1999) sees an unfinished history of complicities andcollaborations. Fundamentally altered by the politicalmobilization of Native communities, research can nolonger be justified by assumptions of free scientific ac-cess and interpersonal rapport. Explicit contract agree-ments and negotiated reciprocities are increasingly thenorm. In postindependence Vanuatu, for example, an-thropology and archaeology were formally banned for adecade. Now research is permitted only when host com-munities agree and when the foreign researcher collab-orates with a local filwoka doing heritage work for theVanuatu Cultural Centre (Bolton 1999, Curtis 2003). Insome contexts, anthropologists find themselves re-cruited for land-claims litigation, archaeologists for localheritage projects, linguists for language reclamation. Inothers, fieldwork is forbidden or subject to disabling re-strictions. Faced with these new, politicized relations,scholars may regret a loss of scientific freedomfor-getting the structural power that was formerly a guar-antee of free access and relative safety and ignoring themany implicit limits and accommodations that have al-ways been part of field research. (Many scientists oncefelt authorized to remove human remains, without con-sent, from graves in Native communities. If this is nowbeyond the professional pale, it is the result of ethicaland political constraints on scientific freedom.) As Na-tive intellectuals and activists challenge academic au-thority, lines can harden: the current Kennewick Man/Ancient One struggle for control of an ancientskeleton is a notorious case in which unbending nativeand scientific positions face off in court (Thomas2000). Even where relations are less polarized, it has be-come clear that local communities need to be able tosay no, unambiguously, as a precondition for negotiatingmore equitable and respectful collaborations. In practice,the complex, unfinished colonial entanglements of an-thropology and Native communities are being undoneand rewoven, and even the most severe indigenous crit-ics of anthropology recognize the potential for allianceswhen they are based on shared resources, repositionedindigenous and academic authorities, and relations ofgenuine respect.4

This essay probes the possibilities and limits of col-laborative work, focusing on a recent Native heritageexhibition in southwestern Alaska: Looking Both Ways.I discuss the projects contributors, conditions of pro-duction, and occasions of reception primarily through acontextualized reading of its remarkable catalogue,Looking Both Ways: Heritage and Identity of the AlutiiqPeople, edited by Aron Crowell, Amy Steffian, and Gor-don Pullar (2001). I was able to view the exhibition,

4. Deloria (2000:xvi) writes, in the Kennewick context, Never-theless, in most areas, scholars and Indians have worked to discoveras much as possible about newly discovered remains. When schol-ars have gone directly to the tribes involved, much progress hasbeen made. Linda Tuhiwai Smith (1999:15, 17) argues for reci-procity and feedback in a range of current bicultural, partner-ship, and multi-disciplinary research practices. Field (1999) dis-cusses current possibilities and constraints in research alliances,and his CA commentators offer useful complications.

which was linked with a local Alutiiq cultural festival(Tamamta Katurlluta, August 31, 2002) in one of its Alas-kan venues.5 I also discuss, more briefly, Ann Fienup-Riordans pioneering collaborative work with Yupiit andthe recently opened Alaska Native Heritage Center inAnchorage. The goal is not a complete survey of heritageactivity in the region but an evocation of changing Alas-kan Native identity politics touching on several differentpractices of cultural revival, translation, and alliance.

Heritage is self-conscious tradition, what Fienup-Rior-dan (2000:167) calls conscious culture, performed inold and new public contexts and asserted against his-torical experiences of loss. It responds to demands thatoriginate both inside and outside indigenous commu-nities, mediating new powers and attachments: relationswith the land, among local groups, with the state, andwith transnational forces. In contemporary Alaska, Na-tive identifications have been empowered by global andregional movements of cultural resurgence and politicalcontestation. They have also been channeled and inten-sified by state policies, particularly the Alaska NativeClaims Settlement Act of 1971 (ANCSA) and its after-math.6 With the passage of this legislation, for the firsttime, perhaps, it paid to be Native. The land-claimsmovements of the 1960s and the formation of the Alaska

5. The festival was organized by members of the Alutiiq commu-nities in Nanwalek, Port Graham, and Seldovia, working closelywith staff at the Pratt Museum, Homer, Alaska, where the exhi-bition was installed. I also visited briefly in the village of Nanwalek.While my perspective on the project was greatly enriched by theseencounters, my analysis remains essentially that of a visitor, a con-sumer and critic of public performances and texts. The many lim-itations and perhaps a few strengths of this outsider position will,no doubt, be evident. The fact that I was unable to visit the AlutiiqMuseum and Archaeological Repository in Kodiak means that animportant dimension of the story is underdeveloped. Aron Crow-ells Dynamics of Indigenous Collaboration in Alaska, deliveredat Berkeley in spring 2002, piqued my interest. He later introducedme to Homer and Nanwalek, and I particularly thank him, alongwith my gracious Nanwalek hosts, James and Carol Kvasnikoff. Inpreparing this essay I have consulted with Crowell and Amy Stef-fian primarily to verify matters of fact. Helpful comments on earlierdrafts have been provided by Gordon Pullar, Sven Haakanson Jr.,Ann Fienup-Riordan, Nicholas Thomas, and Anna Tsing. The spe-cific emphases and interpretations are, of course, my responsibility.6. ANCSA was a political compromise of several different agendas:Native land-claims agitation and a new political coalition (theAlaska Federation of Natives), the need of transnational corpora-tions to build a pipeline across the state for oil recently discoveredin Prudhoe Bay, and the desire of state and federal governments toarticulate a new Native policy in the wake of the failed termi-nation period of the 1950s and 60sa policy that could defini-tively settle aboriginal claims, giving Native groups a stake in eco-nomic development within a capitalist context while avoidingwelfare and trusteeship responsibilities. The act awarded 44 millionacres of land and nearly $1 billion to 13 regional Native corporationsand 205 village corporations. Eligible Native shareholders had toshow a 25% blood quantum, and participation was limited to in-dividuals born before the date of the legislation. Unique in U.S.Native policy, ANCSA reflects the specific history of Native-gov-ernment relations in Alaska, which lacks a reservation system andgovernment trusteeship over tribal lands as practiced in the lower48 states. It has served as a model for Inuit self-determinationin Quebec, with ambivalent consequences similar to those inAlaska, including the emergence of a Native corporate elite (Mitch-ell 1996, Skinner 1997, Dombrowski 2002).

clifford Looking Several Ways F 7

Fig. 1. Distribution of native languages in Alaska.

Federation of Natives (AFN) made a self-determinationpolitics based on Pan-Alaskan alliances possible. Nur-tured by strengthening circumpolar and FourthWorld connections, large-scale tribal or nationalidentifications emerged, supplementing more local vil-lage or kin-based affiliations. Heritage preservation andperformance have been an integral part of these changingNative articulations. The result has been more formallyarticulated notions of culture or tradition appropri-ate to changing indigenous senses of self.

For example, the people who now call themselvesAlutiiq (and sometimes also Sugpiaq) live in villagesand towns on Kodiak Island, on the southern coast ofthe Alaska Peninsula, on the Kenai Peninsula, on PrinceWilliam Sound, and in urban Anchorage (figs. 1 and 2).Their somewhat uncertain status as a coherent entity in1971 is indicated by the fact that Alutiit are dispersedamong three of the ANCSA regional corporations. In fact,many individuals rediscovered or renewed their sense ofNative identity in the process of ANCSA enrollment.Their collective history had been one of intense disrup-tion and trauma: the arrival of the Russians in the lateeighteenth century, bringing labor exploitation, massa-

cres, and epidemics; United States colonization after1867, with missionaries, boarding schools, and intensemilitary presence during World War II; devastation anddisplacement by a series of seismic disasters and theExxon Valdez oil spill. While a great deal of local tra-dition had been lost or buried, there were surviving sub-sistence communities, kinship networks, a thriving Na-tive religion (syncretic Russian Orthodoxy), and asignificant, if dwindling, number of individuals whocould speak Sugstun, the Eskimoan language indigenousto the region. Under the impetus of the identity politicssweeping Alaska, affiliations partially consolidated byANCSA, people were inspired to research, reclaim, andtransmit their Alutiiq heritage (see Pullar 1992 andMason 2002).

Throughout Native Alaska, new forms of cultural/ar-tistic production have been devised, along with new al-liances of Native and non-Native interests and new sitesof performance and consumption. Today these rangefrom regional elders conferences and syncretic revivalsof midwinter dancing to language classes, carving andboat-building workshops, tribal museums, nativetours, and model villages for cruise-ship visitors. New


Fig. 2. Alutiiq villages (adapted from Damas 1984:198).

cohorts of ethnically defined entrepreneurs, communityleaders, and cultural brokers have emerged. Older formsof social, political, and religious authority are simulta-neously recognized and transformed, selectively trans-lated in changing situations. How these practices takehold in local contexts varies considerably, depending ondemographics and ecology, the timing and force of co-lonial and neocolonial disruptions, possibilities and pres-sures for resource extraction, and ongoing struggles oversubsistence. Works like Looking Both Ways and theother heritage projects discussed below are specific co-productions in a complex social/economic/cultural con-juncture that both governs and empowers Native life.

