How to Dress a Fish

How to Dress a FishPoetry that crafts a prismatic vision of Nativeness at the intersection of language, history, family, and identity In How to Dress a Fish, poet Abigail Chabitnoy, of Aleut descent, addresses the lives disrupted by US Indian boarding school policy. She pays particular attention to the life story of her great grandfather, Michael, who was taken from the Baptist Orphanage, Wood Island, Alaska, and sent to Carlisle Indian Industrial School in

Poetry that crafts a prismatic vision of Nativeness at the intersection of language, history, family, and identity

In How to Dress a Fish, poet Abigail Chabitnoy, of Aleut descent, addresses the lives disrupted by US Indian boarding school policy. She pays particular attention to the life story of her great grandfather, Michael, who was taken from the Baptist Orphanage, Wood Island, Alaska, and sent to Carlisle Indian Industrial School in Pennsylvania. Incorporating extracts from Michael's boarding school records and early Russian ethnologies--while engaging Alutiiq language, storytelling motifs, and traditional practices--the poems form an act of witness and reclamation. In uncovering her own family records, Chabitnoy works against the attempted erasure, finding that while legislation such as the Alaska Native Claims Settlement Act reconnects her to community, through blood and paper, it could not restore the personal relationships that had already been severed.

Binding Type: Paperback
Publisher: Wesleyan University Press
Published: 12/11/2018
ISBN: 9780819578495
Pages: 152
Weight: 0.55lbs
Size: 8.90h x 5.90w x 0.50d

Review Citations: Library Journal 01/01/0001 pg. 78
Publishers Weekly 01/21/2019