Telling Our Selves

In this book, Chase Hensel examines how Yup'ik Eskimos and non-natives construct and maintain gender and ethnic identities through strategic talk about hunting, fishing, and processing. Although ethnicity is overtly constructed in terms of either/or categories, the discourse of residents of Bethel, Alaska suggests that their actual concern is less with whether one is native or non-native than with how native one is in a given context. In the interweaving of subsistence practices and subsistence …