Many tribes dream of having their own interdisciplinary team of scholars working together on questions of importance to their communities. Sharing Our Knowledge, edited by the noted anthropologist Sergei Kan, contains twenty-four chapters broken into five units: “Our Elders and Teachers,” “Native History,” “Subsistence, Natural Resources, and Ethnogeography,” “Material Culture, Art, and Tourism,” and “Repatriation.” Most of the chapters derive from the 2007 Conference of Tsimshian, Haida, and Tlingit Tribes and Clans. Kan and Steve Henrikson organized the conference as a tribute to the renowned Tlingit elder Mark Jacobs Jr. (Gusht’eihéen), a man from a high-ranking Tlingit family for whom English was a second language. In 1993 Andrew Hope III (Xaastánch), a Tlingit leader who organized the first clan conference, dreamed of using these gatherings to help revitalize the culture and language of Alaska’s southeastern Native peoples. Sharing Our Knowledge derives from these long-standing aspirations.
Jacobs and Hope organized...
