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Under Nushagak Bluff
In 1939, everything changes for Anne Girl when outsider John Nelson grounds his sailboat on the shores, into Anne Girl’s skiff, and into her life during a rare storm in the Alaskan fishing village of Nushagak. When Anne Girl and her mother Marulia find their skiff flattened by John’s boat, Anne Girl decides she both hates and wants him. Thus begins a generational saga of strong, stubborn Yup’ik women living in a village that has been divided between the new and the old, the bluff side and the missionary side, the cannery side and the subsistence side.
232 pages, Paperback
Published November 12, 2019
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Displaying 1 - 15 of 15 reviews
December 17, 2021
"Under Nushagak" Bluff was one of my book discussion choices for this year, and there was much to talk about. The story takes place in Alaska during the early-mid 20th century, before Alaska became a part of United States. The encounters between the Yup'ik community, the cannery men (many of whom came from the East, specifically China and the Philippines), fishermen and pilots (many of whom were European), as well as the missionaries (European and American men and women) created a atmosphere of melancholy, tension, and few moments of comradery. I learned a lot about indigenous ways of the life in the region, such as how skiffs, ropes, and fishing nets were used to catch salmon, how the salmon was prepared and cooked, and other cultural practices, such as the use of bathhouses. There was an consistent element of comparison between the communities, not without jealousies and prejudices, including the problem of religious conversion. At the worst times depressing, and at the best, poignant, Heavener's characters made the narrative completely worthwhile. Learning about mothers and daughters, fathers and daughters, preachers, homemakers, rapid industry and factory men, the imminence of death (to the people and animals), and the ever present folkloric yearning for social clarity and meaningfulness, helped me gain perspective on a time and place I didn't know about prior to finding and reading "Under Nushagak Bluff". My favorite parts illuminated the indigenous practices of gathering food and supplies from the land: fishing for salmon (learning how salmon begin to decay after they shed their skin), collecting berries from dry, wind-strewn fields, finding fireweed, and gathering wood for fires. In those moments, which take up a lot of the book, enchantment and wonder in the natural world (the water, the sun, the frost, the smell of flora) was rekindled and urged me to finish the entire story even though the end seemed to complete a social cycle in crisis that didn't leave much room for brighter future. I worry about places of filth, such as the Cannery (where dirty men smelling of rotten fish and metal and blood had to work in bad conditions and then sleep in disheveled bunkers) continuing an industry without a real philosophical intention and foundation other than the production of money. Because of this, and not because of the value this precious book holds, is part of why I am unable to takeaway something inspiring about the situation presented. However, for anyone interested in the history of Alaska, the plight of the indigenous people (especially women), and the fraught emergence of industry and labor (especially concerning men), I highly recommend.
February 6, 2020
There is so much to love about this book. Heavener writes about the relationship between mother and daughter, the interdependence of a small community, the difficulties of relationships, and the ebbs and flows of the lives of three generations of women. It was hard to put down; this was the best book I've read so far this year. It's a bit different from most books I grab, but I got this on a whim because I saw it on the shelf, and it exceeded all of my expectations.
November 13, 2020
I had no expectations, and yet this book flouted them anyway!!
It's a story of a mother-daughter relationship, a woman-community relationship, a community-divided uneasiness, a coming-of-age story, and by the by, drops in Yup'ik traditions, phrases, morals, and difficulties. A beautiful glimpse of a 1940s-1960s Alaska village.
It's a story of a mother-daughter relationship, a woman-community relationship, a community-divided uneasiness, a coming-of-age story, and by the by, drops in Yup'ik traditions, phrases, morals, and difficulties. A beautiful glimpse of a 1940s-1960s Alaska village.
April 19, 2021
This book needs to be more widely known! If you are looking for a unique book that beautifully depicts rural village life in Alaska and centers on indigenous women, this is a must read.
