Life Lived Like a Story: Life Stories of Three Yukon Native Elders

Front Cover
UBC Press, 1992 - Biography & Autobiography - 428 pages
The life stories appearing in this volume come from communities where storytelling provides a customary framework for discussing the past. Angela Sidney, Kitty Smith and Annie Ned are three remarkable and gifted women of Athapaskan and Tlingit ancestry who were born in the southern Yukon Territory around the turn of the century. Their life stories tell us as much about the present as about the past, as much about ideas of community as about individual experience; they call our attention to the diverse ways humans formulate such linkages.
 

Contents

Life History and Life Stories
1
Angela Sidney Introduction
21
Our Shagóon Our Family History
37
How the World Began
42
My Parents
50
Stories from My Parents Time
53
Childhood
66
Stories from Childhood
73
Thinking with Shagoon
146
Kitty Smith Introduction
159
Our Family History
175
Origins and Transformations
179
My Husbands People
186
The Dangers of Distance
190
Childhood
201
Stories from Childhood
205

Childhood Travels 19121915
79
Stories and Place Names
86
Potlatches
91
A Potlatch Song
94
Becoming a Woman
98
The Stolen Woman 1
102
Getting Married
111
The Stolen Woman 2
117
Marriage and Children
128
Kaaxachgóok
139
Becoming a Woman
214
From Daughter to Wife
216
The Resourceful Woman
233
Annie
263
Cultural Constructions of Individual Experience
339
Notes
357
Glossary of Native Terms
375
Bibliography
381
Index
395
Copyright

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About the author (1992)

Of Athapaskan and Tlingit ancestry, Angela Sidney, Kitty Smith, and Annie Ned lived in the southern Yukon Territory for nearly a century. They collaborated with Julie Cruikshank, an assistant professor in the Department of Anthropology at the University of British Columbia, to produce this unique kind of autobiography. Cruikshank's books include The Stolen Woman: Female Journeys in Tagish, Tutchone Narrative (1982) and Do Glaciers Listen?