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Ilanka offers fine quality books about Native art, culture and history. Local, regional, and national authors describe the vivid history of the peoples of Prince William Sound and the Copper River Delta.

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Alaska Eskimo Footwear

Our Price: $54.95

Alaska Eskimo Footwear celebrates the incredible beauty and spiritual significance of the shoes and boots worn by Alaska Native peoples. Stunning photography brings the barsh and striking environment of the North alive and demonstrates how essential footwear was to Native survival, while Eskimo seamstresses, dancers, and hunters explain the symbolic meaning of their traditional patterns and decorative details. This full-color volume features photographs from museum collections in Canada, the United States, and Russia, as contributors from each major Alaska Eskimo group�Inupiaq, Yup�ik, Alutiiq, and St. Lawrence Islander�discuss skin preparation, boot construction, and decoration. A tribute to exquisite art and the women who practice it, Alaska Eskimo Footwear brings the beauty of the North�and its traditional wares�to life.

Alaska's First Peoples

Our Price: $15.50

By Judy Ferguson Illustrated by Nikola Kocic�
Alaska�s First People presents Tahita, Travels With Grampa, an Alaskan odyssey from the Aleutians to the arctic in 1898 by foot and by kayak. T.A.H.I.T.A. (Tlingit, Aleut, Haida, Inuit/Eskimo, Tsimshian, Athabascan) portrays Alaska�s cultures in their native lands.

Alaska's Secret Door

Our Price: $15.50

Alaska�s Secret Door
By Judy Ferguson Illustrated by Nikola Kocic�
In 1975, the Ferguson family left Alaska�s road system by canoe. They passed through an invisible door via the Tanana, Yukon and Innoko Rivers, plunging into the Athabascan Interior, where the river is the only road. Wind, sand and salmon, Alaska�s Secret Door presents Emmitt Peters, the winner of the 1975 Iditarod Trail Dogsled Race, fishwheels, and the mask dances of the lower Yukon. With maps and glossary, Secret Door is more than a children�s book; it is an experience into the heart of Alaska.

Always Getting Ready - Yup�ik Eskimo Subsistence in Southwest Alaska

Always Getting Ready - Yup�ik Eskimo Subsistence in Southwest Alaska

Our Price: $35.00

Always Getting Ready - Yup�ik Eskimo Subsistence in Southwest Alaska
By James H. Barker
In this remarkable book, James Barker follows the Yup�ik Eskimo of Alaska�s Yukon-Kuckokwim Delta through their year�s cycle, beginning with spring seal hunting and ending with the winter dancing that celebrates life on the land. Striking duotone photographs and accompanying text capture a people alert to every opportunity. Whether they are waiting for the weather to clear for hunting or preparing testimony on the effects of oil exploration, they are, in the words of Yup�ik Agnes Kelly Bostrom, �always getting ready.�

A Special Gift � the Kutchin Beadwork Tradition by Kate C. Duncan with Eunice Carney

A Special Gift � the Kutchin Beadwork Tradition

Our Price: $19.95

A Special Gift � the Kutchin Beadwork Tradition
By Kate C. Duncan with Eunice Carney
Today as in the past Kutchin women use beads in evocative and beautiful patterns to ornament clothing for family and friends, and for items to be sold. Beadwork is the form a woman will often choose when a most special gift is called for. The beaded object is love made visible. This beautifully illustrated and detailed book tells the story of stunning Kutchin Athabascan beadwork. Among these subarctic Native people, beadwork has been a tradition for over a century. The book follows art historian Kate Duncan and Eunice Carney, a Kutchin elder and beadworker, as they examine beadwork and talk with Kutchin artists in Alaska and the Yukon.

Bird Girl - and - The Man Who Followed the Sun by Velma Wallace

Bird Girl - and - The Man Who Followed the Sun by Velma Wallace

Our Price: $19.95

Bird Girl and The Man Who Followed the Sun
An Athabaskan Indian Legend from Alaska
By Velma Wallis
Velma Wallis, author of the award-winning Two Old Women, brings legends of her people, the Athabaskans of Alaska. In a cold, harsh country where the sun disappears for mush of the long winter, Indians and Eskimos struggle against nature and one another to survive. Against this stark landscape, Wallis skillfully interweaves the stories of two rebels. Bird Girl, an independent young Indian woman, defies her family�s expectations by refusing to become a traditional wife and mother. Instead she chooses to brave life.

The Blue Bead by Kate Boyan

Our Price: $10.95

The Blue Bead
By Kate Boyan
Teeth, ivory, bone, Clay, seeds, stone, Gold, silver, gems, Shells and pearls.
The small but splendid bead is appreciated worldwide; the variety of shapes and materials as endless as your imagination. Used by people from prehistoric to modern times, beads have been symbolic in religious ceremonies, used as currency for trade, and artists have used them to depict dreams, myths, stories, and in their expressions of everyday life.
The tiny colorful glass seed beads used to make up these intricate illustrations tell a tale of an 18th century Bohemian blue glass trade bead that survives its journey into modern day Alaska. One of the fascinating things about old beads is that each one has a different history. Where a bead has been and who its previous owner was often remains a mystery.

Chugach Legends

Our Price: $25.00

Chugach Legends- Stories and Photographs of the Chugach Region
Compile by John Johnson
These photographs and ancient legends of the Native people of the Chugach Region comprise a collection that touches the heart and the soul. These stories transfer a message from prehistoric times of a life and a people who have survived for countless generations on the rim of the North Pacific Ocean. Over the last five thousand years the Chugach have occupied the coastal waters of southcentral Alaska from Prince William Sound to the lower Cook Inlet. The Chugach refer to themselves as Suqpiaq, which means: �Real People� or the original people of their homeland. Seraphim Ukatish, a bilingual teacher in the village of Nanwalek states that the term �Suqpiaq� means a �real person� and was used to distinguish us from other tribes. The word Sugcestun means �as a real person� and refers to the language of the Suqpiaq people, whereas Alutiiq simply means Aleut, a name the Russians gave the Sugpiag.
These stories help to foster and maintain self-awareness and a sense of plave critical to continued self-esteem and identity as a people. The Chugach Alutiiq includes: Port Graham, Nanwalek, Tatitlek, Chenega, Cordova, Nuchek, Kiniklik, Ninilchik, and Seldovia.

Cold River Spirits

Our Price: $19.95

Cold River Spirits- the legacy of an Athabascan- Irish Family from Alaska�s Yukon River
By Jan Harper-Haines
Cold River Spirits is an inspirational story of cultural assimilation told from an insider�s perspective. Jan Harper-Haines offers a fascinating saga of her people and their transition from the wild waterways, which they had ruled with deference to its many spirits, to fast-track modern American life.

Eskimo Drawings

Our Price: $16.95

Eskimo Drawings
Edited by Suzi Jones
Eskimo Drawings is published in conjuction with an exhibition of the same name organized by the Anchorage Museum of History and Art and co-curated by Suzi Jones and Walter Van Horn. The catalog is edited with an introduction by Suzi Jones and a foreward by Patricia B. Wolf.