![]() She describes herself alternately as Yup’ik and Eskimo. She uses phrases like “according to our beliefs”, “in our culture”, and so on. The Minuk telling this story is not a twelve year old- she might be 70, sitting in a rocking chair or on a hillside, talking to a granddaughter. Telling a story set in a culture different from the reader’s is always going to be difficult, because the references the narrator has are different from one’s own. ![]() The first thing I want to hit on is the way Hill has decided to tell the story. ![]() It might have been nice to hire a Yup’ik author for Minuk, sure, but Hill does a phenomenal job and I don’t think I would want to lose Ashes in the Pathway for anything. Personally, I think she does an A+ job of tackling the culture and history of Native Alaska, informed by decades as a teacher in the bush. (In a state full of transplants, the distinction is important.) However, she was raised in a family with lots of Alaska Native relatives, including older step-relatives who relayed a lot of oral history to her as a history curious kid. She’s a white native Alaskan (born and raised in Alaska) but not Alaska Native (ancestors crossed the Bering Strait and ate a lot of berries in a lot of bushes). ![]() I had a near-complete collection of her books as a kid, and she’s written some fantastic kids literature focusing on Alaska and Alaskan history. I didn’t realize it was written by Kirkpatrick Hill until a few months ago. It made me cry then and I was pretty close last week. ![]() With my personal sappiness out of the way, let’s dig in to the book. ![]()
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