Broadly defined, heritage work includes oral-historicalresearch, cultural evocation and explanation (exhibits,festivals, publications, films, tourist sites), language de-scription and pedagogy, community-based archaeology,art production, marketing, and criticism. Of course, suchprojects are only one aspect of indigenous self-determi-nation politics today. Heritage is not a substitute for landclaims, struggles over subsistence rights, development,educational, and health projects, defense of sacred sites,and repatriation of human remains or stolen artifacts,but it is closely connected to all these struggles. Whatcounts as tradition is never politically neutral (Jolly1992, Briggs 1996, Clifford 2000, Phillips and Schochet2004), and the work of cultural retrieval, display, and

performance plays a necessary role in current move-ments around identity and recognition. This essay worksto keep in view multiple producers and consumers ofNative heritage, stressing the constitutive processes ofpolitical articulation, contingent performance, and par-tial translation.

Heritage projects participate in a range of publicspheres, acting within and between Native communitiesas sites of mobilization and pride, sources of intergen-erational inspiration and education, ways to reconnectwith the past and to say to others: We exist, We havedeep roots here, We are different. This kind of cul-tural politics is not without ambiguities and dangers (seeHewison 1987, Harvey 1990, Walsh 1992). Heritage canbe a form of self-marketing, responding to the demandsof a multicultural political economy that contains andmanages inequalities. Sustaining local traditions doesnot guarantee economic and social justice; claiming cul-tural identity can be a palliative or compensation ratherthan part of a more systematic shift of power. In postin-dustrial contexts heritage has been criticized as a formof depoliticized, commodified nostalgiaersatz tradi-tion. While such criticisms tend to oversimplify the pol-itics of localism, as Raphael Samuel (1994) has argued,pressures for cultural objectification and commodifica-tion are indeed often at work in contemporary heritageprojects. But to conclude with a moral/political bottom


line of objectification and commodification is to missa great deal of the local, regional, national, and inter-national meaning activated by heritage work.7

The politics of identity and heritage are indeed con-strained and empowered by todays more flexible formsof capitalist marketing, communication, and govern-ment. While recognizing these pressures it is crucial todistinguish different temporalities and scales (Tsing2000) of political articulation (local, regional, national,international), performativity (linguistic, familial, reli-gious, pedagogic, touristic), and translation (intergener-ational, cross-cultural, conservative, innovative). Globalcultural and economic forces are localized and to a degreecritically inflected through these processes. Indeed, theconnections affirmed in Native heritage projectswithland, with elders, with religious affiliations, with an-cient, unevenly changing practicescan be substantial,not invented or merely simulacral. And for indigenouspeople, long marginalized or made to disappear, physi-cally and ideologically, to say We exist in perform-ances and publications is a powerful political act. In thepast several decades, at regional and international scales,an increasing indigenous presence has been felt in manysettler-colonial and national contexts. This presence in-dige`ne is reminiscent of the Presence Africaine move-ment of the early 1950s, an assertion of cultural identityinseparable from political self-determination. Todays in-digenous movements, like earlier anticolonial mobili-zations, complicate dichotomous, arguably Eurocentricconceptions of cultural versus political or eco-nomic agency.8

Of course, the conditions of self-determination, ofsovereignty are different a half-century after the greatwave of postwar national liberation movements. Underconditions of globalization, self-determination is less amatter of independence and more a practice of managinginterdependence, inflecting uneven power relations,finding room for maneuver (Clifford 2001). Subalternstrategies today are flexible and adapted to specific post-/neocolonial, globally interconnected contexts. This isnot an entirely new predicament: indigenous movementshave always had to make the best of bad political-eco-nomic situations. In a relatively liberal settler-colonialmilieu such as contemporary Alaskawhere Nativegroups, a real political presence, control significant land

7. This essay extends an earlier discussion of the heritage debatesand their application (in the work of Kevin Walsh and David Harvey)to transnational contexts (Clifford 1997:21319). How are we tounderstand the paradoxically globalizing and differentiating func-tions of widespread claims to culture and identity (Friedman1994, Dominguez 1994, Wilk 1995)? I have argued that the paradoxshould not be reduced to an effect of globalizing or postmodernpower structures (Clifford 2000). Something excessive is going onin these diverse, proliferating movements. Hodder (1999:14877)clearly portrays the complex determinations at issue.8. A strong argument in this vein was provided by the Kanak in-dependence leader Jean-Marie Tjibaou (1996), who insisted on anorganic connection between Melanesian heritage affirmations anda broad range of self-determination struggles. On recent argumentsthat portray merely cultural movements as divorced from thereal politics of structural transformation, see Judith Butlers(1998) riposte.

and resourcesbasic power imbalances persist. Thespaces opened for Native expansion and initiative arecircumscribed, and key conditions attached to the ap-parently generous ANCSA settlements can be shown toserve dominant interests (Dombrowski 2002). At thesame time, the social and cultural mobilizations nowpartially articulated with state and corporate multicul-turalism in Alaska predate and potentially overflow theprevailing structures of government. Heritage work, tothe extent that it selectively preserves and updates cul-tural traditions and relations to place, can be part of asocial process that strengthens indigenous claims to deeprootsto a status beyond that of another minority orlocal interest group. My discussion of Looking BothWays makes this guarded positive claim. The long-termpolitical and economic effects of recent Alutiiq culturalmobilizations remain to be seen, but the outcome willnecessarily be compromised and uneven.

In the next section I introduce the Looking Both Waysproject and juxtapose it with other heritage exhibitionsand publications that have responded to the changingNative situation in Alaska. Having presented a range ofexperiences, I return to the troubling question of howNative presence in the post-ANCSA period should behistoricized. The subsequent section focuses on the Alu-tiiq projects portrayal of an emergent multi-accentedhistory and identity. In a concluding discussion I returnto the limits and possibilities of collaborative heritagework for anthropologists, archaeologists, and linguistsforging new relationships with Native communities.

Native Presence: Recent Heritage Projects

contexts: looking both ways

Looking Both Ways, a sign of the changing times, is theculmination of two decades of Native reorganization andrenegotiated relations with academic researchers. Twoarchaeological negotiations epitomize crucial aspects ofthe process. In 1984 the Kodiak Area Native Association(KANA), under the new presidency of Gordon Pullar, en-tered into a partnership with the archaeologist RichardJordan to involve Native youth and elders in an exca-vation in the village of Karluk. Local people were deeplymoved by confronting carved wooden masks, stone tools,and spruce-root baskets from their ancestral past. Onewomans face reflected both confusion and sadness. Fi-nally speaking, she said, I guess we really are Nativesafter all. I was always told that we were Russians (Pullar 1992:183). The Karluk project, with its Nativeparticipation and local dissemination of results, wouldbecome a model for subsequent excavations in Alutiiqcommunities (Knecht 1994). In 1987 the Kodiak Islandcommunity of Larsen Bay petitioned for the return ofancestral bones and artifacts collected in the 1930s bythe physical anthropologist Ales Hrdlicka and preservedin the Smithsonian Institutions collections. After fouryears of sometimes bitter struggle, the materials werereturned and the skeletal remains reburied (Bray and Kil-


lian 1994). The Larsen Bay repatriation was a landmarkin the wider renegotiation of relations between UnitedStates Indian communities and scientific institutionsthat resulted in the Native Graves Protection and Re-patriation Act (NAGPRA) of 1990, and it was a rallyingpoint for the dispersed Native peoples on and aroundKodiak Island who were coming to see themselves ascustodians of a distinctive Alutiiq history and culture.

During the 1990s Smithsonian policy, particularly atits Arctic Studies Center, directed by William Fitzhugh,moved decisively in the direction of collaboration withindigenous communities. KANA, formed in 1966 duringthe period of land-claims activism, had already added acultural heritage program animated by the archaeologistRichard Knecht. This initiative would develop during the1990s into the Alutiiq Museum and Archaeological Re-pository, first directed by Knecht and now by the Alutiiqanthropologist and activist Sven Haakanson Jr. By theend of the decade the museum had moved into a newfacility in Kodiak, built with Exxon Valdez oil-spill com-pensation funding. It has expanded rapidly and now sus-tains a full range of educational, community archae-ology, arts, and curatorial programs.9 Its board ofdirectors is composed of representatives from KANA andfrom eight Alutiiq village corporations, and it sponsorsprojects throughout the Kodiak Island area. While themuseum is Native-centered, its staff represents diverseheritages and works to reach the very mixed current pop-ulation of Kodiak Island: Alutiit, U.S. Americans, Fili-pinos, Pacific Islanders, Central Americans.

