Book review: In “My Father’s Smokehouse” and “Old Woman with Berries in her Lap,” Alaskan Vivian Faith Prescott explores the traditions of the Tlingit and Sami through food, identity and a sense of place.
By Vivian Faith Prescott. West Margin Press, 2022. 251 pages. $16.99.By Vivian Faith Prescott. University of Alaska Press, 2022. $16.95.Traditional knowledge instructs us in the ways of our ancestors and of those who preceded us in the places we might now call home. Writer and poet Vivian Faith Prescott, in two new books, shares her life, art and inquiry into the wisdom of two different Indigenous cultures — the Tlingit of Southeast Alaska and the Sami of northern Scandinavia.
Do you wonder what gatherers of spruce tips — the bright-green spring growth at the end of a branch — do with them besides making beer? Prescott will tell you. As she says near the start of the book,"… you should know I’m obsessed with spruce tips. I love picking them, sniffing them, eating them, drinking them, and cooking with spruce tips ... spruce tips and spruce tip juice, pulp, and salt are in many of the fishcamp foods I prepare.
The title chapter describes her father’s system for smoking salmon, from cutting and brining to glazing and smoking. She sets it in a scene with grandchildren and rounds it out with her own early memories and a brief history of Tlingit smokehouses and their government destruction. She clams up, though, toward the end, when “hours later” the fish is ready to eat. In a parenthesis she tells us, “The smoking time and final step is a secret he forbids me to reveal.
In “Cartography,” the speaker appeals to “Grandmother,” a figure who “chewed alder to red paste” and mixed it with ash to draw on the stretched skins of drums “before black robes silenced our trances.” Although such drums are “now mute behind museum glass,” the speaker still sees the patterns moving, “a map lingering with lichen-scent, signposts herding my migration toward home.”
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