17-06-2025
A Traveler Waits in the Stars for Those Willing to Learn How to Look
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.
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