Raising Ourselves | 
|  | | | Title: | Raising Ourselves | | Author: | Velma Wallis | | Publisher: | Epicenter Press | | Type: | Book / Paperback | | Publication Date: | 01 September, 2003 | | ISBN / ISBN-13: | 0972494472 / 9780972494472 | | List Price: | $15.95 | | You Save: | $3.99 | | Amazon Price: | $11.96 | |
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Product Description
Opening a window to a world rarely seen, Velma Wallis tells her family's troubled history with honesty, wisdom, wit, and overriding hope. Wallis also wrote TWO OLD WOMEN, the million-seller translated into seventeen languages. "If you want to know the truth about being Indian, read this book." --Duncan Sings-Alone, Cherokee storyteller, author of Sprinting Backwards
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Customer Reviews:
• A Family History And Their Adaptation To The Advances In Society In Alaska. 03 September, 2007
A very intense story of a family's history. The author told everything, she did not hide any of the family problems. It was very hard to put this book down once I started to read it. What it was like in Alaska before any real public services were available. The depth of drinking and diseases that came with the white man. And the other social problems that existed because of no government or social structure to help the people deal with these problems.
- Reviewed by customer ID: A2S49DQN8JF7CN
• The Facts Of Life In An Alaskan Village 29 July, 2004
This is Velma Wallis' third book. Her previous works, "Two Old Women" and "Bird Girl & the Man Who Followed the Sun," deal with traditional stories told by the Gwich'in people of Fort Yukon. Her latest, "Raising Ourselves: A Gwich'in Coming of Age Story from the Yukon River" is an autobiographical account of her growing up in Fort Yukon, Alaska. The book offers a very open and candid look inside not only the community of Fort Yukon, but also into the intimacies of her immediate and extended families.
For thousands of years, the Gwich'in people lived semi-nomadically along the Yukon, Porcupine and Black rivers until, within the course of two generations, they found themselves settled into a static community surrounded by evidence of modern day life. Wallis represents this "lost generation" caught between wanting to move forward into the modern world and yet yearning to retain the traditional ways of hunting, trapping and other forms of traditional knowledge. Through her, an outsider can see the struggle within the village and it's people as they are forced to adapt and evolve to the new ways.
The major issue that strikes the reader squarely between the eyes is the epidemic of alcoholism in Fort Yukon. It is not something that only affects the adult community, but as Wallis points out, teenagers and even children in some cases. One paragraph in particular brings the issue home:
"After days of drinking and fighting came the slow, painful task of sobering up. My mother's swollen face would gradually heal. My father's face would go blank as if nothing had happened. That was an emptiness about our cabin as in the aftermath of war - a war no one had won." (p. 107)
As a result of her parents' almost continual drunkenness, Wallis and her siblings were forced to quite literally raise themselves as best they could. Relying on their ingenuity, and each other, she and her fourteen siblings managed to make it to adulthood (a fifteenth child had been killed in a tragic accident).
"Raising Ourselves: A Gwich'in coming of Age Story from the Yukon River" paints a fantastic story about growing up in bush Alaska. Descriptions of children cutting firewood, hauling water by the bucket from the river to the cabin, and even the family outhouse hold the reader's attention and keep the pages turning.
Wallis herself paints a picture of being a self-reliant, rebellious individual who, right from the start knew that she would have to take on the world on it's own terms. Somehow she managed to avoid many of the pitfalls through her own tenacity, and win. In the end, the book is obviously an attempt to deal with not only her past but that of her people as well, to begin the process of breaking away from the demons and healing the wounds of alcoholism.
- Reviewed by customer ID: A2773EZ2IZ8TU3
• Wonderful! 13 July, 2006
All I can say is that it was hard to put down. I enjoyed learning about her life's experiences and her "coming of age" as a Native in the "modern" culture. Highly recommended read.
- Reviewed by customer ID: A185CY2CVBKRWD
• Sad, But True..... 19 January, 2003
This story reminded me of my own growing-up years, not in Alaska, but on a reservation, nevertheless. It is a powerful book and reminds me of the strength our people have to survive, despite the odds, and interference of another culture. Velma, thanks for sharing in an honest and sensitive way, and letting us know we were not alone.
- Reviewed by customer ID: A31SBHJONP8MY
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