The Alutiiq Museum board hesitated before agreeingto cosponsor Looking Both Ways. Memories of the Lar-sen Bay repatriation were fresh and suspicion of theSmithsonian still strong. Aron Crowell, director of theAlaska office of the Arctic Studies Center, with helpfrom museum staff, eventually secured support from theboard members, who recognized that a well-funded trav-eling show on Alutiiq heritage was a chance to putAlutiiq on the map. For the Smithsonian, collaborationwith the museum was critical to the projects success.Local networks from more than a decade of KANA-spon-sored heritage work could be activated, two crucial el-ders planning sessions could be organized, and an ap-propriate Native venue would be available. At theopening, four generations of an Alutiiq family cut theribbon, and visitors who had traveled considerable dis-tances to attend were met by a team of well-preparedyouth docents who had acquired specialized knowledgeof specific parts of the exhibition. Speeches, a RussianOrthodox blessing, traditional dancers, and a banquetmade the opening a ceremony and a celebration (see Alu-tiiq Museum Bulletin 7[1]).

The exhibition was built around artifacts lent by theSmithsonian, most of them collected by William J.Fisher, a German-born naturalist and fur trader, duringthe last two decades of the nineteenth century. Masks,clothing, and items of daily and ceremonial life were

9. See the Alutiiq Museum web site for a description of its diverseprojects: www.alutiiqmuseum.com.

exhibited, along with prehistoric and historic specimensfrom the Alutiiq Museums archaeological repository.While the presentation was strongly historical, enlargedcolor pictures of individuals (drying salmon, picking ber-ries), video recordings, and images of contemporary vil-lages reminded viewers of the present momentofwhose heritage this was. The exhibition themesOurAncestors, Our History, Our Way of Living, OurBeliefs, and Our Familysustained a focus on com-munity. The old objects, returning after a century andstill linked with specific places and people, provokedemotional reactionssadness, recognition, gratitude,kinship. Texts accompanying the artifacts included bothscholarly contextualizations and quotes from elders re-corded at planning meetings.

Works of traditional art, old and new, were juxtaposed.A breathtaking skin hat once worn by shamans andwhalers, collected on the Alaska Peninsula in 1883, hadbeen embroidered with caribou hair, yarn, and strips ofthin painted skin (probably esophagus), and further em-bellished with puffs of ermine and sea otter fur (Crowelland Laktonen 2001:169). The centrality of human-ani-mal relations was artfully, sensuously manifested inmany of the objects. Perhaps the most stunning objectwas a ground-squirrel parka sewn in 1999 by Susan Mal-utin and Grace Harrod of Kodiak Island after studyingan 1883 example in the Fisher collection in Washington,D.C. It is made from ground squirrel pelts and accentedwith strips of white ermine along the seams. Mink andwhite caribou fur are used on the chest and sleeves. Thetassels are of dyed skin, sea otter fur, and red cloth withermine puffs (Crowell and Luhrmann 2001:47). The ex-hibition also included an example of the decorated Rus-sian Orthodox Christmas star that is paraded from houseto house during midwinter rituals of visiting and giftexchange made for the exhibition by students at St. In-nocents Academy in Kodiak. (A color photo of the youngmen, grinning and looking very Russian, accompaniedthe 3-foot star.) A mask carved by Jerry Laktonen, nowa successful Native artist, commemorated the ExxonValdez disaster that had forced him to quit commercialfishing and take up sculpture (see www.whaledreams.com/laktonen.htm).

The diverse mix of objects, texts, and images gatheredfor the exhibition signified a complex Alutiiq heritageand identity. Cultural continuity through change wasmanifested by juxtaposing ancient, historical, and con-temporary objects and images. The explicit messageswere straightforwardhistorically descriptive, evoca-tive, and celebratory. The exhibitions catalogue offersconsiderably more diversity of perspective in its ac-counts of cultural and historical process. Extensive andbeautifully produced, it contains hundreds of historicaland contemporary illustrations, with detailed chapterson culture, language, and history, on archaeological re-search results and collaborations, on contemporary iden-tity and subsistence practices, on spiritual life and reli-gious traditions, on elders recollections and hopes. Thevolumes dedication quotes Mary Peterson, a Kodiak Is-


land elder: To all the new generations. They will learnfrom this and keep it going.

The cataloguethe term hardly captures the booksscopeexplores a wide range of old and new places,crafts, and social practices. Heritage is a path to the fu-ture.10 The late Sven Haakanson Sr., a Kodiak Island el-der, inspired the projects title: Youve got to look backand find out the past, and then you go forward. Haak-anson was speaking at an elders planning conferenceheld in 1997, when men and women from the Alutiiqculture area gathered to talk about the old days and waysforward: childhood experiences in the 1920s, parents andgrandparents, subsistence hunting and fishing, religionand social values, elements of a transformed, transform-ing way of life. The catalogue contains many excerptsfrom this meeting, as well as testimony from Alutiiqactivists, community leaders, and scholars. Diverse Na-tive voices are juxtaposed with contributions from non-Native scholars.

Perhaps the most striking feature of Looking BothWays is its multivocality. In the very first pages we en-counter the names of 51 elders who participated in theexhibition or are quoted in the book. The final chapteris composed of nine extended statements. The remainingsections are written/assembled by scholars who haveworked closely with local communities. One of the vol-umes editors, the Native activist and educator GordonPullar, contributes an illuminating chapter entitledContemporary Alutiiq Identity (2001). Virtually everypage juxtaposes quotations, images, and short essays.The textual ensemble makes space for some 40 individ-ual authorsNative and non-Native writers of free-standing essays or sources of extended testimonies. Quo-tations from individual elders are scattered throughout.No one holds the floor for very long, and the experienceof reading is one of constantly shifting modes of atten-tion, encountering specific rhetorics, voices, images, andstories, and shuttling between the archaeological past,personal memories, and present projects.

In the midst of a chapter called SugucihpetOurWay of Living (Crowell and Laktonen 2001), a pagebegins: Fishing sets the pace of the subsistence year. Insummer, five varieties of salmon gather in the bays orascend rivers to spawn. The following page: I remem-ber in the summertime my dad would wake my sistersand me up early to go fishing. The first tells us aboutkinds of fish and how they are dried, smoked, andcanned. The second recalls the chore of cleaning thecatch while being swarmed by vicious flies (pp. 17678).Interspersed illustrations show (1) contemporary com-mercial fishermen netting salmon, (2) IqsakHalibuthook, from about 1899, and (3) an ivory lure in the shapeof a fish, ca. a.d. 6001000, found in an archaeologicalsite on Kodiak Island. In Looking Both Ways, Aron

10. In Pacific Island contexts tradition (kastom) is often articulatedwith development. On this complex temporality, a traditionalanticipation of the future, see Wagner (1979), other versions ap-pear in Sahlins (2000:419) and Kame eleihiwa (1992:2223). Tilley(1997) offers a provocative Melanesian case of what Kirshenblatt-Gimblett (1998) calls the second life of heritage.

Crowell writes, the commitment has been to diversityof perspective, depth of inquiry, and genuine collabora-tion among scholars, Elders, and communities (2001:13). The books five pages of acknowledgments, men-tioning many institutions and an enormous number ofindividuals, are integral to its message. But if the generalstrategy is inclusive, it is not synthetic. Differences ofperspective are registered and allowed to coexist. Thevolumes three editors represent the range of stakehold-ers in the project.

Crowell, director of the Alaska office of the Smith-sonians Arctic Studies Center, came to the Looking BothWays project from prior work in the archaeology andpostcontact history of the region (e.g., Crowell 1992,1997) and is currently pursuing collaborative archaeologywith Alutiiq communities on the Kenai Peninsula. Asproject director he arranged the loan of artifacts, raisedgrant money, and served as primary orchestrator/nego-tiator of the exhibition and the text. He is the author orcoauthor of four chapters in the catalogue. Crowells abil-ity to work both as a Smithsonian insider and as a long-term field researcher enmeshed in local collaborationsand reciprocities was instrumental in facilitating theprojects coalition of diverse interests.

Gordon Pullar has been a leader in Alutiiq heritageprojects since the early 1980s, and it was his early con-versations with William Fitzhugh of the Smithsonian,followed by Crowells presentation of artifact photos toa 1988 conference on Kodiak Island, that led to concreteplans for bringing the old Alutiiq objects to Alaska. Pul-lar chaired the Looking Both Ways advisory committeeand served as political liaison to various groups and or-ganizations. He and other Alutiiq activists and elderswhose ideas influenced the project were much more thanNative consultants recruited after the basic vision wasin place; they were active from the beginning in an evolv-ing coalition.

The archaeologist Amy Steffian, currently deputy di-rector of the Alutiiq Museum, works on collaborativeexcavations with communities on Kodiak Island. In thewake of the Larsen Bay repatriation struggle, Steffianrequested and received tribal permission to resume studyof the Larsen Bay sites. Her experience established thatintense local suspicion of archaeology and anthropologydid not preclude research collaborations in situationswhere trust could be established. Moreover, the fact thatthe Alutiiq Museum is an archaeological repository in-stitutionalizes the idea that excavated heritage can bemade available for study while remaining under localcontrol. Along with other museum staff members andcommunity supporters, Steffian helped insure that Look-ing Both Ways would be a broadly based gathering ofpeople as well as an impressive collection of artifacts.

