THE CHANDALAR KUTCHIN (Technical Paper No. 17).
By Prof. Robert A.McKennan '25 (Anthropology). Montreal,Canada: Arctic Institute of North America, 1965. 156 pp., 26 pi. $3.00 to members of the Institute; $4.00 to nonmembers.
This is the second substantial ethnography contributed by Professor McKennan to our knowledge of the northern Athapaskan peopies of western Canada and interior Alaska It is the result of a summer's work in 1933 The Chandalar Kutchin occupy territory in Alaska on the northernmost fringe of the Athapaskan culture area. They have there, fore long been in trading (and warfare contact with the Arctic Eskimos and acculturative influences are evident. They are a nomadic hunting people. Their margin ality as between the northern spruce forest so typically the habitat of the Athapaskans and the treeless barren lands of the Arctic leads them to exploit the game of both en. vironments, moose and caribou, rabbit squirrel, porcupine and mountain sheep. The tribe at the time of research was small, probably not over 200 people, divided into three separate bands of one or more family lines or kindreds. Residence was predominantly matrilocal. The author worked with all three bands in four separate settlements. This sort of field work is of a demanding kind for it imposes extensive itineration upon the ethnographer. In 1933 this was even more the case and Professor McKennan's work in this remote area was one of the rare penetrations by Europeans.
The intentions of the field trip were ethnography and the materials are presented as just that. Introduced to the peoples and their country we are, in order, shown how they get a living, how they make and do things, what their social relations and life cycle is, and the main outlines of their intellectual life. A final long chapter on mythology completes the ethnography in presenting an unusually rich collection of Kutchin folklore. This collection includes three myth cycles, two probably of foreign origin and one typically Athapaskan. Various folktales, legends and stories are also included. Altogether we have here an important contribution to folklore studies among the American Indian. The abundant incorporation of cultural traits so characteristic of folklore makes this an appropriate conclusion to the ethnography for we see, as it were, the culture whose essentials we have examined in the course of the book now reflected in the natives' own story telling.
This monograph is not concerned, as so many these days, in advancing a point of theory or method. It simply presents that bedrock anthropology upon which all else must be based. As such it has rescued knowledge of a way of life which otherwise is likely to have passed beyond our ken as it is now virtually defunct. This volume will go into our library of mankind's basic records and will continue to be a body of material for reference when our present theoretical debates and methodological quarrels - our contemporary academic lifeways - will be largely forgotten.
Associate Professor of Anthropology
