![]() ![]() Riddling traditions are ubiquitous worldwide and have long been recognized for their educational merit as mind exercises and their role in transmitting culture. Traditional Riddling in the Alaska Classroom The riddle offered here is a riddle of the Denaakk’e people. When speaking of a single cultural group, the group’s name for itself is preferred. The word “Native” when referring to Alaska Natives is always capitalized. The collective term references the various Indigenous peoples who populate the state, including the Iñupiaq, Yup’ik, Aleut, Athabascan, and Southeast Coastal Indigenous peoples. It is important to note that the collective term “Alaska Native” predominates in the state because of its legal use in the Alaska Native Claims Settlement Act of 1971. We are a young educator and an elder poet who strive to honor the lands and the peoples of a now-shared state. We will therefore attempt to model this process of slow study using a riddle from the Dene-Athabascan tradition of Alaska. The authors are non-Native residents of the lands upon which Athabascan peoples have lived for thousands of years, and upon which the authors have resided for three or more decades. It is our hope to engender in educators a new willingness to source Indigenous riddle traditions to help students learn to face incomprehensibility with open mindedness, contextual sensitivity, and infinite patience and persistence and to move toward an evolving understanding that promotes respect, sharing, and cooperation. ![]() We offer that the slow study of traditional riddles, especially of locally Indigenous traditional riddles, should in this spirit be employed across curricula. Riddle study thus becomes an exercise in observation and perception, of limitation and self-correction, and of infinite persistence-skills essential to cross-cultural, cooperative decision making. ![]() For that reason, we maintain that the exercise of pursuing greater understanding of such riddles-while holding in mind the key premise that understanding will inevitably be ever-limited-is in itself an important, worthy pedagogical goal. The riddles of cultural riddling traditions, and especially those of endangered or lost riddling traditions, contain enigmas that can never be fully understood outside their time, place, language, and culture. We ask that the reader approach this riddle with us as a co-puzzler who has been offered a cultural capsule to unpack. Taking your continued reading of this article as agreement, we propose a traditional riddle. In the manner of the Denaakk’e-Koyukon Dene-Athabascan riddling tradition, we first ask your permission to join us in riddling. ![]()
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