Samisa, a young Arctic Inuit in the alien white society of Montreal - virtually friendless, deprived of his beloved through a vicious, cruel twist of fate, wrongly accused of murder for killing a tormentor in self-defense. In a probing, powerful novel examining the human condition, author Charles Macelli has created one of modern fiction's most complex and intriguing individuals.
“My name is Weetaltuk; Eddy Weetaltuk. My Eskimo tag name is E9-422.” So begins From the Tundra to the Trenches. Weetaltuk means “innocent eyes” in Inuktitut, but to the Canadian government, he was known as E9-422: E for Eskimo, 9 for his community, 422 to identify Eddy. In 1951, Eddy decided to leave James Bay. Because Inuit weren’t allowed to leave the North, he changed his name and used this new identity to enlist in the Canadian Forces: Edward Weetaltuk, E9-422, became Eddy Vital, SC-17515, and headed off to fight in the Korean War. In 1967, after fifteen years in the Canadian Forces, Eddy returned home. He worked with Inuit youth struggling with drug and alcohol addiction, and, in 1974, started writing his life’s story. This compelling memoir traces an Inuk’s experiences of world travel and military service. Looking back on his life, Weetaltuk wanted to show young Inuit that they can do and be what they choose. From the Tundra to the Trenches is the fourth book in the First Voices, First Texts series, which publishes lost or underappreciated texts by Indigenous writers. This new English edition of Eddy Weetaltuk’s memoir includes a foreword and appendix by Thibault Martin and an introduction by Isabelle St-Amand.
"One of the great strengths of Arctic Voices is that it shows how Alaska and the Arctic are tied to the places where most of us live. In this impassioned book, Banerjee shows a situation so serious that it has created a movement, where 'voices of resistance are gathering, are getting louder and louder.' May his heartfelt efforts magnify them. The climate changes that are coming have hit soon and hard in the Arctic, and their consequences may be starkest there."–Ian Frazier, The New York Review of Books A pristine environment of ecological richness and biodiversity. Home to generations of indigenous people for thousands of years. The location of vast quantities of oil, natural gas and coal. Largely uninhabited and long at the margins of global affairs, in the last decade Arctic Alaska has quickly become the most contested land in recent US history. World-renowned photographer, writer, and activist Subhankar Banerjee brings together first-person narratives from more than thirty prominent activists, writers, and researchers who address issues of climate change, resource war, and human rights with stunning urgency and groundbreaking research. From Gwich'in activist Sarah James's impassioned appeal, "We Are the Ones Who Have Everything to Lose," during the UN Climate Conference in Copenhagen in 2009 to an original piece by acclaimed historian Dan O'Neill about his recent trips to the Yukon Flats fish camps, Arctic Voices is a window into a remarkable region. Other contributors include Seth Kantner, Velma Wallis, Nick Jans, Debbie Miller, Andri Snaer Magnason, George Schaller, George Archibald, Cindy Shogan, and Peter Matthiessen.
A "passionate amalgam of science and autobiography" that will leave you hearing -- and seeing -- nature as never before (New York Times Book Review). Musician and naturalist Bernie Krause is one of the world's leading experts in natural sound, and he's spent his life discovering and recording nature's rich chorus. Searching far beyond our modern world's honking horns and buzzing machinery, he has sought out the truly wild places that remain, where natural soundscapes exist virtually unchanged from when the earliest humans first inhabited the earth. Krause shares fascinating insight into how deeply animals rely on their aural habitat to survive and the damaging effects of extraneous noise on the delicate balance between predator and prey. But natural soundscapes aren't vital only to the animal kingdom; Krause explores how the myriad voices and rhythms of the natural world formed a basis from which our own musical expression emerged. From snapping shrimp, popping viruses, and the songs of humpback whales -- whose voices, if unimpeded, could circle the earth in hours -- to cracking glaciers, bubbling streams, and the roar of intense storms; from melody-singing birds to the organlike drone of wind blowing over reeds, the sounds Krause has experienced and describes are like no others. And from recording jaguars at night in the Amazon rain forest to encountering mountain gorillas in Africa's Virunga Mountains, Krause offers an intense and intensely personal narrative of the planet's deep and connected natural sounds and rhythm. The Great Animal Orchestra is the story of one man's pursuit of natural music in its purest form, and an impassioned case for the conservation of one of our most overlooked natural resources-the music of the wild.
