A Russian American Photographer in Tlingit Country

A Russian American Photographer in Tlingit Country PDF Author: Sergei Kan
Publisher: University of Oklahoma Press
ISBN: 0806189290
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 285

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Book Description
This book is a rich record of life in small-town southeastern Alaska in the late 1800s and early 1900s. It is the first book to showcase the photographs of Vincent Soboleff, an amateur Russian American photographer whose community included Tlingit Indians from a nearby village as well as Russian Americans, so-called Creoles, who worked in a local fertilizer factory. Using a Kodak camera, Soboleff, the son of a Russian Orthodox priest, documented the life of this multiethnic parish at work and at play until 1920. Despite their significance, few of Soboleff’s photographs have been published since their discovery in 1950. Anthropologist Sergei Kan rectifies that oversight in A Russian American Photographer in Tlingit Country, which brings together more than 100 of Soboleff’s striking black-and-white images. Combining Soboleff’s photographs with ethnographic fieldwork and archival research, Kan brings to life the communities of Killisnoo, where Soboleff grew up, and Angoon, the Tlingit village. The photographs gathered here depict Russian Creoles, Euro-Americans, the operation of the Killisnoo factory, and the daily life of its workers. But Soboleff’s work is especially valuable as a record of Tlingit life. As a member of this multiethnic community, he was able to take unusually personal photographs of people and daily life. Soboleff’s photographs offer candid and intimate glimpses into Tlingit people’s then-new economic pursuits such as commercial fishing, selling berries, and making “Indian curios” to sell to tourists. Other images show white, Creole, and Native factory workers rubbing shoulders while keeping a certain distance during leisure time. Kan offers readers, historians, and photography lovers a beautiful visual resource on Tlingit and Russian American life that shows how the two cultures intertwined in southeastern Alaska at the turn of the past century.

A Russian American Photographer in Tlingit Country

A Russian American Photographer in Tlingit Country PDF Author: Sergei Kan
Publisher: University of Oklahoma Press
ISBN: 0806189290
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 285

Get Book Here

Book Description
This book is a rich record of life in small-town southeastern Alaska in the late 1800s and early 1900s. It is the first book to showcase the photographs of Vincent Soboleff, an amateur Russian American photographer whose community included Tlingit Indians from a nearby village as well as Russian Americans, so-called Creoles, who worked in a local fertilizer factory. Using a Kodak camera, Soboleff, the son of a Russian Orthodox priest, documented the life of this multiethnic parish at work and at play until 1920. Despite their significance, few of Soboleff’s photographs have been published since their discovery in 1950. Anthropologist Sergei Kan rectifies that oversight in A Russian American Photographer in Tlingit Country, which brings together more than 100 of Soboleff’s striking black-and-white images. Combining Soboleff’s photographs with ethnographic fieldwork and archival research, Kan brings to life the communities of Killisnoo, where Soboleff grew up, and Angoon, the Tlingit village. The photographs gathered here depict Russian Creoles, Euro-Americans, the operation of the Killisnoo factory, and the daily life of its workers. But Soboleff’s work is especially valuable as a record of Tlingit life. As a member of this multiethnic community, he was able to take unusually personal photographs of people and daily life. Soboleff’s photographs offer candid and intimate glimpses into Tlingit people’s then-new economic pursuits such as commercial fishing, selling berries, and making “Indian curios” to sell to tourists. Other images show white, Creole, and Native factory workers rubbing shoulders while keeping a certain distance during leisure time. Kan offers readers, historians, and photography lovers a beautiful visual resource on Tlingit and Russian American life that shows how the two cultures intertwined in southeastern Alaska at the turn of the past century.

Symbolic Immortality

Symbolic Immortality PDF Author: Sergei Kan
Publisher: University of Washington Press
ISBN: 0295806281
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 417

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Book Description
Decades after its initial publication, Symbolic Immortality retains its status as the most comprehensive analysis of the mortuary practices of the Tlingit Indians of southeastern Alaska—or any other indigenous culture of the Northwest Coast. This updated and expanded edition furthers our understanding of the potlatch (koo.éex’) as a total social phenomenon, with emotional and religious as well as economic and sociopolitical dimensions. The result is a major contribution to both Northwest Coast ethnology and theoretical literature on the anthropology of death.

