Summary

A lyrical essay collection exploring reconciliation, colonial legacies, and climate
change in the Raven Biome of the Alaska-Yukon borderlands through research,
personal reflection, and ekphrastic meditations on maps and artifacts; Corinna Cook
wrestles with difficult pasts while facing an uncertain ecological future.

The Yukon Ice Patch Project reveals ancient lives. A road through the boreal forest reads like a map of climate upheaval. Those houses with broken doorknobs—a legacy of government regulation over Indigenous life. Corinna Cook, who was born white on Áak’w Kwáan Tlingit land in Juneau, Alaska, wrestles with the past and future into Canada’s Yukon Territory. With writing that blends research and reverie, her essays ask how we might come into right relations with our most difficult, shared histories. How can we carry the past together, in a good way, as the land melts? The answers— elusive as they are—carry global resonance, taking shape through a deeply personal lens combined with careful study of local arts, artifacts, maps, and the land we depend on.

Contents

The Photographer (a prelude)

Part One
The Slower Questions
The Black Spruce
Distance Over Light
Sister Essays: The Young and the Old
The Young
The Old
Swan Signs

Part Two
The Story of the Day
Atlin
Permafrost Is an Archive
YFN 101: What We Give to One Another
Chooutla: Truth and Reconciliation
Government Documents: A Lineage of Blades

Part Three
The Trails are Always There
Under the Bridge at Johnson’s Crossing
The Kohklux Map
The Ash and the Literature: A Diptych
A Triangle of Sun
Salsa

The End
Acknowledgments
Notes

Author

Corinna Cook is the author of the essay collection Leavetakings. Her writing has been published in Alaska Quarterly Review, Assay: A Journal of Nonfiction Studies, Terrain.org, and Pedagogy and American Literary Studies. Cook, a former Fulbright Fellow and an Alaska Literary Award recipient, is a graduate of Pomona College and the University of Alaska Fairbanks and holds a PhD in English and creative writing from the University of Missouri. She serves as core nonfiction faculty at Alaska Pacific University’s low-residency MFA program in creative writing and lives in Juneau, Alaska.

Reviews

“This volume is a spiritual cartography, a deep map of aching, of longing. Cook’s essays chart our small human awareness as one part of geologic time, taking in spiritual, scientific, and metaphysical ways of knowing. She draws from archives and from culture-bearers. Her finely crafted essays become forms of reconciliation storytelling. Cook asserts that a shared future requires everyone to enter into right relationships with divisive histories, and then to pitch in to help carry the difficult past (and present).”

—Peggy Shumaker, author of Cairn and former poet laureate of Alaska

“This book follows a lineage of Alaska writers reckoning with belonging to a vast and wild place but Cook forges new ground in her unique combination of rigorous scholarship and thinking, her wry original voice, and her poetic leaps and stunning imagery.”

—Anne Haven McDonnell, author of Living with Wolves and Breath on a Coal