How to Dress a Fish

Name: How to Dress a Fish
Brand: Wesleyan University Press

Wesleyan University Press

How to Dress a FishAuthor(s): Abigal Chabitnoy\nFormat: Hardback\nPublisher: Wesleyan University Press, United States\nImprint: Wesleyan University Press\nISBN-13: 9780819578488, 978-0819578488\nSynopsis\nIn How to Dress a Fish, poet Abigail Chabitnoy, of Aleut descent, addresses the lives disrupted by US Indian boarding school policy. She pays particular attention to the life story of her great grandfather, Michael, who was taken from the Baptist Orphanage, Wood Island, Alaska, and sent to Carlisle Indian Industrial School in Pennsylvania. Incorporating extracts from Michael's boarding school records and early Russian ethnologieswhile engaging Alutiiq language, storytelling motifs, and traditional practicesthe poems form an act of witness and reclamation. In uncovering her own family records, Chabitnoy works against the attempted erasure, finding that while legislation such as the Alaska Native Claims Settlement Act reconnects her to community, through blood and paper, it could not .