Painful Beauty

Painful Beauty PDF Author: Megan A. Smetzer
Publisher: University of Washington Press
ISBN: 0295748958
Category : Art
Languages : en
Pages : 238

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Book Description
For over 150 years, Tlingit women artists have beaded colorful, intricately beautiful designs on moccasins, dolls, octopus bags, tunics, and other garments. Painful Beauty suggests that at a time when Indigenous cultural practices were actively being repressed, beading supported cultural continuity, demonstrating Tlingit women’s resilience, strength, and power. Beadwork served many uses, from the ceremonial to the economic, as women created beaded pieces for community use and to sell to tourists. Like other Tlingit art, beadwork reflects rich artistic visions with deep connections to the environment, clan histories, and Tlingit worldviews. Contemporary Tlingit artists Alison Bremner, Chloe French, Shgen Doo Tan George, Lily Hudson Hope, Tanis S’eiltin, and Larry McNeil foreground the significance of historical beading practices in their diverse, boundary-pushing artworks. Working with museum collection materials, photographs, archives, and interviews with artists and elders, Megan Smetzer reframes this often overlooked artform as a site of historical negotiations and contemporary inspirations. She shows how beading gave Tlingit women the freedom to innovate aesthetically, assert their clan crests and identities, support tribal sovereignty, and pass on cultural knowledge. Painful Beauty is the first dedicated study of Tlingit beadwork and contributes to the expanding literature addressing women’s artistic expressions on the Northwest Coast.

Sharing Our Knowledge

Sharing Our Knowledge PDF Author: Sergei Kan
Publisher: U of Nebraska Press
ISBN: 0803240562
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 541

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Book Description
"An edited volume of interdisciplinary, collaborative research on Tlingit culture, language, and history"--

A Dangerous Idea

A Dangerous Idea PDF Author: Peter Metcalfe
Publisher: University of Alaska Press
ISBN: 1602232407
Category : Law
Languages : en
Pages : 161

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Book Description
Decades before the marches and victories of the 1960s, a group of Alaska Natives were making civil rights history. Throughout the early twentieth century, the Alaska Native Brotherhood fought for citizenship, voting rights, and education for all Alaska Natives, securing unheard-of victories in a contentious time. Their unified work and legal prowess propelled the Alaska Native Claims Settlement Act, one of the biggest claim settlements in United States history. A Dangerous Idea tells an overlooked but powerful story of Alaska Natives fighting for their rights under American law and details one of the rare successes for Native Americans in their nearly two-hundred-year effort to define and protect their rights.

Space-Time Colonialism

Space-Time Colonialism PDF Author: Juliana Hu Pegues
Publisher: UNC Press Books
ISBN: 1469656191
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 233

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Book Description
As the enduring "last frontier," Alaska proves an indispensable context for examining the form and function of American colonialism, particularly in the shift from western continental expansion to global empire. In this richly theorized work, Juliana Hu Pegues evaluates four key historical periods in U.S.-Alaskan history: the Alaskan purchase, the Gold Rush, the emergence of salmon canneries, and the World War II era. In each, Hu Pegues recognizes colonial and racial entanglements between Alaska Native peoples and Asian immigrants. In the midst of this complex interplay, the American colonial project advanced by differentially racializing and gendering Indigenous and Asian peoples, constructing Asian immigrants as "out of place" and Alaska Natives as "out of time." Counter to this space-time colonialism, Native and Asian peoples created alternate modes of meaning and belonging through their literature, photography, political organizing, and sociality. Offering an intersectional approach to U.S. empire, Indigenous dispossession, and labor exploitation, Space-Time Colonialism makes clear that Alaska is essential to understanding both U.S. imperial expansion and the machinations of settler colonialism.

Picture Man

Picture Man PDF Author: Margaret Thomas
Publisher: University of Alaska Press
ISBN: 1602232458
Category : Art
Languages : en
Pages : 149

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Book Description
In 1912, Shoki Kayamori and his box camera arrived in a small Tlingit village in southeast Alaska. At a time when Asian immigrants were forbidden to own property and faced intense racial pressure, the Japanese-born Kayamori put down roots and became part of the Yakutat community. For three decades he photographed daily life in the village, turning his lens on locals and migrants alike, and gaining the nickname “Picture Man.” But as World War II drew near, his passion for photography turned dangerous, as government officials called out Kayamori as a potential spy. Despondent, Kayamori committed suicide, leaving behind an enigmatic photographic legacy. In Picture Man, Margaret Thomas views Kayamori’s life through multiple lenses. Using Kayamori’s original photos, she explores the economic and political realities that sent Kayamori and thousands like him out of Japan toward opportunity and adventure in the United States, especially the Pacific Northwest. She reveals the tensions around Asian immigrants on the West Coast and the racism that sent many young men north to work in the canneries of Alaska. And she illuminates the intersecting—and at times conflicting—lives of villagers and migrants in a time of enormous change. Part history, part biography, part photographic showcase, Picture Man offers a fascinating new view of Alaska history.