The projects success depended on bringing togetherNative authorities, skilled professionals, and institu-tional sponsors. Primary financial donors included theSmithsonian Institution, the National Endowment forthe Humanities, Koniag Inc., the Alutiiq Heritage Foun-dation, the Anchorage Museum of History and Art, andPhillips Alaska. Additional support was provided by an


impressive cross-section of Alaska institutions, publicand private, and nearly two dozen Native regional andvillage corporations. As I have suggested, the projectscollaborative expression of Alutiiq heritage and iden-tity reflects an open-ended moment of cultural emer-gence, weaving together discussions, struggles, and ac-commodations sustained over more than two decades ina shifting context of power. A look at several precursorsand allied projects may provide a better sense of thatcontexta dynamic conjuncture that, while locally par-ticular, has analogues elsewhere.11

precursors: crossroads and agayuliyararput

In 1988 Fitzhugh and Crowell edited the major Russian-American-Canadian collaboration Crossroads of Conti-nents: Cultures of Siberia and Alaska. Prehistory, his-tory, anthropology, archaeology, and art criticism cametogether in a richly documented and illustrated accountof the transnational world of Beringia. Small Siberian andAlaskan Native groups were shown to be part of a larger,dynamic indigenous region with a deep history of inter-connection and crossing that had been obscured by na-tional projects and cold war partitioning. The projectbrought together for the first time many powerful andevocative artifacts collected in the eighteenth and nine-teenth centuries and preserved in Washington, D.C., St.Petersburg, New York, and Ottawa. The effect was re-velatory not simply for students of cultural flows but forNative Alaskans, who rediscovered lost aspects of theirtribal histories and a deep transnational context for newindigenous alliances. In Looking Both Ways, Ruth Al-ice Olsen Dawson, chair of the Alutiiq Heritage Foun-dation, recalls her encounter with the Crossroads exhi-bition at its Alaskan venue, the Anchorage Museum ofHistory and Art (2001:89):

For the first time we saw snow-falling parkasmade out of bird skins and decorated with puffinsbeaks. We saw ceremonial masks, regalia, baskets,rattles, pictures, and drawings. The impact for mewas overwhelming. The exhibit sparked the start ofthe first Native dance group in Kodiak in years. Andinstead of wearing European calicos, we wore snow-falling parkas, shook puffin-beak rattles, and worebeaded head-dresses. It was a revelation.

There are no voices like Dawsons in Crossroads ofContinents, and this may be the volumes most strikingdifference from Looking Both Ways. All the contributorsto the earlier collection are non-Native academics, andthe contemporary lives of Koryak, Chukchi, Yupik,Aleut, Tlingit, and others appear only at the very end intwo surveys of current history in Russia and Alaska.Named individuals emerge in a brief final section on 18

11. Quick equivalences are risky, however, and the devil is in the(historical) detailscolonial, post-, and neocolonial. A more sys-tematic comparison of Alaskan Native identity politics with sim-ilar phenomena elsewhere would require work at a different scalefrom that of this essay.

Alaskan Native artists. There are no photographs of liv-ing people, whereas in Looking Both Ways they areeverywhere, mixed with historical photos and MikhailTikhanovs fabulous early-nineteenth-century portraits(prominent in both volumes). Seven years after Cross-roads opened, Fitzhugh and Valerie Chaussonnet of theArctic Studies Center, recognizing the original exhibi-tions limited audience, designed a smaller, less cum-bersome version for travel to local communities on bothsides of the Bering Strait (Chaussonnet 1995). In thisproject images of contemporary populations are featured,along with writings and quotations by indigenousauthorities.

In 1996 a major exhibition entitled Agayuliyararput(Our Way of Making Prayer) opened in the heart ofYupik countryToksook Bay, Nelson Island. In its sub-sequent travel to the regional center, Bethel, and thento Anchorage, New York, Washington, D.C., and Seattle,the exhibition of Yupik masks reversed the itinerary ofCrossroads, starting in venues accessible to indigenouspeople and moving to more distant urban centers.Masks acquired by U.S. and European museums duringthe late-nineteenth-century frenzy of salvage collect-ing now traveled back to their places of origin. AnnFienup-Riordan, an anthropologist whose long-termfieldwork on Nelson Island has been part of oral-historyprojects sponsored by Yupik authorities, conceived theexhibition in dialogue with elders. Its success dependedboth on this local commitment and on the cooperationof museum professionals in Alaska and in Washington,New York, Seattle, and Berlin. The exhibition catalogue,The Living Tradition of Yupik Masks: Agayuliyararput(Our Way of Making Prayer) (Fienup-Riordan 1996), is amodel of richly documented collaborative scholarshipand stunning visual presentation. While the anthropol-ogist appears as its author, large sections of the text arestrongly multivocal, built around quotations from eldersrecorded memories and interpretations of the masks.

In Hunting Tradition in a Changing World, Fienup-Riordan (2000) reflects on her changing relations withYupik communities over the years. She traces an evo-lution from assuming scholarly independence towardsomething more like alliance anthropology and towardtextual forms that manifest the collaborative nature ofthe work.12 Hunting Tradition moves beyond systematicquotation to intersperse among its essays seven free-standing texts written by Yupiit. Along with clusteredaccounts of Yupik Christianity and extended urban-ruralnetworks, Fienup-Riordan provides an illuminating anal-ysis of the mask exhibitions origins and especially of itssignificance in different venues (pp. 20951). The namechosen by the Yupik planning committee, Agayuliyar-arput, fused old and new meanings. In the pre-Christianpast agayu referred to performances honoring animals or

12. It is arguable that her choice to remain unaffiliated with anyuniversity or governmental institution has given her the flexibilityto pioneer collaborative styles of work, engaging in relations andprojects which might have seemed unprofessional before theybecame, under pressure, the norm.


persons who were providers, and it has since taken onthe Christian sense of praying. Our Way of MakingPrayer thus articulates a process of historical transla-tion. (It was not guaranteed that priests and conservativeChristians in the local communities would approve ofthe paganism associated with the renewed enthusiasmfor mask making and dancing. In fact they did, with en-thusiasm.13) Fienup-Riordan describes how, as the exhi-bition traveled beyond Yupik communities, the nameAgayuliyararput, rich in local significance, diminishedin prominence, becoming a subtitle.

In Toksook Bay and Bethel the most important mean-ings of the masks centered on who had made them andwhere they were from. Place (rather than theme or style)was the organizing principle determined by the localsteering committee. It was also decided that Yupik lan-guage had to appear prominently in the exhibitionsname and in the elders interpretations, painstakinglytranscribed and translated by Marie Meade, a Yupik-language specialist, teacher, and traditional dancer (seeMeade 2000). These vernacular materials were featuredin a specially printed bilingual catalogue that precededthe lavishly illustrated English-language version. Avail-able at Toksook Bay and Bethel, the Yupik cataloguesold out quickly and was adopted in school curriculateaching local culture and history.14 The exhibition open-ing coincided with an already established dance festival,a gathering of hundreds of people flown in from remotevillages by light aircraft, and thus it became part of anongoing tradition of midwinter gatherings.

In Anchorage, Alaskas largest urban center, where sig-nificant Native communities live more or less perma-nently, the masks were seen as part of a wider pan-Alas-kan indigenous heritage. In New York, at the NationalMuseum of the American Indian, the masks were con-textualized less in terms of local Alaskan practices thanas contributions to great Native American art. In Wash-ington, D.C., and Seattle, formalist, high art presen-tations predominated. Fienup-Riordan portrays thesecontexts not as distortions but rather as aspects of a po-tential range of Yupik meanings in the late twentiethcentury. The centering of the exhibitionits planningand opening in Toksook Bayreflects a crucial priorityfor a renewed politics of indigenous authenticity. It isnot, however, the sole priority, and the local is actively

13. The Oregon Society of Jesus web site (http.www.nwjesuits.org/ignati/nwjf9508.htm) proudly recounts Fr. Rene Astrucs role inlifting the Catholic Churchs ban on Yupik dancing and encour-aging its revival. The dancing priest was an active agent in thesocial and cultural rearticulations that made Agayuliyararputpossible.14. An interesting contrast is provided by Julie Cruikshanks (1998:16) account of Athabaskan elders insistence that their recordedstories and memories be published in English: What emerged . . .was a strong commitment to extend communication in whateverforms possible, writing being one way among many. There was alsooptimismprobably a result of a history of self-confident multi-lingualismthat English is just one more Native language, in factthe dominant Native language at the end of the century. TheYupik and Athabaskan linguistic situations differ, and notions ofcultural authenticity need to be grounded in specific limits andpossibilities of translation and communication.

defined and redefined in relationships with a variety ofoutsides and scales of belonging. A worldwide web,in Fienup-Riordans provocative expression (2000:15182), of Yupik kinship and culture obliges us to con-sider a range of overlapping performative contexts, tac-tical articulations, and translations: rural/urban, oral/literate, family/corporate, Alaskan/international.

