[1] Dauenhauer was raised in Juneau, Hoonah, on seasonal hunting and fishing sites around Icy Straits, Glacier Bay, and Cape Spencer.

[3] In the early 1970s, she married linguist Richard Dauenhauer, who had done his doctoral work on Tlingit language.

In an interview she states that people have always thought of Tlingit as being simple, but goes on to describe it as one of the hardest languages ever encountered.

Her husband Richard Dauenhauer and her have written numerous books that focus on the Tlingit language.

[4] Dauenhauer continues to be internationally recognized for her work preserving and teaching the Tlingit language.

[8] When Dauenhauer received a National Endowment for the Humanities grant, she and her family moved to Juneau, Alaska, in 1983.

The collection draws its focus towards being an autoethnography of the Tlingit tribe; the volume contains short lyric poems, autobiographical pieces about Dauenhauer and her life in the northern Pacific coast, as well as a few dramatic plays that depict traditional Tlingit Raven stories.