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This book is an introduction to Tlingit social and political history. Each biography is compelling in its own merit, but when all are taken together, the collection shows patterns of interaction among people and communities of today, and across the generations. By combining historical documents and photographs with accounts gathered from living memory, the book also enables the present, living generations to interact with their past.

The book features biographies and life histories of more than 50 men and women, most born between 1880 and 1910, including a special section on the founders of the Alaska Native Brotherhood. Additional lives are described tangentially.

Each biography or life history follows a standard format that includes vital statistics, genealogical information, names in Tlingit and English, and major achievements. But each is also unique. Like the lives they describe, all vary in length, detail, and style, depending on authorship and available human and archival resources. To the fullest extent possible oral and written material from the subjects and their families has been incorporated. Some is more anecdotal, some historical. The appendixes include previously unpublished historical documents and Tlingit texts with facing translations.

The lives in this volume show how individual people both shaped and were shaped by their time and place in history.