Among the Northern Dene people in Alaska and Canada, tradition holds that pointing one’s finger at animals, or the stars, is disrespectful. So is speaking carelessly about entities in the night sky. And so is peppering an Elder with probing questions.
Chris Cannon, a red-haired astronomy educator, did not know any of this one overcast morning in 2011, when he ventured past a black bear’s carcass and a faded sign reading “trespassers will be shot” and knocked on Paul Herbert’s door in Fort Yukon, Alaska.
Dr. Cannon, at that time a number of years from earning his Ph.D. in cultural anthropology, tried to introduce himself in the Gwich’in language, of which Mr. Herbert is among only a few hundred surviving native speakers. Then Dr. Cannon asked about the stars.
“What the hell you mean, stars?” Mr. Herbert said. “It’s cloudy out there.”
Over tea at Mr. Herbert’s kitchen table, Dr. Cannon produced documents showing star names that Western ethnographers and anthropologists had recorded from Indigenous cultures across the region. Existing research suggested that Northern Dene societies like the Gwich’in had only managed to map or study the Big Dipper and no other parts of the night sky. One 20th-century ethnographer had gone so far as to dismiss the region’s Indigenous astronomical knowledge as “extremely slight” and “small.”
But Mr. Herbert holds far more in his head alone than the sum total of all that published research.
“I said, ‘That stupid little map right there, throw that in the garbage,’” Mr. Herbert recalled in a recording of a launch event for Dr. Cannon’s new book on Northern Dene star knowledge that was hosted by the Tanana Chiefs Conference, a consortium of Alaska Native communities.
The book, “In the Footsteps of the Traveller,” grew from that first meeting with Mr. Herbert and replaces earlier scholarly condescension with a clearer picture of a huge, ancient and intricate astronomical system shared by Elders across more than 750 miles of subarctic landscape. Alongside Mr. Herbert, some 65 Indigenous knowledge holders contributed to the book. More than a third have passed away since Dr. Cannon began the research.
One of the most central features of the regional astronomical system is a single figure who straddles the entire sky: In Gwich’in, he is Yahdii.
“We may have called him different names, but we all have the same story of the man in the sky,” Fred Sangris, of the Yellowknives Dene First Nation in Canada, wrote in the volume’s foreword. “As a chief, Elder, and contributor of this book, I give this work my sincere blessing and hope that many benefit from the wisdom in its pages.”
At the beginning, though, it was clear as he sat awkwardly at the kitchen table that Dr. Cannon, now an Indigenous studies scholar at the University of Alaska Fairbanks, had much to learn. Including how to learn. Dr. Cannon would find that such knowledge could not be acquired with traditional Western academic inquiry. Instead, he would need to enter a world with its own thought, methods and rules.
His first task was obvious: Come back when the skies were clear.
Dr. Cannon traveled back to Mr. Herbert’s house in spring 2013.
This time the stars obliged. Standing on powdery, squeaky snow in minus 25 Fahrenheit weather, Mr. Herbert said that the Big Dipper, which earlier ethnographers had recorded as “Yahdii,” was only Yahdii’s tail.
Yahdii’s anatomy in fact incorporated other well-known stars. Castor and Pollux were in Yahdii’s left ear. The Pleiades were the tip of Yahdii’s animallike snout. Yahdii’s left foot hovered near Arcturus; his right foot by Deneb. The Milky Way was the snow-covered trail Yahdii followed. What the ancient Greeks had vivisected into dozens of shapes was here a single man-animal hybrid that arched over the entire sky, like a person on all fours protectively huddled over a beach ball.
The whole-sky constellation that Mr. Herbert shared was not known in Western scholarship, and Dr. Cannon copublished a paper on the subject. But this prompted another question by Dr. Cannon: Who was Yahdii?
Mr. Herbert declined to answer. This wasn’t something to casually discuss. Dr. Cannon needed to stick around and learn about it the correct way, Mr. Herbert said. Four or five years should be adequate.
In Northern Dene traditions, children learn through personal responses to challenges, riddles and experiences. Not through questions. Certainly not by being spoon-fed information. And in these matters, Dr. Cannon was functionally a child.
He should return and join hunting excursions, Mr. Herbert said, and search for a faint red star to better understand Yahdii’s identity.
Dr. Cannon, then living in a cabin outside Fairbanks, searched in vain for that star during his nightly visit to the outhouse. He also accompanied Mr. Herbert, first on short trips, then on voyages.
Some 30 Northern Dene societies live in Alaska and Canada, speaking languages tied closely to each other.
Much of Northern Dene astronomical knowledge addresses the practical challenges of thriving in subarctic environments. To measure the time of day, for example, Mr. Herbert reads the rising of stars over the horizon on sunless winter mornings. He also has memorized a stellar wayfinding system as complex as the star compasses used by Polynesian voyagers.
