Crooked on the Stretcher Board

Craig Mishler
with Kenneth Drizhuu Frank

November 2023, 6.5 x 9.25"
436 pages
$45 cloth
ISBN 978-9-884732-2-0

"Mishler's decades of commitment, his long affiliation with the Gwich'in communities and research collaborations with [Kenneth] Frank and other Gwich'in knowledge keepers is evident throughout the text. This book clearly is written with the inspiration, tutelage, language, cultural expertise, and teaching experience of Frank, with whom Mishler has been a research and writing partner with since the mid-1990s. It is from their several scholarly publications, oral presentations, and professional papers that these essays are born. Mishler and Frank's unique, meticulously researched, pleasant writing style and ability to inform the reader about the historical connections and context to the subject, is what makes their work so important." – Leslie McCartney, from the Foreword.

Craig Mishler has been doing ethnographic field work in Alaska since 1972. He is the author, co-author, or editor of 10 books, including Dinjii Vadzaih Dhidlit: The Man Who Became a Caribou, published with Kenneth Frank in 2020 by the IPI Press. This newest book of essays marks 50 years of careful observation, reflective thought, and friendship with the Gwich'in nation.

Kenneth Drizhuu Frank is an indigenous Gwich'in elder, storyteller, and traditional drummer from Venetie and Arctic Village, Alaska. Kenneth teaches and is fully fluent and literate in the Gwich'in language. He works to keep his culture practices known.

Suntaste

Rannvá Holm Mortensen
Translated by Matthew Landrum
March 2023, 9 3/4 x 12 1/2"

112 pages
$30 paperback
ISBN 978-1-7366902-7-7

     This is the first in a series of Faroese literature in translation by IPI Press. Future editions will
include a short story anthology and collections of ballads–the sung oral tradition.
     Rannvá Holm Mortensen works in the colors of the Faroe Islands: reds, grays, black, white, and
sometimes terra cotta, flesh. Her prints, collages, woodcuts and handwritten poems—
dreamscapes and nightmares—are illuminated in this reproduction of her original artists book.
     Nature, earth mother, lifeblood of sea creatures, saltwater in our arteries, dendrites and
seaweed-shaped shape-shifters. As you read, the female body dissolves into nature. One feels
porous and pulsating. There is a cry, a plea at the core of the work—tidal longing. One hears the
cavernous echoes of Frida Kahlo’s physical and emotional howls, and, as in T.S. Eliot ‘s “The Love
Song of J. Alfred Prufrock,” the phylogeny of human existence recapitulating the ontology of
being. One fish, one child, one woman at a time.
     It’s a woman’s world, bloody, ventricular.

 

Archaeology of Bronze Age Mongolia:

A Deer Stone Diary
William W. Fitzhugh
February 2023, 8 x 10 1/4" 
$25, paperback

ISBN 978-1-7366902-8-4

In the 1930s the famous Smithsonian archaeologist Henry B. Collins discovered 2000 year old Eskimo cultures by excavating ancient sites in the Bering Sea region. Since then, archaeologists have pieced together a detailed history of how Eskimos spread east along the arctic coasts of Alaska, Canada, and Greenland to become the region’s Inuit peoples of today. What remained unknown is the origin of the Alaskan proto-Eskimos. Did they develop from tundra hunting peoples of northern Eurasia? from river fishermen of the Amur who learned to hunt sea mammals? or from early maritime peoples of Japan and Korea? The Bronze Age cultures and ceremonial deer stone art of Mongolia are beginning to provide answers.

Central Asia seemed like an odd place for me to search for ancient Eskimos, but many paths led me to investigate the Bronze and Iron Age cultures of Mongolia ca. 2000-0 BCE. Besides physical and genetic similarities, I was intrigued by links in art and shamanic religion as revealed in Mongolia’s mysterious, unstudied deer stone monuments. Perhaps deer stone art might provide clues about the origin of Eskimo culture and its ancient Asian heritage. This task led me to Mongolia for the decade of anthropological and archaeological studies reported in this book. 

     William W. Fitzhugh is an archaeologist who directs the Arctic Studies Center at the Smithsonian Institution’s National Museum of Natural History in Washington D.C. He has researched Arctic peoples and cultures throughout the Circumpolar North and has produced exhibits and books on Eskimo, Ainu, and North Pacific cultures and art, Vikings, Genghis Khan, and other topics. He resides in Washington DC and Vermont and is affiliated with Dartmouth College. 

     This book is the second in a 2-volume study on the Mongolian deer stone phenomenon. For a study devoted specifically to deer stone art see Deer Stones of Northern Mongolia by Jamransjav Bayarsaikhan published by the Smithsonian Arctic Studies Center and International Polar Institute Press (2022).