The Canoe Rocks: Alaska’s Tlingit and the Euramerican Frontier, 1800-1912

The Canoe Rocks is a historical analysis of the EuroAmerican impact on Alaska’s Tlingit people. With its extensive documentation, the book will assist diverse scholars. After introducing Russia’s early efforts to establish a profitable settlement in Alaska’s southeastern archipelago, the author reviews the concurrent British commercial encroachments. However, it is America’s Boston Men, and their successors, who really cause the Tlingit canoe to rock. Throughout the nineteenth century, Native institutions such as their family life, blood atonement, and trade practices, slavery, witchcraft, and even their celebrated potlatch were modified, some radically. Predictably, Alaska’s environment also incurred accelerating alteration. Responses by Tlingit women and men to miners, missionaries, merchant-town builders, and other traditional frontier figures did not mirror their Native counterparts across the United States. These pages certainly confirm the Northwest Coast people’s singular artistic and entrepreneurial energies. The Canoe Rocks offers readers an informative and culturally balanced history, a fast-paced narrative sure to excite enthusiasts of Native American history and the history of Western America.