In Gwich’in, orientation is given in relation to river systems. Instead of walking “north” or “south,” you travel “upriver” or “downriver.” If Mr. Herbert is disoriented at night in thick forests, he has only to look at Yahdii’s orientation. He mentally maps the position of the stars in relation to the river-drainage system on the land below, as he and Dr. Cannon documented in 2022.
When they traveled together, Dr. Cannon noticed that Mr. Herbert often picked routes that retraced Northern Dene stories of a shape-shifting wanderer. Known by various names in different dialects, he is “the Traveler” in English. In primordial times, the Traveler transformed what was once a monster-inhabited world into a more hospitable place for humans. But where the Traveler went after his lifetime of adventures is often left open-ended.
Dr. Cannon decided to test an informed guest: Is Yahdii another name for the Traveler, he asked blankly? Mr. Herbert responded with a no; it would take Dr. Cannon years of additional learning to understand why he replied that way.
But the Elders that Dr. Cannon visited in nearby communities supplied complementary clues, offering other toeholds to Dr. Cannon. Their dialects also held names for a man-animal constellation figure that spanned the precincts of the heavens described by Mr. Herbert, suggesting a worldview that ran old and deep. To the Sahtúot’ine, Yahdii was named Yı́hda. In Ahtna, he was Nek’eltaeni. To David Engles, a member of the Lower Tanana, he was Nogheyoli.
Mr. Herbert’s teaching methods turned out to be ancestral, not limited to his family. Mr. Engles was taught by his grandfather, who had also initiated him into the mysteries of the night sky with a challenge Dr. Cannon recognized with a shiver of familiarity.
If you can find the “little red one” up there, the grandfather had said, I’ll tell you more. Mr. Engles would spot the star within a few weeks.
By contrast, Dr. Cannon needed the equivalent of a cross-cultural tip line to locate the faint star to Mr. Herbert’s satisfaction. He caught on only after hearing Elders in other communities speak about connecting with their own versions of the constellation figure after having discovered its “head” or “heart.” Hearing this, Dr. Cannon narrowed his search to the region of the sky where Yahdii’s heart must be.
Then he found it, visible only on clearer nights, an obscure star Western astronomers call 27 Lyn.
It had taken him three and a half years.
But whose heart really was it? The more Dr. Cannon learned, the more he became convinced again that the Traveler and the man-animal constellation were the same across many Northern Dene cultures.
Eventually he posed the relationship again to Mr. Herbert, underlining his own deeper convictions and the work he had put in. This time, Mr. Herbert gave a yes: The Gwich’in Traveler figure and Yahdii were one and the same.
In the past, Dr. Cannon’s collaborators told him, only those curious enough to take their own participatory journeys, and have a personal relationship with the stars, were meant to find this out. Only then could people recognize that the Traveler they knew from childhood stories was in the stars overhead, an ancient cosmic guardian watching over the world to this day.
Among the culture bearers who contributed to the book, many agreed to help commit this intimate knowledge to paper because Dr. Cannon was approaching the subject in the traditional hands-on way. Others were motivated because they recognized that they were among the few remaining people in their subcultures or languages to hold this knowledge.
“I have not spoken about this in 20 years,” Mr. Engles told Dr. Cannon in an interview. “I’m just grateful for the opportunity to put back what my grandfather gave me.”
Dr. Cannon’s book aims to fill what he considers a yawning gap. Although every civilization experiences the night sky, thorough studies of how people conceptualize the cosmos have been attempted for fewer than 1 percent of human languages, Dr. Cannon estimates.
“I felt a sense that this is needed,” said John MacDonald, who conducted a survey of astronomy with Inuit Elders in the 1990s, and served as an academic reviewer for Dr. Cannon.
“I reacted to it in an emotional way,” he said of Dr. Cannon’s manuscript.
The experience was more personal to Mandy Bayha, one of the book’s younger contributors. From Deline, in the Northwest Territories of Canada, she describes herself as one of the last generation to grow up with her culture’s language as her first tongue. The decision of Elders to participate in Dr. Cannon’s research was part of an ongoing gift to future generations, she said, describing it as an act of “unconditional love and sacred obligation.”
When Dr. Cannon met with her and Elder Charlie Neyelle, the discussions felt like an exercise in remembering so much she already knew. All those familiar stories of the Traveler suddenly snapped into place among the stars.
“When I remembered, or connected that, it was like past, present, future all came together at once for me, and it came alive,” Ms. Bayha said.
Dr. Cannon also conveyed the tradition in other Northern Dene cultures of seeking the constellation’s heart, describing how long the process had taken him. Ms. Bayha immediately started eyeing one faint star overhead, doubtful it could be that easy.
The next time Dr. Cannon visited, she pointed it out, and he confirmed she had identified the right star.
“I kind of laughed,” she said. “I found it and I didn’t even know I found it. The entire time it was there.”
The post A Traveler Waits in the Stars for Those Willing to Learn How to Look appeared first on New York Times.
