Telling Our Selves Ethnicity and Discourse in Southwestern Alaska

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 Bethel residents 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 discourse, ethnicity is constantly recreated.

Chase Hensel was a Visiting Scholar at the Scott Polar Research Institute, Cambridge University, and teaches anthropology and education at the University of Fairbanks. He lived in Bethel, Alaska for eleven years, where, as a participant in Bethel's subsistence practices and subsistence discourse, he studied issues of language, education, and ethnicity in the region