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In a Hungry Country: Essays by Simon Paneak. ed., intro., and epi. by John Martin Campbell. Fwd. by Grant Spealman. App. by Robert L. Rausch and Stephen C. Porter. (Fairbanks: University of Alaska Press, 2004. Pp. xxiii + 125, forward, acknowledgements, introduction, 46 photographs and illustrations, epilogue, appendices, notes, references cited, index.)
In a Hungry Country continues a promising trend of allowing indigenous informants and fieldworkers a forum to express themselves in their own words without having them overtly couched in an academic researcher's theoretical biases or research questions. This book presents the words and drawings of Simon Paneak, a Nunamiut hunter from above the Arctic Circle in Alaska. Paneak was born in 1900 in the Brooks Range area of Alaska. Since the 1950s, anthropologists and others have sought out and valued Paneak for his command of English and for his knowledge of traditional ways that was often beyond what was currently being practiced by the majority of his people.
In the late 1960s and early 1970s, John Martin Campbell gave a notebook and later a tape recorder and tapes to Paneak, encouraging him to record what he knew of Nunamiut history....