Make Prayers to the Raven

I first encountered Nelson’s arctic stories in his account of the sea-ice survival techniques he learned as an apprentice to Inuit whalers of Wainwright, Alaska, on the Arctic Ocean shore. I followed his adventures south to the sub-arctic muskeg home of the Koyukon, an Athabaskan people at home on the Koyukon River, a northern tributary of the great Yukon.

His book, Make Prayers to the Raven, is a deep dive into the daily lives and worldview of the Koyukon. Their ancestors survived in the harsh climate of the Arctic Circle for 10,000 years by respecting the power of… show more.