The first genre I will discuss is fiction. As I read through the book, it became immediately apparent to me that the fictional stories are chock full of descriptions of landscape. A good example of this is the excerpt from Rex Beach's novel The Spoilers, which begins on page 70. Entire paragraphs in this story are devoted to describing the surroundings and it seems that no detail is spared a mention. For example, most of page 74 is taken up with the author's description of how the city of Nome appears. I believe that great care is taken in presenting the landscape in fictional stories like this because they are written for outsiders. The authors are telling stories to people who have probably never been to Alaska or at least are not particularly familiar with the landscape or time, so detailed descriptions are necessary to anchor the time and place in the reader's mind.
Photo of Nome, Alaska during the time described in Beach's novel. Photo from this website, and originally from page 18-19 of a book called This Fabulous Century: 1900-1910.
In contrast to the great amount of effort expended in descriptions of landscapes in fictional stories is how landscape is presented in oral stories. Now, oral stories can be very, very long and one story can take days to tell. The oral stories presented in this book are all pretty short, but as I think back on oral stories I heard and read about in a previous Literature class, they seem to be very representative of Alaska Native oral stories as a whole and details do not seem to have been sacrificed for the sake of brevity. That being said, landscape is not a concept that is focused on all that much in the oral stories in this book. Certainly setting and surroundings are mentioned, but nowhere near to the same degree as in the fictional story I mentioned earlier. For example, in the Tlingit Legend How Mosquitoes Came to Be on page 11 (which happens to be my favorite Alaska Native story), landscape is barely mentioned at all. The storyteller mentions that the main character lies down on the ground, but does not specify where he lies down or give any details of the surroundings. After he is taken back to the giant's home, the only detail that is mentioned is the fireplace. Why is this? Why doesn't landscape take as central a role in these stories? After thinking about it for a bit, I came to the conclusion that it is because the oral stories were created by Native Alaskans for people of their own cultural group. The stories were made in the same setting that they were told. Everyone within the intended audience would be intimately familiar with the landscape around them since nature took such a gigantic role in their lives, therefore the listeners would not need much explanation of the surrounding landscape to understand the story.
This leads to the question of whether or not humans separate themselves from nature when they classify it as a resource. In my opinion, it definitely can. The first thing that comes to mind is people destroying the environment in the process of mining. However,it is not always the case that people separate themselves from nature when they regard it as a resource. An example of how this is the excerpt from James A. Michener's book Alaska, which begins on page 13. The story is about a group of ancient people traveling over the Bering Land Bridge to Alaska. To their alarm, there is very little food to be found as they make their journey and they desperately need to find something to eat so they don't all die. Finally, the men are able to kill a mammoth after hunting it for several days, thereby guaranteeing they have food for the time being. In this case, they are definitely using nature as a resource, but one can hardly say they are separated from nature since the entire course of their lives and whether they survive or not is dictated by nature
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