Bird Girl & the Man Who Followed the Sun: An Athabaskan Indian Legend from Alaska

We follow the life's of Bird Girl and Daagoo. Both try to break with tradition and do what they want, on their own, without being controlled by their family or tribes. They try to run away from the roles that their people try to force onto them. In the end they find out that individualism and being their own person is just wrong. Women should marry who their parents want them to, have babies and work about the camp till they die from old age. And Men should become hunters, working day and night, to keep the people in food and furs, then die an early death. Unless they are tossed out because nobody needs them anymore. In other words, everything has a price, even being your own person.

Velma Wallis, an Athabaskan Indian woman from Alaska, was set on codifying some of the legends that her mother had told her about their people. Her first endeavor, Two Old Women, became a bestseller. Her second project was the mingling of two legends she had heard throughout her childhood. Each of the stories were similar because they focused on "loners" or people who do not fit into the norm of society. Bird Girl and Daagoo are from different bands of the Gwich'in tribe and have one chance meeting when they are young. The story follows as each go separate ways, Daagoo to the "Land of the Sun", and Bird Girl as she is kidnapped and enslaved by an enemy tribe. Their stories mirror each others through their struggles for independence, and the great tragedies they endure.A wonderful story from which I learned a great deal about the Native Alaskan people... Beautifully written story.

Excellent reading. Anyone from the lower 48 who has dreams about Alaska should read this book, it will give you a small insight about the Athabaskan's. Who are a giving people once they know and trust you.

This is a wonderful book - I read it in two days because it is so engrossing, I could scarcely put it down. Written by an Athabaskan woman, raised to hate the Inupiat (eskimos), it is a very honest rendering of Athabaskan culture from the last century - honest because it tells life like it was (miscarriages, women treated as propery, intertribal hatred, harshness of life, etc.), and honest because Wallis (an Athabaskan) is also honest about her own anti-eskimo upbringing in that the main characters in this story are Athabaskan, and the "villians" of the story are eskimo. However, this story goes so far beyond any kind of mere race-based narrative. The story is, truly, about what it means to be a person with dreams and a distinct calling in a society that does not honor difference: Bird Girl is a girl who prefers to hunt and run and be active (not a sewer and cook like women are "supposed" to be), and the Man Who Followed the Sun is a boy who has an intense wanderlust and need to explore new areas and learn new thing (and not interested in taking a wife, having a family, or living by the strict community-based rules of his tribe). I am a person who has long followed my own path, and although my path does not include having to hunt carribou or face death from spear impalation, Wallis's writing, and the story, is such that anyone who is a wanderer/explorer/creative will identify with the characters, and feel refreshed and thankful that someone understands them. I feel much better after having read this - not just because I am fascinated with Athabaskan, eskimo, and Tlingit culture, and wish I could live in that fashion for a year, but I feel better having someone write about what it means to be a wanderer/explorer; to whit, that one must leave one's family, leave's one home, and basically give up a very comfortable (but to me very stagnant and unwholesome) social setting, and carve out one's own niche - but to be a wanderer/explorer means, of course, that one's life will be mostly lonely and often filled with the scorn of others who do not understand, who do not comprehend that some people are called to be more than mere worker-bees for the sake of the "stability" of a society.You, as a reader, will also benefit from the maps, pictures, and historical background that is also included in this book, which will hopefully also help people to realize that cultures like the native Alaskans (and any other culture that doesn't have TV, flush toilets, aluminum siding, strip malls, microwavable food, press-on-nails, or other "civilized" accoutrements) are, in fact, human, and human on a scale that few people who own a housefull of mass-produced paraphernalia that they don't need.Mostly, though, as I stated before, Wallis has a tremendous sense of prose. Her wtriting is very immediate and unadorned. Many would call it "simplistic", but it is the kind of "simplistic" that is almost impossible to do well - very much like Asimov's writing in that regard. Few

I loved this book. It gave me a whole new sense of well being. Thank you Velma Wallis.