How to Dress a Fish
Middletown, Connecticut : Wesleyan University Press, [2019]
Format: Book
Description: 141 pages : illustrations ; 24 cm.
In How to Dress a Fish, poet Abigail Chabitnoy, of Germanic and Aleut descent, addresses the lives disrupted by US Indian boarding school policy. She pays particular attention to the life story of her great grandfather, Michael, who was taken from the Baptist Orphanage, Wood Island, Alaska, and sent to Carlisle Indian Industrial School in Pennsylvania. Incorporating extracts from Michael's boarding school records and early Russian ethnologies--while engaging Alutiiq language, storytelling motifs, and traditional practices--the poems form an act of witness and reclamation. In uncovering her own family records, Chabitnoy works against the attempted erasure, finding that while legislation such as the Alaska Native Claims Settlement Act reconnects her to community, through blood and paper, it could not restore the personal relationships that had already been severed.
Series: Wesleyan poetry.
Subjects:
Chabitnoy family -- Poetry.
Indians of North America -- Poetry.
Alaska Natives -- Poetry.
Off-reservation boarding schools -- United States -- Poetry.
Chabitnoy family -- Poetry.
Indians of North America -- Poetry.
Alaska Natives -- Poetry.
Off-reservation boarding schools -- United States -- Poetry.
ISBN:
9780819578488
Availability | |||
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Call Number | Location | Shelf Location | Status |
LITERATURE Poetry Cha | Ballentine Indoors | Nonfiction | In |
Includes bibliographical references.