and Other Inheritances from the Alaska-Yukon Borderlands
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.
"[Cook] invites readers to join her in her process of asking questions about culture, art, Indigenous learning and northern science. The reader is challenged to make meaning right along with her. Permafrost is an Archive is, ultimately, a book of questioning and imagining, rich in metaphor and lyricism. Its many references to other texts and to cultural theory contribute significantly to understanding the North. — its past, present and future. Notes at the end add more context and sources for consideration."
—Nancy Lord, Anchorage Daily New
“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
