“Crooked on the Stretcher Board: Collected Essays on Gwich’in History, Language, and Folk Culture”
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By Craig Mishler, with Kenneth Drizhuu Frank; International Polar Institute Press, 2023; 432 pages; $45.
By the early 1860s, white fur traders fanned across the arctic and subarctic North American lands of the Gwich’in peoples. Predictably, missionaries weren’t far behind. In the opening chapter of Craig Mishler’s “Crooked on the Stretcher Board,” we learn that the Anglican and Catholic churches were in direct competition over who would win the souls of the recently subjected people. Yet even while traditional lifestyles were being upended throughout the last corner of the continent to be brought under European control, he tells us, the locals found ways of subverting the new arrivals. Having learned to play fur traders off of each other for profit, the Indigenous Gwich’in did likewise with the missionaries, maximizing their own gain in search of tobacco and other goods, even as their own spiritual world was being brought to heel.
This mildly humorous anecdote amidst a period of societal collision demonstrates the quiet resilience of Gwich’in culture when faced with overwhelming power seeking to effect change. And it also serves as an early indication that Mishler’s book isn’t going to be a dry academic treatise, despite its author’s impressive credentials.
“Crooked on the Stretcher Board” is an exploration of the Gwich’in world drawn from Mishler’s half-century of ethnographic study of the Athabaskan-speaking people who inhabit a broad expanse of lands stretching from northeastern Alaska well into Canada. The book, which is arranged into four sections but can be read in whatever order the reader wishes, discusses the customs, history, practices and lives of a people who have managed to adapt to the intrusion of Western ways while hanging on to significant aspects of their identity, and who have enacted their own cultural revival in recent decades.
Mishler comes to the topic through extensive experience. An ethnographer with a doctorate in folklore and anthropology, he’s conducted field studies in Alaska since 1972, worked as a historian for the Alaska Department of Natural Resources and a subsistence specialist for the Department of Fish and Game, and held a research professor position with the Alaska Native Language Center at the University of Alaska Fairbanks.
“Crooked on the Stretcher Board” is a collection of papers on the Gwich’in that Mishler has delivered over the decades, updated to include current conditions, and written with the aid of Kenneth Drizhuu Frank, a Gwich’in elder, storyteller and traditional drummer from Venetie and Arctic Village, who has taught language at Effie Kokrine Charter School in Fairbanks.
The book’s four sections are divided into the topics of history and biography, language, folklore and folklife, and rituals and festivals. And as the first chapter indicates, the writing is lively while being informative, making it both factual enough to be a primary source for researchers and sufficiently accessible to maintain the attention of lay readers. This is not always the case for academic writings, and it’s part of why this book is so valuable.
In that opening essay, Mishler shows how it was ultimately the Anglicans who won the competition for Gwich’in souls, and he suspects they did so by bringing Gwich’in men — and later women — into the clergy. This in turn shows how the Gwich’in were able to adapt themselves to the government and society that overtook them while successfully maintaining their identity as a people.
The history section will be of significant interest to the general public. After documenting the arrival of the missionaries, Mishler tells us that the earliest anthropological information was gathered by geologists sent into the region to explore for minerals. Two of them arrived in 1927, at a time when changes were still fresh and old ways persisted. For reasons not known, one of them, John Mertie, Jr., took pictures of Gwich’in families in Arctic Village that summer, while the other, Gerald Fitzgerald, kept an extensive diary of daily life in the same community. Many of the photos and some of the journal entries are found between these covers.
Mishler also provides a brief biography of John Fredson, who manned the base camp during the first successful ascent of Denali. It was practically the least of his accomplishments. He subsequently attended college and returned to work as a teacher, becoming a significant Gwich’in leader and helping to found the village of Venetie. Another chapter outlines how the locating of the international border between Alaska and Canada cleaved the traditional Gwich’in lands, an act that would lead to some variances among the peoples on either side of the line.
[Book review: The story of husband-and-wife missionaries in Fort Yukon is told in ‘Hospital & Haven’]
The lengthy section on language will likely be of least interest to average readers, but it’s important to what follows, a collection of folk tales as well as descriptions of cultural practices still present in Gwich’in society.
Perhaps the best chapter in the book is a gathering of tall tales about a man named Sam Peter, an actual storyteller from the late 19th and early 20th centuries who has since become the central character in these short, humorous narratives. Sam Peter is presented as a mighty man who rides a moose, encounters a “brushman,” outsmarts and eats an owl, and mushes his dogs to Seattle, but who is subject to pratfalls.
Other legends emerge as Mishler moves into the various cultural expressions of today’s Gwich’in people. Fairbanks residents are familiar with the annual Athabascan Fiddle Festival, and here Mishler explains how the instrument was brought to Gwich’in lands by Scottish and French Canadian fur traders, and then adapted to local customs. “(O)ld time fiddling,” he writes, has become “a political affirmation of tribal identity.”
Potlatches were traditional to Gwich’in culture prior to the arrival of Europeans, and after a century of suppression were brought back, now blessed by the Anglican and Episcopal churches. Mishler takes us along to one such event in Arctic Village.
“Crooked on the Stretcher Board” contains much more than what’s mentioned here. It’s a capstone to Mishler’s long career and a tribute to a people who have endured and thrived despite being subjected to Western rule. In the library of Indigenous Alaskan studies, it’s a must-have.