baidarka Gift of the Whale

Subject: baidarka Gift of the Whale
From: Alexander Mcleod (alexandermcleod@sprintmail.com)
Date: Tue Jan 04 2000 - 11:17:11 EST

Gift of the Whale by Bill Hess is a new book which might appeal to those
of us interested in the use of baidarka in the contemporary work world
of the Inupiat. The subtitle is "The Inupiat Bowhead Hunt, A Sacred
Tradition." It is profusely illustrated with black and white
photographs and while the subject matter is not the baidarka that sea
craft figures prominently in it. The focal point is the hunt and the
Inupiat culture but there are a number of interesting water craft noted
ranging from skin umiaks to aluminum skiffs and fiberglass kayaks. A
couple of pictures show Inupiat women sewing ugruk hides for an umiak
skin and one shot juxtaposes traditional and contemporary culture:
skidoos towing a sled and an umiak home after a hunt. Good text
explaining, from a sympathetic white man's view, the hunt and the role
it plays for the Inupiat. However, if the events surrounding a whale
hunt, including the actual kill and butchering, are offensive to you
this volume is not for you.
Sandy 

--
Alexander "Sandy" McLeod, Ph.D.
Asian and Pacific Rim Studies
mailto:alexandermcleod@sprintmail.com
URL http://home.sprintmail.com/~alexandermcleod

Meantime, let us count our blessings--I mean those
thousands of peaks, climbed and unclimbed, of every
size, shape and order of difficulty, where each of us
may find our own unattainable Mount Everest.
 Bill Tilman, climber and sailor

[demime 0.92b removed an attachment of type text/x-vcard which had a name of alexandermcleod.vcf]
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