Hunting Tradition concludes with a recent visit to theBerlin Museum fur Volkerkunde by a group of Yupikelders accompanied by the anthropologist (Fienup-Rior-dan 2000:25270). The discussions there were governedby Yupik protocols and agendas. The goal was not thereturn of traditional artifacts preserved in Germany. Thevisitors expressed gratitude for the museums curator-ship, since in the old days it was customary to destroymasks after use. They were primarily interested in thereturn of important stories and knowledge renewedthrough the encounter with the old masks, spears, andbows. What mattered was not the reified objects butwhat they could communicate for a Yupik future. Un-derstood in this historical frame, museums, as the elderPaul John put it, were part of Gods plan.

The Living Tradition of Yupik Masks (Fienup-Riordan1996) looks both ways: to a recollected past and to adynamic present-becoming-future. The catalogue por-trays Yupik cultural production enmeshed in specificcontact histories: colonial (Russian and American) andnow post-/neocolonial (indigenous resurgence). Thetranslated renditions of the masks meanings and usesare not located solely or even primarily in traditional(pre-1900) contexts. The catalogue emphasizes contacthistories of collecting (including aesthetic appropriationof the dramatic masks by the surrealists), periods of mis-sionary suppression, and recent movements of revival inCatholic, Orthodox, and Moravian communities. Theperspectives of different generations on rearticulated cur-rents of spirituality and aesthetics are kept in view. Thecollaborative genesis of the exhibition and its local sig-nificance are stressed from the outset in a chapter titledOur Way of Making an Exhibit.15

It is instructive to compare The Living Tradition ofYupik Masks with an earlier Smithsonian-sponsored cat-alogue and exhibition devoted to similar objects and his-tories from the same region. Inua: Spirit World of theBering Sea Eskimo, by William Fitzhugh and Susan Kap-lan (1982), was an innovative project for its time. Likethe later exhibition, it returned objects held in Wash-ington museums to Alaskan venues, though not to Na-tive homelands. Its focus was a collection of artifactsacquired in the late 1870s by Edward William Nelson inwestern Alaska. The narrow time period, contextualizedin a broad historical/archaeological/natural frame, gavethe exhibition a temporal/social specificity that sepa-rated it from more common cultural or primitive artapproaches. A final section of the catalogue, Art inTransformation, provided a glimpse of later develop-

15. Fienup-Riordans deepening collaborative work will be mani-fested in two forthcoming publications (2004a, b) the latter com-plemented by a bilingual version for local use.


ments: the discovery of representational ivory carvingand the emergence of individual Eskimo artists whowould develop new graphic styles and carving traditionsfor an expanding art market. Except for these last pages,however, contemporary populations were absent fromthe book. An Eskimo voiceunattributed quotationsfrom recorded mythsappeared as a kind of chorus.

If Inua seems dated today, this is a comment less onits substantive achievements, which remain considera-ble, than on rapidly changing times, identifications, andpower relations. The lack of visible participation byYupit and Inupiat in the exhibition process contrastswith the explicit collaborations described by Crowell andFienup-Riordan. Moreover, the earlier exhibitions focuson the Bering Sea Eskimo, including under this rubricboth Yupik and Inupiaq, would today be ruled out bythe disaggregation of Eskimos into Inuit, Inupiat, Yu-piit, and Alutiit, an outcome of Alaskan and CanadianNative identity politics during the 1980s and 90s. Thisprocess was significantly (though not solely) driven bythe struggles surrounding ANCSA, whose politics of Na-tive regrouping were making headway at the time Inuawas produced. Subsequent decades would see many ar-ticulations of Fienup-Riordans conscious culture. TheNative corporations created after 1971 offered new lead-ership roles and sources of funding for cultural/heritageprojects such as the Alutiiq Museum, other cultural cen-ters, and education and language initiatives. Local, re-gional, and international dance/art/storytelling festivals,Native studies programs in universities (sometimes in-cluding elders in residence), Native participation inresource management, teacher training programs, thegrowth of indigenous art markets, and cultural tourismall these contributed to a sharply increased Native pres-ence in Alaska public culture.

A full historicalpolitical, social, economic, and cul-turalaccount of the increased Native presence and her-itage activity in Alaska after the 1970s is beyond mypresent compass. However, a few reflections on howthese movements are related to the social and economiccontexts created by ANCSA may be useful. The relationsare intimate, partial, and overdetermined. Recent studiesargue that the Native corporate structure through whichthe U.S. Congress settled aboriginal land claims hashad ambiguous and in some cases disastrous conse-quences. Ramona Ellen Skinners survey Alaska NativePolicy in the Twentieth Century (1997) shows how a lawintended to foster indigenous self-determination becamerecognized as a recipe for eventual termination, limitingNative status to those born before 1971 and ultimatelyallowing unfettered sales of tribal assets. Amendmentsto the law attempting to correct its temporal limit oncorporate participation and slowing the transfer of stockto non-Natives have only partially dealt with its fun-damental problems. ANCSA, from this perspective, is apact with the devil of capitalism. By making Native as-sets indistinguishable from other private property, thelaw has significantly expanded participation in the Alas-kan and international economy. But this developmentcomes at the cost of extinguishing aboriginal title to

land, creating Native capitalist elites, and forcing short-sighted, profit-motivated decisions about resource man-agement. Kirk Dombrowskis recent discussions (2001,2002) are particularly informative on these effects, par-ticularly in the timber-rich south.

Overall, the economic situation of Alaskas Native cor-porations is quite uneven, and ANCSAs articulation withthe new identity politics has taken different forms in dif-ferent Native contexts, depending on resource wealth, ex-tractive pressures from powerful corporations, and degreeof urbanization and acculturation. It is obviously impor-tant to distinguish the community-based heritage edu-cation and revival practiced by institutions like the Alu-tiiq Museum, the midwinter Orthodox starringceremonies and Yupik dance festivals in Toksook Bay,pan-Alaskan institutions like the Alaska Native HeritageCenter, and the Indian villages maintained for cruise-shiptourists along the South Alaska Inland Passage. In eachcase, one needs to ask what old and new cultural and socialelements are being articulated, what audiences are beingaddressed by specific performances, and what are the so-cial/linguistic relations and tradeoffs of translation. Suchquestions are critical for a nonreductive understanding ofa complex historical conjuncture.

Native Alaska is caught up in a local/global constel-lation of forces that can be roughly characterized as post-1960s/neoindigenous and corporate/multicultural. Her-itage projects reweave diverse social and culturalfiliations in ways that are aligned by this conjuncturewhile also exceeding it. Multiple historical projects andpossible futures are active. In Dombrowskis ethnograph-ically nuanced analysis (2001) and the related but morefunctionalist account of Kodiak capitalism by ArthurMason (2002), cultural politics appears as largely a matterof corporate ideology, commodified tribal symbols, andtourist spectacles: an Alaskan identity industry. In thisperspective, which brings Native class and status differ-ences into view, the state and corporate capitalism ul-timately call the shots. I would argue for another viewof determination in which capitalism and state powerdo not produce indigenous identities, not at least inany global or functional way, but set limits and exertpressures (Williams 1977:8389). Struggles over indige-nous practice occur, as Dombrowski rightly puts it,within and against Western institutions and hege-monic ideas such as culture.

All of the heritage work discussed here is connectedto capitalism in variously configured relations of depen-dency, interpellation, domination, and resistance. AsMarx said, people make history but not in conditions oftheir choosing. This observation has always been bru-tally relevant to Native peoples experiences of conquest,resistance, and survival. Yet Marx also affirmed that, inconditions not of their choosing, people do make history.The unexpected resurgence of Native, First Nations, Ab-original, etc., societies in recent decades confirms thepoint. And while indigenous heritage and identity move-ments have indeed expanded dramatically during the re-cent heyday of corporate liberalism, this conjuncturedoes not exhaust their historicity. Native cultural poli-


tics builds connections extending before and potentiallyafter the current moment. I am inclined to see thepraxis of indigenism16 in Gramscian termsas a con-tingent work of positional struggle, articulation, andalliance.

interactions: the alaska native heritagecenter

The Alaska Native Heritage Center in Anchorage is aprominent sign of the expanding Native presence inAlaska. Its heritage work at several scales and its mul-tiple audiences, community ties, and corporate connec-tions contrast and overlap with the Yupik and Alutiiqexhibitions. Opened in 1999 as a gathering place forall Alaska Native groups, the Center functions as a siteof cultural exchange, celebration, and education. EntirelyNative-run and not dependent on academic experts, itdraws its funds from a broad range of sourcestribal,corporate, and touristic. All of its programs are approvedby a college of elders representing the principal Nativeregions. Dialogue among indigenous peoples is pro-moted, and communication with visitors, a high priority,is on Native terms. The Center sometimes enters intocontracts with non-Native scholars and facilitates col-laborative projects. For example, its staff worked withthe Smithsonians Arctic Studies Center to produce apedagogical video and web site for Looking Both Ways.Housed in a new complex on the outskirts of Anchorage,the Center maintains links with local and regional Na-tive authorities while cultivating partnerships with abroad range of sponsors.

