This is What They Say: Stories

2010 American Book Award Winner

Chipewyan is one of the many Northern Athapaskan languages spoken in Alaska and western Canada. Mandeville's story cycle is a rich picture of traditional life and thought in the Northern Athapaskan world.

"You can read these stories for their gritty amorality balanced with etiquette, their fierce hunger and generosity, and their sudden senseless death. The tips on hunting, trapping, and tricking. The unvarnished tales of a tough people in a tough land. This is an invaluable book on how to be and not to be: on work and dedication, on the inner life of scholarship, and on life and death in the Old Ways." -- Gary Snyder

Francois Mandeville was a master storyteller born at Fort Resolution in the Northwest Territories in 1878. Fifty years later, at Fort Chipewyan, Alberta, he dictated a book of stories to a young and very talented Chinese linguist, Li Fang-kuei, who wrote them down in the Chipewyan language.

Ron Scollon, former professor of linguistics at Georgetown University, first translated these stories in the 1970s after studying with Li, and returns to them here after a lifetime of work and serious play among the mysteries of human language.