Being and Place among the Tlingit

by Thomas F. Thornton

In Being and Place among the Tlingit, anthropologist Thomas F. Thornton examines the concept of place in the language, social structure, economy, and ritual of southeast Alaska's Tlingit Indians. Place signifies not only a specific geographical location but also reveals the ways in which individuals and social groups define themselves.

The notion of place consists of three dimensions - space, time, and experience - which are culturally and environmentally structured. Thornton examines each in detail to show how individual and collective Tlingit notions of place, being, and identity are formed. As he observes, despite cultural and environmental changes over time, particularly in the post-contact era since the late eighteenth century, Tlingits continue to bind themselves and their culture to places and landscapes in distinctive ways. He offers insight into how Tlingits in particular, and humans in general, conceptualize their relationship to the lands they inhabit, arguing for a study of place that considers all aspects of human interaction with landscape.

In Tlingit, it is difficult even to introduce oneself without referencing places in Lingit Aani (Tlingit Country). Geographic references are embedded in personal names, clan names, house names, and, most obviously, in k-waan names, which define regions of dwelling. To say one is Sheet'ka K-waan defines one as a member of the Tlingit community that inhabits Sheet'ka (Sitka).

Being and Place among the Tlingit makes a substantive contribution to the literature on the Tlingit, the Northwest Coast cultural area, Native American and indigenous studies, and to the growing social scientific and humanistic literature on space, place, and landscape.

Genres: Nonfiction, Native American

236 pages, Paperback

First published November 21, 2007

Reviews

[Holly]

I was hoping for this ethnography to be easier to read, but technical language is a huge barrier to anyone from everyday society to read. Shame really, since it's about a culture that doesn't get a lot of press.

[Rizzie]

Probably my personal favorite ethnography. Remember that episode of Star Trek: The Next Generation, "Darmok"? In it, Picard meets an alien whose language is composed entirely of metaphors based on stories of his planet's culture. Without the context of the stories, the language is utterly meaningless to Picard, even when translated. Well, it turns out that concept isn't so crazy, because the Tlingit culture presented in this ethnography is rather close. Every little mountain, river, hill, stream, boulder, and other landmark has its own name that is inherently tied to a legend surrounding that specific landmark. And daily speech revolves around usage of place names like that in lieu of more direct and literal descriptions we might be more familiar with. This is just one example of what make the Tlingit unique, but I hope it gets people interested in reading this book, because it really is quite remarkable. It is a bit technical at times but you can easily choose to engage to whatever degree you wish and not be lost.

[Cassie]

In Being and Place Among the Tlingit, Thomas F. Thornton evaluates the Tlingit people’s attachment to their land and how it is shaped through their history and experiences with it. The Tlingit used to occupy much of the Northwest Coast of Canada and part of the Southeast corner of Alaska. Today, the land is government owned and laws have been established that threaten the traditional way of life for the Tlingit. Rivers and bays in which they once fished are protected by the federal government as wildlife preserves. Sacred places, colored with myth and reverence, are being forgotten by current Tlingit members, as they are now unreachable. The very land they lay claim to for hundreds of years through stories and naming has been taken away from them while the Tlingit people are being displaced far from their homeland. Without their direct connection to the land, much of Tlingit knowledge has and is being lost and with that, the Tlingit sense of being.
Thornton centers his argument around the preservation of the Tlingit culture and how the land their ancestors inhabited is an important element of it. This nonfiction novel offers a window into what is left of Tlingit knowledge and touches on the struggles of the Tlingit people living in the twenty-first century experience where they cannot continue with life as they had for hundreds of years. Thornton argues that the Tlingit people are losing their sense of being and who they are. Their past and the stories that describe the people’s history are heavily tied to land and without the land, the people feel a sense of loss. Even the names people are given come from the land, and in Tlingit culture, a name is one of the most sacred things a person is given. It gives them life and enhances them with the spirits of their ancestors that carried that name. The Tlingit culture was heavily influenced by the place, or the land, on which it developed. It connects the Tlingit people over time and space through experiences they can all share and brings them together as one. To support his argument, Thornton identified four “cultural structures” that link people to a place. They consist of social organization, language and cognitive structures, material production, and ritual processes. He then uses his novel to elaborate, dedicating a lengthy and detailed chapter to each one.
I found the book very interesting and Thornton’s argument thought provoking. He opens the novel by defining place. However, instead of using his own words, he describes it using the words of other philosophers and anthropologists. He spends a great deal comparing and contrasting their ideas and definitions of place. I feel that it would have almost been better for Thornton himself to define what he thought place meant and use the words of the others to support his opinion. I thought this was a little weak on his part. Eventually, he mentions that place consists of time, space, and experience and the four cultural structures that connect people to a place through which the reader finally gets a glimpse at the author’s ideas on place. This also serves as the backbone to his argument with which he uses the Tlingit culture to flesh out his ideas into something the reader can observe and connect with.
The strength of the novel lies in it’s in depth analysis of the Tlingit culture based on the four cultural structures named in the introduction of the book. Everything for how social organization operated to fishing techniques as a means of production is touched on and used as support. The chapter on language and naming is especially thorough and it is most influential to me. In it, Thornton states that names are given based on place and to know the meaning of one’s name is to know where that person came from. Without the deep connection land, there would be no names, and without names, the people have no access to the ancestors before them that bring life into a person. In other words, according to the Tlingit, if there was not a connection to place, then there would be no life. The naming chapter also explains how places are named. Many of Tlingit places have long, descriptive names. This is also true of other native cultures and their ways of naming things. This gave me a better understanding of why such long names are important and why they are even given in the first place. The novel also gains strength from the firsthand accounts provided by the author. He has been to some of these places and met the people. Through them he has gained a large extent of knowledge about the Tlingit and their culture. It adds to the legitimacy of his argument because by providing this, the reader knows that the information is coming from a credible source. The novel’s strongest point has to be that the author’s view of place and how it is essential to a person’s sense of being can apply to other native groups and not just the Tlingit.
In conclusion, this novel is centered around the argument that place is connected to a sense of being among a group of people. The Tlingit are used so support this belief. The author successfully argues that the Tlingit are tied to the land on which they lived and their culture developed. Taking the land away from them is taking away their places where the history of their culture is rich and the sense of being a Tlingit is most powerful. The novel can also be applied to other works about native cultures using Thornton’s four cultural structures that tie people to place. Because the argument is far reaching and applicable to other situations, it aids in solidifying its validity. The main focus of Tlingit culture in this novel is meant to show that one may not destroy a people by removing them from their place in this world, but instead, destroy a culture. Without a place, there is not a sense of being for one cannot belong to a place if the place does not exist.

[Brogan Fairchilde]

I found myself flitting between wondering if I was too unintelligent to understand much of this and asking myself if the author was actually stating something so obvious. Perhaps both at different times.

Maybe it’s more difficult to understand why some (seemingly obvious) things need analysed given I’m a native of my own land. I would say though that it is verbose and this makes the arguments less accessible than they should be.

[Jon Wlasiuk]

A scholarly ethnogeography of the Tlingit people of SE Alaska.

[Timbo Hartzer]

difficult to read, but that is the material in a nutshell, challenging and compelling