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Floating Coast: An Environmental History of the Bering Strait

2020; Oxford University Press; Volume: 107; Issue: 3 Linguagem: Inglês

10.1093/jahist/jaaa350

1945-2314

James Spiller,

Indigenous Studies and Ecology

Bathsheba Demuth is a sensitive observer who lived for a time near the Bering Strait. A talented scholar and writer who poetically draws on her connections to its landscape and indigenous peoples, she uses a wealth of historical sources (literature, scientific research, government reports, ethnographic studies, indigenous oral histories) to weave a compelling environmental history of both sides of the strait since the mid-nineteenth century. She does this while also touching on major threads of U.S. and Russian/Soviet history. Demuth tells a long story of reciprocal influence between people and environment in Beringia—the Bering Strait and seas to the north and south and lands to the east (the United States) and west (Russia). Her account of ecological volatility references traditional hunting practices, wild animal population swings, and regular conflict among indigenous groups before foreign whalers arrived in 1848. However, she focuses on how these whalers and successive waves of people...