IPI Press

The Man Who Became a Caribou
by Craig Mishler and Kenneth Frank

480 pages
16 pages color photographs
Illustrations throughout

6 5/8 x 9 1/2"
October 2019

ISBN 9780996748070
$37.50, paperback





Dinjii Vadzaih Dhidlit: The Man Who Became a Caribou is a new bilingual volume based on a series of oral interviews with Gwich'in elders living in rural northeast Alaska and the Yukon Territory. Richly illustrated, the book covers a wide range of topics based on traditional harvesting and use of caribou from ancient to contemporary times. It also reveals traditional beliefs and taboos about caribou and includes a detailed naming system for caribou anatomy.

Recording the traditional ethnoscientific knowledge Gwich’in elders have about caribou in their oral narratives and in their hunting lexicon has far-reaching implications for zooarchaeology, for applied linguistics, for wildlife co-management, and for folklore and cultural anthropology. It is an empirical approach which essentially weds natural science with the humanities, osteology with verbal art. The topics included herein form a nucleus of many specialized study areas such as linguistic anthropology, zoosemiotics, ethnoscience, ethnozoology, osteology, and cultural ecology. And the Gwich’in ways of hunting, butchering and processing, preserving, storing, cooking, serving, tasting, and sharing food from the caribou, are all key elements in an ecological knowledge system. 
--from the Introduction

While there has been attention to caribou, I do not know of any work that looks at caribou in this way, drawing on the knowledge of the Gwich’in (or any other northern group) in such a deep and first-hand way. The book spans many important areas, including what in western science would be identified as natural sciences, social sciences, and humanities. It makes outstanding contributions in these areas. It also still stands out in the overt recognition of the importance of the unfiltered voices of those who live with the caribou.
--Keren Rice, University of Toronto

This manuscript is an extensive collection of narratives. It presents an abundance of new data on an endangered language with extraordinary detail, grammatical and discursive. It also makes a critical contribution to the resources indigenous communities have for developing curriculum materials and institutionalizing indigenous studies in schools and elsewhere. Finally, it provides an amazing compendium of knowledge for resource management in the subarctic. 
--Barbra Meek, University of Michigan