The Alaska Native Heritage Center is not a museumfocused on a collection but something more like a per-formance space, featuring face-to-face encounters.Everything is designed to facilitate conversations be-tween different tribal Alaskans and between Natives andnon-Natives. At the door, visitors are personally greeted.The central space is a stage where every hour dancing orstorytelling is presented. In the Hall of Cultures, visitorsare encouraged to talk with Native artists and traditionbearers17 about their work. All of the artifacts on displayare newly made traditional piecesmasks, drums, kay-aks, parkas, boots, button blankets, headgear. Outside,

16. The phrase is Dombrowkis (2002). My perspective is, with dif-ferences of emphasis, consistent with the analytic approach to con-temporary indigenism that he and Gerald Sider project for theirnew book series Fourth World Rising (see Dombrowski 2001).17. The public status of tradition bearer is a relatively recentdevelopment in North American indigenous heritage politics. Itdenotes individuals of deep cultural experience who are not (yet)elders. The latter designation depends on traditional usage and localconsensuswhich may, of course, include disagreement. Tradition-bearer status is more closely linked with the politics of heritage,and it can include people of more or less mixed background whoin recent decades have returned to Native tradition, reactivatingold crafts, languages, stories, and lifeways. It thus denotes an activecommitment to transmitting community values and knowledgeand recognizes the translation and education functions of individ-uals mediating between (deeply knowledgeable) elders and (rela-tively ignorant) youth. Its emergence is evidence that heritage ac-tivism extends beyond the goal of simply salvaging endangered lore.

around an artificial lake, five houses represent the pastlifeways of Alaskas principal indigenous regions. Every-where, young Native men and women act as hosts andinterpreters, actively engaging visitors. During the sum-mer months, tourists visit in large numbers, includingregular busloads of cruise-ship passengersa lucrativemarket that the Center has successfully pursued. Work-shops and gatherings support its yearly themes (for ex-ample, boat-building, health and Native medicines). Inwinter, school visits, art demonstrations, and workshopsare organized (Exxon Mobil master artist classes, inwhich one can learn to make Tsimshian hand drums,Alutiiq beaded headdresses, Aleut model kayaks, andother emblematic Native artifacts). The Center also ar-ranges cultural awareness workshops funded by WellsFargo Bank and adapted to the needs of diverse clientssuch as the Girl Scouts, the FBI, the army and the airforce, Covenant House, and various government agen-cies.18

Like most Native heritage projects, the Center ad-dresses diverse audienceslocal, regional, state, and in-ternational. The performances, alliances, and transla-tions vary according to the context. For tourists and othervisitors with limited time, the Center provides a clearvision of Alaska Native presence and diversity. Color-coded maps and labels identify five principal Native cul-tures/regionsAthabascan Yupik/Cupik, Inupiaq/St.Lawrence Island Yupik, Eyak/Tlingit/Haida/Tsimshian,and Aleut/Alutiiqeach endowed with a stylized imageor logo. The five traditional house types reinforce thetaxonomy. A message of current vitality is reinforced byface-to-face contacts, especially with young people. ForAlaskans of various backgrounds, specialized perform-ances and educational events offer more sustained en-counters with Native artists and tradition bearers. Theagenda of gathering and cultural communication specif-ically addresses Native people of all ages from many partsof Alaska who are employed at the Center or attend itsevents. Its work thus contributes to a loosely articulatedNative Alaskan identification following from the wide-spread post-1960s indigenous revival movements and thedifficult but largely successful alliances leading to theANCSA land settlement.

Native resurgence, a complex process of continuitythrough transformation, involves articulation (culturaland political alliance), performance (forms of display fordifferent publics), and translation (partial communi-cation and dialogue across cultural and generational di-vides). All are clearly visible in a Center publication thatdocuments and celebrates one of its annual themes andsummer workshops: Qayaqs and Canoes: Native Waysof Knowing (Steinbright and Mishler 2001). Teams ofmaster builders and apprentices gathered at theCenter over a period of five months to construct eighttraditional boats: two Athabascan birch-bark canoes,four styles of kayak (Aleut, Alutiiq, and two CentralYupik), a Northwest Coast dugout canoe, and a Bering

18. The Center web site (www.alaskaNative.net) provides detailson programs and sponsors.


Straits open skin boat. Only the last-mentioned boat typeis still actively made and used; the others have enteredthe relatively new category of what might be called her-itage objectsspecially valued material sites of remem-brance and communication. (Such traditional objectscan, of course, be recently made as long as their con-nection to past models is recognizably authenticforexample, the squirrel parka from Looking Both Waysmentioned above.) In the primarily first-person accountsof boat building, elders, heritage activists, youth, andother participants in the workshop offer perspectives onkeeping the skills alive in changing times.

A range of Native ways of knowing come togetherin Qayaqs and Canoes: oral transmission from experi-enced elders, library and museum research by Native andnon-Native builders, aspirations to identity by youngerapprentices. In a variety of team contexts, young familymembers learn from older master builders; men learnseal-skin stitching (a traditional womans task); womenparticipate in kayak framing (formerly a mans job); anAleut activist of mixed heritage (an Anchorage policedetective who has rediscovered his Native past throughkayak research and construction) teaches the art to ayoung man of Inupiaq background and to a young Alutiiqwoman from Kodiak Island; an 88-year-old Athabaskanelder works in close collaboration with an anthropologydoctoral student (originally from North Dakota) record-ing traditional tools and techniques; an Alutiiq activistand tradition bearer learns kayak construction from ayoung New Englander who, through research and dedi-cated practice, has become expert in the craft, and theyboth find out about waterproof stitching from a womanof Cupik ancestry now living on Kodiak Island; theAleut and Alutiiq groups observe the Yupik teams whoare guided by more knowledgeable elders; extended net-works are activated (Got a call from my dad in Chigniksaying he had a good tip for me on dehairing skins).

Participants recall old stories of travel and contactamong different Alaskan populations, and they see theirinterethnic encounters at the Center as renewing thistradition. There are repeated references to a sense of ex-panded Native affiliations, the linking of different, newlyrelated heritages. Alutiiq participants recall listening tospoken Yupik and getting the gist. Elders find ways totranslate knowledge rooted in specific local hunting andgathering practices for younger apprentices raised inmore urban conditions. The performative nature of con-temporary heritage projects is visible across a range ofoccasions: the public accomplishment of painstakingcrafts and the final, exuberant celebrations, dramaticlaunchings on Kachemak Bay with traditional dancers,Orthodox prayers, formal speeches.

Different contexts of performancethe technicaldemonstrations and talk that pervaded the workshop, theintertribal exchanges, the public displays and celebra-tions, the circulation of an evocative, elegantly illus-trated bookactivate different audiences and situationsof translation. In their commentaries, the participantsrecognize that tradition is being renegotiated for newsituations. Young women express satisfaction at doing

work formerly restricted to men. Elders adjudicate whatpractices are bound by rules and what can be pragmat-ically altered. In an atmosphere of serious fun, peoplework within while pushing the limits of tradition. GraceHarrod, who taught the Alutiiq team waterproof stitch-ing, offers a humorous and far-reaching anecdote (Stein-bright and Mishler 2001:87):

I called my mom on the phone in Mekoryuk. I said,Mom, Im going to sew a kayak. Over the phoneshe just hollered, You dont know how. So, mydad, Peter Smith, got on the phone, and I said, Dad,Im going to sew a kayak. He said, Its going tosink in Eskimo. He started laughing. I said, Dad,its going to be in a museum. Theyre going to put itin a museum when Im done with it. He said, Goahead, sew it. It wont sink in a museum.

One might be inclined to interpret this kayak as atraditional object belonging to a nostalgic, postmodernculturea thing with meaning only as a specimen anda work of art, artificially separated from the currents ofhistorical change (thus unsinkable, in its museum).But this would privilege the authenticity of objects overthe social processes of transmitting and transformingknowledges and relationships. It would miss the multi-accented, intergenerational work of articulation, perfor-mance, and translation that goes into the kayaks pro-duction and interpretation. Similarly complex, open-ended social processes are at work in the identity for-mations of those who have recently come to be knownas Alutiiq.

Emergence and Articulation

Looking Both Ways documents an identity rearticulatedin new circumstances, a historical process of emergence.The name Alutiiq does not appear in Crossroads ofContinents, where the people south of the Yupik areprimarily described as Pacific Eskimo, and even in hermost recent book Fienup-Riordan (2000:9) writes of alarger family of Inuit cultures, extending from PrinceWilliam Sound on the Pacific Coast of Alaska . . . intoLabrador and Greenland. Linguistic form here overridesdifferences of subsistence, history, and environment. Butthe former Pacific Eskimo now reject identificationwith the Inuit/Inupiaq/Yupik cultural family.

