Peter Kalifornsky

Who was Peter Kalifornsky?

Peter Kalifornsky, self-named "Петр Калифорнский", was a self-taught writer and ethnographer of the Dena'ina Athabaskan of Kenai, Alaska, who wrote traditional stories, poems, and language lessons in the Outer Inlet dialect of Dena'ina, a language of the Athabaskan language group. Kalifornsky, a Dena'ina elder, participated in creating the written version of the Dena'ina language, and over 19 years worked to record as many sukdu or traditional stories as he could remember, translating them also into English. He also wrote original works in Dena'ina, including a number of autobiographical works.

Near the end of his life, he worked with linguist James Kari of the Alaska Native Language Center and anthropologist Alan Boraas of Kenai Peninsula College to compile his collected works. Published in 1991, A Dena'ina Legacy — K'tl'egh'i Sukdu: The Collected Writings of Peter Kalifornsky contains 147 bilingual Dena'ina-English writings. Throughout most of the volume, the original Dena'ina appears on the left-hand page and the English translation appears opposite, on the right page.