January 1, 2020
I purchased this book directly from Red Hen Press while at the Miami Book Fair. I wasn't sure if I would enjoy this novel, but I was immediately drawn in by the author's rich description of both the characters and the environment. This story traces the personal and emotional history of three (really two) generations of women growing up in a small fishing community in Alaska, starting from just before WW!! to the decades following. The narrative is driven by the push and pull of the seasons, mirrored by the ups and downs of the female main characters. It's not packed with action, but there's something that kept me turning the pages to find out how the lives of these women (strong, difficult, but ultimately sympathetic) were going to evolve. The author writes beautifully, weaving the idea of the importance of stories and storytelling throughout the book. I highly recommend this novel to anyone interested in a story driven by compelling characters, and/or someone who enjoys reading about the diverse history of Alaska.
December 4, 2019
The authors use of words to create an honest and lyrical story about life in an Alaska fishing village through generations of women is stunning. Mia Heavener constantly amazes me throughout every inch of this story with her ability to tell it like it is and to bring me into this world with her imagery. I can taste the salt water in the air and can feel the fish slime on my forehead as she brings her talent and skill to the published book world for the first time. Her writing is simply beautiful and poetic.
June 4, 2020
I listened to novelist Mia Heavener read from her new book, Under Nushagak Bluff, on November 12 at the Writers Block in Anchorage. Mia was worried that she’d bore her listeners if she read too long, but listening to the first chapter made me hungry to hear more. I wasn’t the only person who felt that way; the books on hand sold out in just a few minutes after the reading. Luckily, I’d already captured a copy to read eagerly over the next two days.
Here’s the description from the book’s back cover: “In 1939, everything changes for Anne Girl when outsider John Nelson grounds his sailboat on the shores, into Anne Girl’s skiff, and into her life during a rare storm in the Alaskan fishing village of Nushagak. When Anne Girl and her mother, Marulia, find their skiff flattened by John’s boat, Anne Girl decides she both hates and wants him. This begins a generational saga of strong, stubborn Yup’ik women living in a village that has been divided between the new and the old, the bluff side and the missionary side, the cannery side and the subsistence side.”
I hope the book stirs commentary from readers and reviewers knowledgeable about its geographic and historical and cultural settings. It is the kind of book that is not over for you on first reading, first understandings.
The novel takes place from 1939 into the 1950s, yet Heavener’s narrator never backs up to give an overview of those war years. The backdrop for the story is the expansion of a commercial salmon fishery in Bristol Bay and a Nushagak cannery crowding out the lifestyle of people who fished to live. Old stories, old people are crowded until they lose their moorings in culture; bluff and bay and cannery and new houses are also shadowed by the ambiguous expanding activities of missionaries and the less ambiguous expansion of money.
Everything changes over the course of this story: subsistence to paychecks, sails to outboards, Russian Orthodox crosses to Moravians bible classes and baked goods to the reluctant educational ministrations of the state. Young daughters stumble painfully into sex and adulthood on the invasive phalanx of docks and strangers. All the characters move in their own given blindness in relation to the others, pushing explanation into the reader’s realm. Heavener offers only scenes and conversations: a view of the event at hand. The narration is so close it blinds the reader, too—making us live inside the story with the characters, listening to their voices.
The generations of women, Marulia, Anne Girl, Ellen, Sara, step forward one by one, in the passage of time that is the movement of this novel. Sara is still a baby as the book ends; her future only glimpsed in the inertia of past events and her mother’s words to Sara’s future self. Of all the characters, Ellen emerges most clearly to readers as Heavener shows us that her time more closely resembles ours, but even that recognition is accompanied by a realization that what we readers can’t know, and what each character cannot know about the others—for example the contradictory elder/inebriate Sweet Mary—is being eroded and lost. The narrator is unflinching about these losses, which only intensifies a reader’s longing to regain them.
There is no super-adult sitting at the end of this story, no super-culture taking notes on another—in fact there is no closure. Only the skiff stuck fast by its own propeller to the sandbar in the middle of the channel gives a kind of overview, with Ellen’s voice in the skiff disembodied and supernatural in what it can remember, what it can project. That voice is with the reader in italics at the start of many chapters, working against the chronological time of the narrative, suggesting a timeless Yup’ik knowing that robs familiar assumptions. By some distance into this novel, the reader does not question the appearance of a mother as a raven, a mother as a gull. The meaning in that progression, as in all the progressions of Under Nushagak Bluff, must be precipitated from the accumulation of scenes. Heavener never utters “cruelty” or “misunderstanding” or “disfunction” or “alcoholism”; nor does she identify “resilience” or in fact “love.” Heavener works her readers very hard in this book, and it is rewarding work.
