Fienup-Riordan, Ann (ed.), 2003 Qulirat Qanemcit-llu Kinguvarcimalriit, Stories for Future Generations: The Oratory of Yup’ik Elder Paul John, Bethel, Calista Elders Council, and Seattle, University of Washington Press, stories translated by Sophie Shield, 778 pages.

The volume begins with a short preface explaining the creative process behind the production of the volume and is followed by two introductory chapters. The first is a biographical chapter on Paul John. This chapter combines Paul John’s own words about his life, with Fienup-Riordan’s historical and biographical contextualization. This chapter gives the reader some background on Paul John and his early “Yup’ik education,” gained through living in the traditional qasgi, or men’s house, with his father, learning how to drive a dog team, paddle a kayak, use a spear-thrower, shoot a gun, set snares and fish traps, and all of the other things one must know to live as a “real Yup’ik.” Paul John quickly became a powerful political leader in his community and in his elder years has become one of the Delta’s most respected cultural leaders. The second introductory chapter provides some brief background on common forms of Yup’ik oratory. It delves into an insightful, and at times analytical, discussion of how Paul John’s own struggles to integrate modern practices (Western education, Christianity, and participation in the market economy) with traditional practices (subsistence hunting and fishing, Eskimo dancing and sharing) shape not only what stories John chooses to give to the younger generations, but how he tells them as well. For as Fienup-Riordan explains, “the properly lived Yup’ik life is [often] explained with reference to that which it is not.” Many of the stories in this volume reflect Paul John’s awareness of growing influence of Kass’at ways of life and culture on the younger Yup’ik generations, and his stories appropriate these images and terms to represent areas of tension and synchronicity between the two cultures. The performances are organized into 13 “narrative sets” grouped by Fienup-Riordan to reflect primary relationships. These include, “A’ka Tamanni Yuullrat: Life in the Past,” “Yuut Ungungsiit-llu: Humans and Animals,” “Angutet Arnat-llu: Men and Women,” “Yupiuyaraq: Becoming a Yup’ik Person,” “Angalkut: Shamans,” “Nukalpait: Great Hunters,” “Ellminek Ikayuryqraq Yuilqumi: Yupik Survival Skills,” and several more. The chapters and the stories within each chapter are presented in the order they were told by Paul John, and the only intrusions upon his original performance are in the form of whispery endnotes that provide some contextualizing information about key Yup’ik concepts, practices or sayings. This volume does not provide an extensive background on Coastal Yup’ik beliefs, practices and ways of knowing, and should be approached with caution by those inexperienced with Yup’ik culture. Fienup-Riordan’s (1996) volume Boundaries and Passages: Rule and ritual in Yup’ik oral tradition provides a nice companion volume to John’s oratory and is suggested along with Morrow and Schneider’s (1998) When Our Words Return, Writing, hearing and remembering oral traditions of Alaska and the Yukon as background reading for those who may need or desire more explication on the role of oratory, narrative and performance for Yupiit both of the past and today. This volume provides not only a wealth of cultural and historical information, but through its meticulous transliteration it also provides a library of linguistic knowledge as well. Sophie Shield was the sole transcriber and translator for all 38 of the original recordings. Shield chose a prose method of representing the oral performances, but as Fienup-Riordan points out, “her paragraphs are no longer arbitrary groupings disconnected from Paul’s original performance,” but instead maintain much of the flow and natural breaks that occurred in the oral versions. The sheer length of the volume would have prohibited the “short-line” verse format that many now use in the literary representation of Native …