When documenting a people's legacy, which matters most: facts or lore?
Kate Hu is one of the last of the Tlingowa, a tribe that has all but been assimilated into the American mainstream. She knows a handful of words from the now dead language, though she did get to grow up with one of the last fluent speakers, her aged and demented Aunt Bess. Once, in a moment of clarity, or perhaps it was deep insanity, Aunt Bess told her a story of three foreign men who lived among the Tlingowa after their ship wrecked off the coast. They had black hair, sallow skin, and tilted eyes, and they sang rather than spoke to each other. It's a story Kate will always treasure as her aunt only told it once.
Unfortunately a linguistic anthropologist was present at the recitation and decided to write a paper, mocking and deriding Aunt Bess's story as the academic explained the underlying language shift happening to the Tlingowa people. One paper was bad enough, but when adapted into a longer textbook, it hit the New York Times Bestseller List. Now the entire world knows and mocks Aunt Bess and that one treasured piece of Tlingowa lore.
When archaeologists turn up Chinese artifacts on Tlingowa ancestral lands, Kate is one of the first people on the scene, but so is that academic who ridiculed her family all those years ago. He's contemplating a sequel to his bestseller. Kate has no academic standing, nor any of this man's fame or fanbase. Will she have to stand by and watch him destroy everything she loves once again?
Genre: Science Fiction
Kate Hu is one of the last of the Tlingowa, a tribe that has all but been assimilated into the American mainstream. She knows a handful of words from the now dead language, though she did get to grow up with one of the last fluent speakers, her aged and demented Aunt Bess. Once, in a moment of clarity, or perhaps it was deep insanity, Aunt Bess told her a story of three foreign men who lived among the Tlingowa after their ship wrecked off the coast. They had black hair, sallow skin, and tilted eyes, and they sang rather than spoke to each other. It's a story Kate will always treasure as her aunt only told it once.
Unfortunately a linguistic anthropologist was present at the recitation and decided to write a paper, mocking and deriding Aunt Bess's story as the academic explained the underlying language shift happening to the Tlingowa people. One paper was bad enough, but when adapted into a longer textbook, it hit the New York Times Bestseller List. Now the entire world knows and mocks Aunt Bess and that one treasured piece of Tlingowa lore.
When archaeologists turn up Chinese artifacts on Tlingowa ancestral lands, Kate is one of the first people on the scene, but so is that academic who ridiculed her family all those years ago. He's contemplating a sequel to his bestseller. Kate has no academic standing, nor any of this man's fame or fanbase. Will she have to stand by and watch him destroy everything she loves once again?
Genre: Science Fiction
Used availability for Emily Mah's Across the Sea