Make Prayers to the Raven: A Koyukon View of the Northern Forest by Richard K. Nelson (review)

248 Western American Literature M ake Prayers to the Raven: A Koyukon View of the Northern Forest. By Richard K. Nelson. (Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press, 1983. 292 pages, 16 pages of photographs, bibliography, index, $25.00.) No stranger to the Far North, Richard K. Nelson writes sensitively and with affection of the Koyukon people of Huslia and Hughes, Alaska. Nelson spent some sixteen months and more among these Koyukon people as a partici­ pant “in a broad study of land use among Koyukon communities.” His particular interest, as he writes, was “the integration of subsistence into Koyukon intellectual culture” (p. 250). But this book documents that interest only in a very special way, for Nelson’s chief concern is to produce what he calls a “native natural history” (p. xiv), an account of the boreal forest from the Koyukon point of view. This account, therefore, “stands outside the established realm of Western science . . .” (p. xiv), at least to the extent that science is usually concerned to categorize and explain. Nelson’s preference is to accept and describe, leaving the categorization and explanation to others. The necessary consequence of this classic, Boasian emic stance is that a good deal of the book is essentially a listing — of plants, earth animals, fish, birds, and so on, with notes on the powers and tabus associated with them, their uses, and the like. I am not an anthropologist, and I found these chapters — these elaborated lists— sometimes fascinating, sometimes heavy going. But this seems inevitable (perhaps it is different for the specialist reader), given Nelson’s resolutely non-explanatory stance. It is in his last three chapters, “Ecological Patterns and Conservation Practices,” “Principles of Koyukon World View,” and “Nature and the Koyukon Tradition” that Nelson finally pulls everything together, unifying the bird and plant and mammal information into a rounded and coherent portrait of how the Koyukon see their environment. Nelson writes gracefully, and these chapters, indeed the book as a whole, provide as comprehensive and sympathetic a portrayal of another culture’s view and experience of its sur­ rounding world as an outsider can produce. I cannot help but wish Nelson had ventured some further effort at analysis. But, given what he set out to do — and he is admirably clear about this — one can only conclude he has done it extremely well. ARNOLD KRUPAT, Sarah Lawrence College M y Name is Saroyan. By William Saroyan. Compiled with a commentary by James H. Tashjian. (New York: Coward-McCann, Inc., 1983. $22.50.) William Saroyan. ByAram Saroyan. (New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1983. $7.95.) William Saroyan was an authentic American genius. In fact, he was a writer only America could have produced, because he managed to combine immigrant roots with a deep sense of place and the aggressive energy of the ...