Here’s the description from the book’s back cover: “In 1939, everything changes for Anne Girl when outsider John Nelson grounds his sailboat on the shores, into Anne Girl’s skiff, and into her life during a rare storm in the Alaskan fishing village of Nushagak. When Anne Girl and her mother, Marulia, find their skiff flattened by John’s boat, Anne Girl decides she both hates and wants him. This begins a generational saga of strong, stubborn Yup’ik women living in a village that has been divided between the new and the old, the bluff side and the missionary side, the cannery side and the subsistence side.”
I hope the book stirs commentary from readers and reviewers knowledgeable about its geographic and historical and cultural settings. It is the kind of book that is not over for you on first reading, first understandings.
The novel takes place from 1939 into the 1950s, yet Heavener’s narrator never backs up to give an overview of those war years. The backdrop for the story is the expansion of a commercial salmon fishery in Bristol Bay and a Nushagak cannery crowding out the lifestyle of people who fished to live. Old stories, old people are crowded until they lose their moorings in culture; bluff and bay and cannery and new houses are also shadowed by the ambiguous expanding activities of missionaries and the less ambiguous expansion of money.
Everything changes over the course of this story: subsistence to paychecks, sails to outboards, Russian Orthodox crosses to Moravians bible classes and baked goods to the reluctant educational ministrations of the state. Young daughters stumble painfully into sex and adulthood on the invasive phalanx of docks and strangers. All the characters move in their own given blindness in relation to the others, pushing explanation into the reader’s realm. Heavener offers only scenes and conversations: a view of the event at hand. The narration is so close it blinds the reader, too—making us live inside the story with the characters, listening to their voices.
The generations of women, Marulia, Anne Girl, Ellen, Sara, step forward one by one, in the passage of time that is the movement of this novel. Sara is still a baby as the book ends; her future only glimpsed in the inertia of past events and her mother’s words to Sara’s future self. Of all the characters, Ellen emerges most clearly to readers as Heavener shows us that her time more closely resembles ours, but even that recognition is accompanied by a realization that what we readers can’t know, and what each character cannot know about the others—for example the contradictory elder/inebriate Sweet Mary—is being eroded and lost. The narrator is unflinching about these losses, which only intensifies a reader’s longing to regain them.
There is no super-adult sitting at the end of this story, no super-culture taking notes on another—in fact there is no closure. Only the skiff stuck fast by its own propeller to the sandbar in the middle of the channel gives a kind of overview, with Ellen’s voice in the skiff disembodied and supernatural in what it can remember, what it can project. That voice is with the reader in italics at the start of many chapters, working against the chronological time of the narrative, suggesting a timeless Yup’ik knowing that robs familiar assumptions. By some distance into this novel, the reader does not question the appearance of a mother as a raven, a mother as a gull. The meaning in that progression, as in all the progressions of Under Nushagak Bluff, must be precipitated from the accumulation of scenes. Heavener never utters “cruelty” or “misunderstanding” or “disfunction” or “alcoholism”; nor does she identify “resilience” or in fact “love.” Heavener works her readers very hard in this book, and it is rewarding work.
December 29, 2020
All about character. You get to know women from a remote Alaskan village a hundred years ago. Native women you would never meet, and even if you did, you would never know so intimately. You see them whole and learn to respect them, despite their flaws, or maybe because of them.
The book is beautiful not only for the descriptions of the scenery, but more so for the descriptions of interiority; the scenery inside of us, the emotions that we feel stronger than reason and that may destroy us, but also create.
Anne Girl's irrational anger, often misdirected, but still legitimate. Not adaptive, but understandable, even admirable, a sign of human tenacity. She values her culture and sees that the smiling missionaries, despite being "nice", are actually there to destroy her way of life. Her daughter doesn't understand her mother's impotent anger and so they fight and don't understand each other. But we, the reader, do, and see their essential human dignity in the face of events they can't understand or control.
