Two Old Women: An Alaska Legend of Betrayal, Courage and Survival - Hardcover

Wallis, Velma; Lael Morgan (editor And Afterword)

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0945397186 ISBN 13: 9780945397182

Publisher: Epicenter Press, 1993

Synopsis

An Athabascan Indian of Alaska's Yukon flats, author Velma Wallis retells a classic legend wherein two old women are abandoned by their tribe during a brutal winter famine and must survive on their own or die trying. A wise and simple story now in paperback. Winner of a 1993 Western State Book Award.

About this title

From the Inside Flap

Velma Wallis and her mother were chopping wood at the mouth of the Porcupine River, where it flows into the Yukon, when Wallis first heard the legend of the Two Old Women - an elderly pair's "journey into hardship." Passed from mothers to daughters for many generations, the ancient story of abandonment is tragic and shocking but comes with a surprise that will lighten your heart. In 1993, Velma Wallis's retelling of the legen in book form challenged her people's oral traditions and revealed old taboos, yet revealed universal themes. Ten years after the first edition, Two Old Women has been translated into seventeen languages, sellingmore than one million copies. Today, the legend is still being passed between mother and daughter, and from sister to sister, with its hopeful lesson for us all.

About the Author

Velma Wallis was born in 1960 in Fort Yukon, a remote village of about 650 people in Interior Alaska. Growing up in a traditional Athabaskan family, Wallis was one of thirteen children. When she was thirteen, her father died and she left school to help her mother raise her younger siblings.

Wallis later moved to her father's trapping cabin, a twelve-mile walk from the village. She lived alone there intermittently for a dozen years, learning traditional skills of hunting and trapping. An avid reader, she passed her high school equivalency exam and began her first literary project-writing down a legend her mother had told her, about two abandoned old women and their struggle to survive.

That story became her first book, Two Old Women, published by Epicenter Press in 1993. As her second book, Bird Girl and the Man who Followed the Sun, went to press, Wallis was living in Fort Yukon with her husband, Jeffrey John, and their two children. The family also spends time in the neighboring village of Venetie.

About this edition

• Publisher: Epicenter Press
• Publication date: 1993
• ISBN 10: 0945397186
• ISBN 13: 9780945397182
• Binding: Hardcover
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 145