Julie Cruikshank

Do Glaciers Listen? explores the conflicting depictions of glaciers to show how natural and cultural histories are objectively entangled in the Mount Saint Elias ranges. This rugged area, where Alaska, British Columbia, and the Yukon Territory now meet, underwent significant geophysical change in the late eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, which coincided with dramatic social upheaval resulting from European exploration and increased travel and trade among Aboriginal peoples.European visitors brought with them varying conceptions of nature as sublime, as spiritual, or as a resource for human progress. They saw glaciers as inanimate, subject to empirical investigation and measurement. Aboriginal oral histories, conversely, described glaciers as sentient, animate, and quick to respond to human behaviour. In each case, however, the experiences and ideas surrounding glaciers were incorporated into interpretations of social relations.Focusing on these contrasting views during the late stages of the Little Ice Age (1550-1900), Cruikshank demonstrates how local knowledge is produced, rather than discovered, through colonial encounters, and how it often conjoins social and biophysical processes. She then traces how the divergent views weave through contemporary debates about cultural meanings as well as current discussions about protected areas, parks, and the new World Heritage site. Readers interested in anthropology and Native and northern studies will find this a fascinating read and a rich addition to circumpolar literature.

1992 Sir John A. McDonald Prize, sponsored by the Canadian Historical Association, winnerOf Athapaskan and Tlingit ancestry, Angela Sidney, Kitty Smith, and Annie Ned lived in the southern Yukon Territory for nearly a century. They collaborated with Julie Cruikshank, an assistant professor in the Department of Anthropology at the University of British Columbia, to produce this unique kind of autobiography.

In this theoretically sophisticated study of indigenous oral narratives, Julie Cruikshank moves beyond the text to explore the social significance of storytelling. Circumpolar Native peoples today experience strikingly different and often competing systems of narrative and knowledge. These systems include traditional oral stories; the authoritative, literate voice of the modern state; and the narrative forms used by academic disciplines to represent them to outsiders. Pressured by other systems of narrative and truth, how do Native peoples use their stories and find them still meaningful in the late twentieth century? Why does storytelling continue to thrive? What can anthropologists learn from the structure and performance of indigenous narratives to become better academic storytellers themselves? Cruikshank addresses these questions by deftly blending the stories gathered from her own fieldwork with interdisciplinary theoretical perspectives on dialogue and storytelling, including the insights of Walter Benjamin, Mikhail Bakhtin, and Harold Innis. Her analysis reveals the many ways in which the artistry and structure of storytelling mediate between social action and local knowledge in indigenous northern communities.

Cruikshank, Julie

This book presents a photographic record of social, economic and cultural changes experienced by Indian people in one part of northern Canada--the Yukon Territory. The uniqueness of this album lies in the origins of the photos. Most of them were taken by Indian men and women who have kept them as records of daily life in the early decades of this century. They illustrate changes which have occurred since the coming of white men at the turn of the century - changes brought first by gold seekers, trappers and traders, and then by the development of commercial trapping, trading posts, riverboat transportation, woodcamps, church schools, and so on.