I identified with Anne Girl's impotent rage at the missionaries. She doesn't have ideas like "cultural genocide" to describe the harm the missionaries are doing, but she knows it, and hates them. I also hate religious proselytizers, even while I also know they can be nice people, friends even. And I hate them for disarming me in that way. I've also been to a funeral that was coopted for religious indoctrination, and hated the exploitative way preachers are always using every "opportunity" to browbeat more converts.
Adapting to change: the book shows how each generation in the village responds and adapts (or doesn't) to the changes anglos and technology are bringing. It raises the question of whether it is better to adopt and adapt, or to hold true to tradition, culture, and self-respect. I struggle with this in my life, because we are not fit to live in our modern society, and we are constantly confronted with demands to fit in. To change ourselves, our values, our character? Or to be social outcasts, impoverished and psychologically injured?
The book is beautiful not only for the descriptions of the scenery, but more so for the descriptions of interiority; the scenery inside of us, the emotions that we feel stronger than reason and that may destroy us, but also create.
Anne Girl's irrational anger, often misdirected, but still legitimate. Not adaptive, but understandable, even admirable, a sign of human tenacity. She values her culture and sees that the smiling missionaries, despite being "nice", are actually there to destroy her way of life. Her daughter doesn't understand her mother's impotent anger and so they fight and don't understand each other. But we, the reader, do, and see their essential human dignity in the face of events they can't understand or control.
I identified with Anne Girl's impotent rage at the missionaries. She doesn't have ideas like "cultural genocide" to describe the harm the missionaries are doing, but she knows it, and hates them. I also hate religious proselytizers, even while I also know they can be nice people, friends even. And I hate them for disarming me in that way. I've also been to a funeral that was coopted for religious indoctrination, and hated the exploitative way preachers are always using every "opportunity" to browbeat more converts.
Adapting to change: the book shows how each generation in the village responds and adapts (or doesn't) to the changes anglos and technology are bringing. It raises the question of whether it is better to adopt and adapt, or to hold true to tradition, culture, and self-respect. I struggle with this in my life, because we are not fit to live in our modern society, and we are constantly confronted with demands to fit in. To change ourselves, our values, our character? Or to be social outcasts, impoverished and psychologically injured?
May 17, 2020
Great! This multi-generational look at women's native village life in rural Alaska was fantastic. It felt right on - not a fast read, but on "village time." The tensions of Christian/missionaries and more traditional/shamanistic understanding of reality, the reality of alcohol and exploitative outsiders (in this case cannery and fisheries). It was hard to get into (just like a village!) and very intriguing and definitely hooked me.
July 2, 2020
I enjoyed this story. I am not native Alaskan, nor have I visited much of rural Alaska. However, I have friends who grew up in the Bristol Bay Area and this story brought to mind stories of their childhoods. I appreciate nature and loved the descriptions of the tides, the grasses, fish, birds and other life in the setting.
I appreciated the idea of Ellen’s mother coming back as a gull, rather than the raven she hoped to be... it made me wonder what I will come back as :-)
I appreciated the idea of Ellen’s mother coming back as a gull, rather than the raven she hoped to be... it made me wonder what I will come back as :-)
This entire review has been hidden because of spoilers.
May 27, 2020
I wanted to like this. The Alaskan setting and stories are usually of interest to me. This one has some tough life-long events that were difficult to read about including family alcoholism, abuse, and poverty. It probably would have been a 3 if there weren't all this political, racism, and covid stuff going on right now. I think I might start reading happy kids books for a break.
January 2, 2021
This was a staff pick on the shelf at Chicago Public Library - and I can see why. The writing is excellent. Set in Alaska. Vivid. Concise. Female characters (mostly) with some depth and nuance. I’d recommend it.
dnf
February 1, 2020I just couldn’t get into this.
February 7, 2023
A portrait of a little know time and place, as well as a fraught family. Well worth reading.
November 16, 2023
Heavener writes a solid melancholic story about multiple generations of indigenous women struggling to deal with their changing home and a loss of culture.
Displaying 1 - 15 of 15 reviews