Another long-standing term for the people representedin Looking Both Ways is Aleut. (Alutiiq was, in fact,an adaptation of the Russian Aleuty in the sound sys-tem of Sugstun.) A Russian misnomer for the chain is-landers (who generally now prefer to be called Unangan),Aleut, in its expanded usage, registers common his-torical experiences (Russian colonization, exploitation,massacres, religious conversion, intermarriage) as wellas shared maritime hunting economy and coastal sub-sistence. Linguistically, however, the chain islanders andpeople of Kodiak differ markedly, and while cultural andkinship ties are still significant, there has been a strong


recent tendency to distinguish Aleut from Alutiiq.Tactical name changesreflecting new articulations ofresistance, separation, community affiliation, and tribalgovernanceare familiar and, indeed, necessary aspectsof decolonizing indigenous politics.

Looking Both Ways makes serious attempts not tofreeze these processes by objectifying Alutiiqness. Itsstrong archaeological and historical emphases keepmany tangled roots in view. For example, early explorersplausibly related the inhabitants of Kodiak Island toGreenland Eskimos, to Siberians, to Aleutian island-ers, and to Indians (Athabaskans and Tlingit). In theirarchaeological, anthropological, and historical survey ofAlutiiq culture, Aron Crowell and Sonja Luhrmann(2001) provide evidence that at different moments eachof these connections made sense. Later, Russian influ-ences were strong, and the Orthodox religion would sinkdeep, tangled Native roots. In the late 1800s Scandina-vian immigrant fishermen influenced local practices andwere absorbed by kinship networks. The catalogues his-torical sections offer a multivocal, nonessentialist ac-count of a fundamentally interactive tradition. Gather-ing together much historical and archaeological evidencethat has been widely dispersed and never before madeaccessible to Native communities, Crowell, Luhrmann,Steffian, and Leer attempt the difficult task of telling acoherent Alutiiq story for the first time without mergingpast and present into a seamless culture. Since doc-umentary evidence, in Crowell and Luhrmanns words,is partial and imperfect at best (p. 30), they comple-ment the written record with Alutiiq oral narratives.

Patricia Partnow, an ethnographer who has just pub-lished Making History: Alutiiq/Sugpiaq Life in theAlaska Peninsula (2003), is the only contemporary non-Native cultural anthropologist represented in the vol-ume. (Jeff Leer, a linguist who has produced Kodiak Alu-tiiq dictionaries, pedagogical grammars, and place-namerecords, also makes important contributions.) Partnowacknowledges her mentor, the late elder Ignatius Kos-bruk, and many Alutiiq teachers. Until recently sheserved as vice president of education at the Alaska Na-tive Heritage Center. These relations indicate the kindsof involvements that make anthropological research pos-sible in a region where only a decade ago, as GordonPullar recalls, anthropologists were beginning to wearout their welcome (2001:78). Partnow reports her Alu-tiiq hosts lack of concern with definitive origins andsharp ethnic borders. By identifying themselves as Alu-tiiq, she writes, they were privileging one part of theirgenetic and cultural background and underplaying theirAthabaskan, Russian, Scandinavian, Irish, and Yupikparts (2001:69). Alutiiq identity is a selective rearticu-lation of diverse connections, a sense of continuity ex-pressed in elders traditional stories, both mythic andhistorical. (Partnow appears to confirm Julie Cruik-shanks [1998] penetrating view of Athabaskan eldersnarratives less as records of a past than as reconnectionsof fragmented realities and reframings of current issues.)Partnow identifies five core elements of identity: (1) tiesto land, (2) a shared history and continuity with the past,

(3) the Alutiiq or Sugstun language, (4) subsistence, and(5) kinship. These are not prescriptive elements of a cul-tural essence, a check-list of authenticity. In todays con-ditions of social and spatial mobility it is seldom possibleto exemplify all five points equally. Instead, people ac-centuate different parts of their Alutiiqness at differenttimes and in different places (p. 69). Alutiiq is a work-in-progress, a way of managing diversity and change.Each one of Partnows five elements has undergonetransformation since the Russians and, a century later,the Americans established colonial dominance. Thechanges continue through the intensifying indigenousmovements of the 1960s and the land settlements andcorporate reorganizations of the 70s and 80s.

alutiiq tides and currents

There is nothing ready-made about Alutiiqness in thechapter on contemporary Alutiiq identity written/as-sembled by Gordon Pullar. He begins by invoking hismother, who resolutely identified herself as Russianeven though her nearest truly Russian ancestors wereeight generations distant. He, by contrast, growing up inthe cold-war 1950s, had rejected this historical identitybut without a clear alternative. He cites others who, atthe time of ANCSA enrollment in the early 1970s, re-sisted pressures to identify themselves as Alutiiqsomebecause they felt that a Native identity would diminisha hard-won Americanness and others like his grand-mother, who commented: Are they trying to make anAleut out of you? (2001:74).

Pullar and the elders he cites make it clear that Alu-tiiq identification is something more than a return toan essential, continuous Native tradition. Considerabledisconnecting and reconnecting was involved in the pro-cesses out of which a new unity was forged. Clarifyingfuzzy borders with near neighbors involved specific re-alignments and a good deal of confusion. Pullar quotesMargaret Knowles at the 1997 elders conference thatguided Looking Both Ways (2001:81):

I realized that we are not the true Natives and thefact remained that we really didnt even know whowe were. And that really bothered me. It angered mebecause I . . . well, who are we? . . . I was embar-rassed when Id be around other groups, Yupiks,who absolutely knew who they were and where theywere from, . . . and I didnt. I didnt know. And theysaid, Well it depends on what anthropologist youtalk to. I always believed I was Aleut and thensomebody said, No, youre really Koniag. And,No, youre really Pacific Eskimo, No, youre Sug-piaq. No, youre really more related to theYupik.

Pullar traces the emergence of Alutiiq during the1970s as a series of reidentifications in a specific histor-ical conjuncture, the chaotic/creative aftermath ofANCSA.

Looking Both Ways represents an unusually clear and


perhaps extreme example of constitutive political artic-ulations that are active, to varying degrees, across thespectrum of Alaskan Native identities and traditions.The elder Roy Madsen invokes long lists of Russian andScandinavian names, comparing Alutiiq tradition tobits and pieces of seaweed and twigs in swirling waterswhere the ocean tide meets a stream. The culture, hewrites, has been pushed, shoved, jostled and propelledfrom the time of our earliest ancestors to the presentday. Madsen recalls the several languages he heard asa child (including Slavonic at church) and his fathersknowledge of English, Danish, German, and seven Es-kimo dialects. In the tides and currents of historicalchange, the homogeneous culture of our ancestors hasbeen transformed into the heterogeneous culture that weexperience today, mixed, mingled, blended and combinedwith those many other cultures, retaining some of eachbut still with some recognizable and acknowledged as-pects of the culture of our Alutiiq ancestors (2001:75).

Madsens vivid image of a culture in flux and recom-bination imagines not a traditional core resistingchange but rather a series of combinations of ancestraland foreign influences contributing to the survival andadaptation of a Native people (indigenous Russian Or-thodoxy is perhaps the most striking example). RobertLowie once famously described culture as a thing ofshreds and patches. Roy Madsen and many of the con-tributors to Looking Both Ways give this conception anindigenous historical specificity. If people are devoutlyOrthodox, it is because in the early years of brutal co-lonial exploitation a degree of safety could be found inreligious conversion, which brought with it Russian cit-izenship. If the Alutiiq (or Sugtsun) language is endan-gered, it is because of intense disruptions and all-too-familiar boarding school prohibitions. If some have feltreluctant to embrace Native identity, it is because mem-ories of bitter events (such as Grigorii Shelikhovs mas-sacre of Kodiak Islanders at Refuge Rock, a constitutivetrauma that Pullar highlights) have led to intense psychicrepression and a sense of hopelessness brought on bydecades of dependency on outsiders (Pullar 2001:76).But if indigenous memory, coming to terms with a sadhistory, tells and retells horror stories, it does so, in Look-ing Both Ways, to clear the way for a more hopeful fu-ture. Pullar and many others tell a story of struggle andrenewal.