Ragged Coast, Rugged Coves

Ragged Coast, Rugged Coves PDF Author: Diane J. Purvis
Publisher: U of Nebraska Press
ISBN: 1496228510
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 416

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Book Description
Ragged Coast, Rugged Coves explores the untold story of cannery workers in Southeast Alaska from 1878, when the first cannery was erected on the Alexander Archipelago, through the Cold War. The cannery jobs brought waves of immigrants, starting with Chinese, followed by Japanese, and then Filipino nationals. Working alongside these men were Alaska Native women, trained from childhood in processing salmon. Because of their expertise, these women remained the mainstay of employment in these fish factories for decades while their husbands or brothers fished, often for the same company. Canned salmon was territorial Alaska’s most important industry. The tax revenue, though meager, kept the local government running, and as corporate wealth grew, it did not take long for a mix of socioeconomic factors and politics to affect every aspect of the lands, waters, and population. During this time the workers formed a bond and shared their experiences, troubles, and joys. Alaska Natives and Chinese, Japanese, and Filipino immigrants brought elements from their ethnic heritage into the mix, creating a cannery culture. Although the labor was difficult and frequently unsafe, the cannery workers and fishermen were not victims. When they saw injustice, they acted on the threat. In the process, the Tlingits and Haidas, clans of Southeast Alaska for more than ten thousand years, aligned their interests with Filipino activists and the union movement. Ragged Coast, Rugged Coves tells the powerful story of diverse peoples uniting to triumph over adversity.

Going to the People

Going to the People PDF Author: Jeffrey Veidlinger
Publisher: Indiana University Press
ISBN: 0253019168
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 364

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Book Description
“A remarkable achievement, demonstrating the vitality of Jewish folklore and ethnographic studies a hundred years after An-sky’s pioneering expedition.” —Folklore Taking S. An-sky’s expeditions to the Pale of Jewish Settlement as its point of departure, the volume explores the dynamic and many-sided nature of ethnographic knowledge and the long and complex history of the production and consumption of Jewish folk traditions. These essays by historians, anthropologists, musicologists, and folklorists showcase some of the finest research in the field. They reveal how the collection, analysis, and preservation of ethnography intersect with questions about the construction and delineation of community, the preservation of Jewishness, the meaning of belief, the significance of retrieving cultural heritage, the politics of accessing and memorializing “lost” cultures, and the problem of narration, among other topics. “Going to the People proves itself a useful addition to scholarship on Jewish folklore and ethnography by introducing major issues in these fields, as well as the historical figures and contemporary scholars who have shaped (and continue to shape) their development.” —Western Folklore “This book’s essays portray the various threads and trends in Jewish ethnography in Poland and Soviet Russia, the US, the new Jewish State of Israel and, eventually, in postcommunist societies. The endurance and evolution of Jewish folk culture is analyzed using techniques applicable to all groups and communities. . . . Recommended.” —Choice “I read through this collection with pleasure and fascination. . . . These are valuable voices that should be heard.” —Gabriella Safran, Stanford University “This volume brings together some of the most innovative research in the field.” —Eugene Avrutin, author of Photographing the Jewish Nation: Pictures from S. An-sky’s Ethnographic Expeditions

Through a Native Lens

Through a Native Lens PDF Author: Nicole Strathman
Publisher: University of Oklahoma Press
ISBN: 0806167068
Category : Photography
Languages : en
Pages : 241

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Book Description
What is American Indian photography? At the turn of the twentieth century, Edward Curtis began creating romantic images of American Indians, and his works—along with pictures by other non-Native photographers—came to define the field. Yet beginning in the second half of the nineteenth century, American Indians themselves started using cameras to record their daily activities and to memorialize tribal members. Through a Native Lens offers a refreshing, new perspective by highlighting the active contributions of North American Indians, both as patrons who commissioned portraits and as photographers who created collections. In this richly illustrated volume, Nicole Dawn Strathman explores how indigenous peoples throughout the United States and Canada appropriated the art of photography and integrated it into their lifeways. The photographs she analyzes date to the first one hundred years of the medium, between 1840 and 1940. To account for Native activity both in front of and behind the camera, the author divides her survey into two parts. Part I focuses on Native participants, including such public figures as Sarah Winnemucca and Red Cloud, who fashioned themselves in deliberate ways for their portraits. Part II examines Native professional, semiprofessional, and amateur photographers. Drawing from tribal and state archives, libraries, museums, and individual collections, Through a Native Lens features photographs—including some never before published—that range from formal portraits to casual snapshots. The images represent multiple tribal communities across Native North America, including the Inland Tlingit, Northern Paiute, and Kiowa. Moving beyond studies of Native Americans as photographic subjects, this groundbreaking book demonstrates how indigenous peoples took control of their own images and distinguished themselves as pioneers of photography.