In 1903, aspiring journalist Robert Dunn joined an expedition attempting the first ascent of Mt. McKinley, the highest mountain in North America. Led by explorer Frederick Cook (who would later win infamy for faking the discovery of the North Pole), the climbers failed to conquer McKinley, but they did circumnavigate the great peak-an accomplishment not repeated until 1978. The trek also spawned a book unique in the literature of exploration: Dunn's frank, sardonic, no-holds-barred look at day-to-day existence on an Alaskan expedition. Before Dunn, most such accounts were sanitized and expurgated of anything unflattering. Dunn, however, a protege of the muckraker Lincoln Steffens, endeavored to report what he saw, with panache. And what Dunn reported was a journey rife with conflict, missed opportunity, incompetence, privation, and danger. By showing men reduced to their rawest state, the young journalist produced a compelling, insightful, and oddly amusing book that disturbed and riveted his contemporaries. As Hudson Stuck-the Episcopal archdeacon of the Yukon who completed the first ascent of Mt. McKinley in 1913-observed, "[Dunn's] book has a curious undeniable power, despite its brutal frankness. ... One is thankful, however, that it is unique in the literature of travel."
Combining practical, student-centered activities with an annotated bibliography of more than 160 children's books, this guide models ways for classroom teachers to teach geography through children's literature. Chapters based on the five themes of the Geographic Standards present a variety of activities that teach students important geographic concepts. The extensive bibliography provides summaries of books, suggested teaching activities, and cross-references to other books; a list of teacher resources is also included. Attractive line drawings accompany the conversational text. Anyone looking for an effective way to teach geography at the elementary level will want this book and middle and high school educators will find useful extensions for older students. The work offers a great way to integrate geography into the curriculum.
The shamanic understanding of animals as guides to self-knowledge and the soul comes alive in close encounters with some of the most magnificent creatures of the wild.
The Art of Persistence examines the relations between art and politics in transwar Japan, exploring these via a microhistory of the artist, memoirist, and activist Akamatsu Toshiko (also known as Maruki Toshi, 1912–2000). Scaling up from the details of Akamatsu’s lived experience, the book addresses major events in modern Japanese history, including colonization and empire, war, the nuclear bombings, and the transwar proletarian movement. More broadly, it outlines an ethical position known as persistence, which occupies the grey area between complicity and resistance: Like resilience, persistence signals a commitment to not disappearing—a fierce act of taking up space but often from a position of privilege, among the classes and people in power. Akamatsu grew up in a settler-colonial family in rural Hokkaido before attending arts college in Tokyo and becoming one of the first women to receive formal training as an oil painter in Japan. She later worked as a governess in the home of a Moscow diplomat and traveled to the Japanese Mandate in Micronesia before returning home to write and illustrate children’s books set in the Pacific. She married the surrealist poet and painter Maruki Iri (1901–1995), and together in 1948—and in defiance of Occupation censorship—they began creating and exhibiting the Nuclear Series, some of the most influential and powerful artwork depicting the aftermath of the Hiroshima bombing. For the next forty or more years, the couple toured the world to protest war and nuclear proliferation and were nominated for the Nobel Peace Prize in 1995. With abundant excerpts and drawings from Akamatsu’s journals and sketchbooks, The Art of Persistence offers a bridge between scholarship on imperial Japan and postwar memory cultures, arguing for the importance of each individual’s historical agency. While uncovering the longue durée of Japan’s visual cultures of war, it charts the development of the national(ist) “literature for little citizens” movement and Japan’s postwar reorientation toward global multiculturalism. Finally, the work proposes ways to enlist artwork generally, and the museum specifically, as a site of ethical engagement.
