Neeluk : An Eskimo Boy in the Days of the Whaling Ships - Softcover

Kittredge, Frances

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0882405462 ISBN 13: 9780882405469

Publisher: Alaska Northwest Books, 2003

Synopsis

Weaving history, art, and literature, these stories follow a young Inupiat Eskimo boy through a year of his life at the turn of the last century.

About this title

About the Author:

Frances Kittredge was born in the frontier village of Glyndon, Minnesota, in 1874, the fourth of eight children. She died in 1940.

Howard Rock was born at Point Hope, Alaska, in 1911 to a family of seal and whale hunters. He studied art at the University of Washington in the late 1930s but spent most of his adult life defending the heritage of the Native people, and publishing the Tundra Times. He died in 1976.

From School Library Journal:

Gr 2-6-Told in very simple prose, this series of stories follows the life of seven-year-old Neeluk, an Inupiat of western Alaska in the late 1800s, through an Arctic year. The quietness of the narrative and the remoteness of the setting and time might seem a dubious attraction to young readers; however, adults will want to help them find these stories of everyday life in a village of subsistence hunters because of the unique picture they provide. The author was a visitor to the Inupiaq village of Wales for two years beginning in 1900. More than 30 years later, Kittredge produced these stories of Neeluk, a fun-loving but thoughtful character, based on her notes and interviews from her Alaskan days. Kittredge died in 1940, so it was left to her grandniece to reassemble the stories and Rock's oil paintings and line drawings that now accompany each story. She checked the authenticity and validity of the stories with people of present-day Wales and has given all of us the unusual gift of a window into another time and place. This is a well-designed document of a life that is often "exoticized." It is all the more remarkable that it is accessible to elementary students.

Sue Sherif, Alaska State Library, Anchorage

Copyright 2002 Cahners Business Information, Inc.

About this edition

• Publisher: Alaska Northwest Books
• Publication date: 2003
• ISBN 10: 0882405462
• ISBN 13: 9780882405469
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 88
• Illustrator: Rock Howard Weyahok