Elders remember their confusion and outrage when in1931 Ales Hrdlicka arrived on Kodiak Island to dig uphuman remains for his research collections at the Smith-sonian. Looking Both Ways contains a photograph ofhundreds of boxes filled with bones awaiting reburial ata 1991 ceremony presided over by Alutiiq elders and Or-thodox priests. Pullar notes that the Larsen Bay repatri-ation movement came at a time when the search foridentity and cultural pride was underway on Kodiak Is-land. It became a symbol for tribal self-determination(2001:95). Here, as elsewhere in Native communities,repatriation has been a crucial process of healing andmoving on. John F. C. Johnson, chairman of the ChugachHeritage Foundation, contributes an essay on the return

of masks and other artifacts looted from caves in PrinceWilliam Sound. He writes: A cultural renaissance isnow sweeping across Alaska like a winter storm. Nativecultural centers and spirit camps for the Native youthare being built across this great land and in record num-bers (2001:93). Repatriation is a critical part of theseheritage movements. It establishes indigenous controlover cultural artifacts and thus the possibility of engag-ing with scientific research on something like equalterms. Repatriation is not, Johnson stresses, the end tothe thirst for knowledge, but is a new starting point inbuilding trust and cooperation. . . . Cooperation and part-nership with science is important if we want to under-stand the full picture of human history (p. 92).

Dawson (2001) discusses the establishment of the Alu-tiiq Museum and Archaeological Repository and de-scribes current archaeology programs that include youthinternships, elder participation, and the return of all dis-coveries to the community. Children from the Kodiakschools now come to the museum to touch our past andlearn about our people. The museum has helped turnaround local prejudices about being Native. And the re-searchers now must come to Kodiak to study the col-lections, instead of us begging for them (p. 90). As Stef-fian points out, archaeologys important role may bepartly due to the fact that Alutiiqswiftly conquered inthe eighteenth century by the Russians, devastated bydiseases, and for centuries participants in the capitalistworld systempreserved relatively less traditionalculture than other Alaskan groups (2001:130). Peopleconcerned with their Alutiiq heritage have needed, fig-uratively and literally, to dig into their past to findthemselves.19

While this history partly explains the openness ofmany Alutiit to ongoing archaeological research, a shiftin relations of authority and power has also been essen-tial. Steffian suggests as much in her discussion of part-nerships in archaeology (2001:12934). The self-deter-mination achieved through the Larsen Bay repatriationsestablished new relations with institutions such as theSmithsonian and the University of Alaska. At the sametime, the growth of Native-led corporations, museums,and heritage projects has provided new sites for organ-izing research and disseminating results. Finally, andcrucially, relations of trust and respect have been sus-tained over the past two decades by individual scholarsworking in long-term, reciprocal relations with com-munities. Knecht, reflecting on the seminal Karluk ex-cavation, concludes: As archaeologists we had come toKodiak to study Alutiiq culture but while doing so un-

19. The potential uses of archaeology by subordinate peoples tohelp maintain their pasts in the face of the universalizing and dom-inating processes of Westernization and Western science . . . [and]to maintain, reform, or even form a new identity or culture in theface of multinational encroachment, outside powers, or centralizedgovernment are emphasized by Ian Hodder in an important ar-gument for interpretive archaeology (1991:14). Hodder also rec-ognizes that there are no political guaranteesthat heritage ar-chaeology can be appropriated by development projects andgovernmental resource management.


wittingly became an inextricable part of the very culturehistory we had sought to understand (2001:134).

heritage relations, changing weather

The relationships are not without tension. When Daw-son defends archaeology, she also recognizes that manyobject to archaeological research as they feel it would bebetter left alone. For some this may be appropriate. Butfor me archaeology has opened a new world. The key isthat the Native people must control the research effort.Otherwise its just another rip-off, with scientists com-ing in and taking instead of sharing (2001:8990). Poweris openly an issue in the new research partnerships. Pul-lar (2001:78) takes a certain distance from the version ofAlutiiq anthropology, archaeology, and history presentedby Crowell and Luhrmann:

The results of academic research are, of course, im-portant in describing how Alutiiq people have cometo view themselves today. But at the same time, thereader must decide how the various views of Alutiiqculture and identity fit together. Listening to Alutiiqpeople about how they view their own history isequally important. There are times when the indige-nous viewpoint is diametrically opposed to that ofWestern scholarship. The age-old question what istruth? may be appropriate in this circumstance.The proposition that there can be more than onetruth is often overlooked.

Pullar does not object to anything specific in Crowelland Luhrmanns discussion (which weaves together ac-ademic research findings and elders memories) but ar-gues more generally that academic and Native positionsof authority need to be distinguished if new relations areto emerge. As do many indigenous intellectuals today,Pullar urges that traditional origin myths be given equalstatus alongside the findings of archaeology. The insis-tence is less on agreement than on respect. He traces theemergence on Kodiak Island of codes of ethics gov-erning scientific research (prior community permission,direct participation, sharing of results). Of course, morethan a few scholars will be reluctant to accept such lim-itations, withdrawing to less fraught research contextswhile privatelyand sometimes publiclyprotestingagainst religious obscurantism and political censorship.Among indigenous activists a corresponding suspicion isreinforced by painful histories of arrogant, intrusive,or exploitative scientific collecting. Indeed, Pullarsappeal for equality of indigenous myth and Westernscience may represent, for the moment, a utopian vi-sion, given histories of mutual suspicion and persistentpower imbalances (for example, the unequal struggle oforal tradition and documentary evidence in land-claimslitigation). In the face of these antagonistic legacies,Looking Both Ways proposes a space in which, as Pullarsays, the reader must decide how the various views ofAlutiiq culture and identity fit together. Crowell, in hisintroductory chapter, traces changing academic practices

and argues for the specificity and thus partiality of allways of looking at culturefrom both the outside andthe inside (2001:8). Part genuine coalition, part respect-ful truce, Looking Both Ways offers varied perspectivesthat need to be adjusted, weighed, and assembled. Whatis proposed by all contributors to the volume is not atake-it-or leave-it vision of scientific versus Native truthbut a pragmatic relationship: live-and-let-live wherethere is opposition, collaboration in the considerable ar-eas of overlap.

Lines are drawn around heritage and identity but nothardened. Sven Haakanson Jr., a recent Ph.D. in anthro-pology from Harvard and currently director of the AlutiiqMuseum, offers a pointed meditation on the predicamentof the Native anthropologist. He gives no absoluteprivilege to insider knowledge (his own academicfieldwork was among Siberian reindeer herders) and askswhy the Native anthropologist is always, in effect, re-quired to speak from an emic rather than an eticposition. Is not the whole purpose of research to learn,including the exploration of different approaches toknowing (hermeneutics)? If Natives cannot write fromboth Native and scientific perspectives then what is thepurpose of doing anthropology? (2001:79). Citing theexamples of Knud Rasmussen (Greenlandic Inuit/Dan-ish), Oscar Kawagley (Yupik), and Alfonzo Ortiz (Tewa),Haakanson argues that Native approaches to the field,while not necessarily better, are just as valid as anyothers. As do many others in Looking Both Ways, herecognizes differential authorities while sustaining,where possible, contexts of exchange and translation.

The Alutiiq heritage visible here is not a single thing,with sharply defined insides and outsides. In Pul-lars words, it is defined by a mosaic of historical eventsand overlapping criteria (2001:95). Inflexible measuresof belonging such as the blood quantum required forANCSA enrollment in practice exclude many who can-not be sure of their exact ancestry. Looking Both Waysemphasizes kinship, including alliance as well asblood (pp. 9596). This relational way of being Alutiiqdepends on participation in Native life: residence in avillage, Orthodox religious practice, language use, sub-sistence activities, heritage revival and transmission.Alutiiqness is thus something constantly rearticulatedin changing circumstances and power-charged relationswith relatives and outsiders. Indeed, one is left with theimpression that the political label Alutiiq, although itis becoming institutionally entrenched (with the help ofprojects like Looking Both Ways), cannot be a definitivetribal or national name. In some communitiesAleut is still favored, and whereas Alutiiq stronglysuggests Pullars historical mosaic, an alternative eth-nonym, Sugpiaq, evokes ties with older, pre-Russiantraditions. People use more than one term, depending onthe audience and the occasion.

In Looking Both Ways descriptions of traditional formsof life (archaeological and ethnographic artifacts, inter-spersed with elders statements) evoke facets of a dis-tinctive style: our way of living. To call this way ofliving Alutiiq consolidates and marks off a discrete


identity. Scholars have understood similar processes ofsocial differentiation as ethnic boundary-marking(Barth 1969), the processual invention of culture (Wag-ner 1981), and ethnogenesis (Roosens 1989, Hill 1996).Each of these approaches captures something of what isgoing on.20 All assume that selective, creative culturalmemory, border policing, and transgression are funda-mental aspects of collective agency. Culture is articu-lated, performed, and translated, with varying degrees ofpower, in specific relational situations. Economic pres-sures and changing governmental policies are very muchpart of the process, and so are changing ideological con-texts (for example, post-1960s cultural movements andthe development of global indigenous politics). Com-ponents of traditionoral sources, written texts, andmaterial artifactsare rediscovered and rewoven. At-tachments to place, to changing subsistence practices,to circuits of migration and family visiting are affirmed.None of this suggests a wholly new genesis, a made-upidentity, a postmodernist simulacrum, or the rathernarrowly political invention of tradition analyzed by

Documents

Clifford J. Looking Several Ways - Anthropology and Native Heritage in Alaska