An Ethnographic Long Look: Language and Literacy Over Time and Space in Alaska Native Communities

In this chapter, the authors draws on overlapping, complementary, and continuous long-term ethnographic language and literacy research each of them separately conducted in Alaska Native communities. They discuss this work collectively to deepen and reinforce the ethnographic gaze of their individual research projects, joining others who seek to find new means of 'putting anthropology to work,' through 'situated comparisons' across individual projects and emerging forms of collaborative Indigenous research. They present these studies to both illustrate the kinds of insights that ethnographies of literacy can produce in specific Alaska Native Indigenous communities, and to demonstrate the significant contributions that long, sustained ethnographic collaboration with specific communities over time and across economic, political, linguistic, technological, and social change can provide.