Loon: Memory, Meaning, and Reality in a Northern Dene Community

In August 1975, at Foxholm Lake in the Northwest Territories of Canada - home of the Native Dene or Chipewyan people - anthropologist Henry S. Sharp went fishing with two members of the Mission Band of Chipewyans. On the lake, they encountered what at first seemed to be a loon - a bird greatly prized for its meat, hide, and feathers--but which then, through a series of abortive shots and elusive dives, revealed itself to be a 'spirit' in the form of a loon. In this book, Sharp takes us on a narrative exploration of the Chipewyan culture that shows us how to make sense of this encounter. An unforgettable journey through the symbolic universe and daily life of the Chipewyans of Mission, his work uses the context and meaning of the loon encounter to teach us how, in Chipewyan reality, spirits are an actual and almost omnipresent aspect of life. To explain how the Chipewyans create and order the shared reality of their culture, Sharp develops a series of analytical metaphors that draw heavily on quantum mechanics. His central premise: Reality is an indeterminate phenomenon created through the sharing of meaning between cultural beings. In support of this argument, Sharp examines such topics as the nature of time, power, gender, animals, memory, gossip, magical death, and the construction of meaning. Creatively argued and evocatively written, his work presents a compelling picture of one people engaged in the human struggle to create meaning. Henry S. Sharp is a scholar in residence in the Department of Anthropology at the University of Virginia. He is the author of "The Transformation of Bigfoot: Maleness, Power, and Belief among the Chipewyan" and co-editor of "Wolf and Man: Evolution in Parallel".