Positively Uncivilized

Inaugural winner of Raven Chronicles Press's Keepers of the Fire Prize for Nonfiction in 2025, Positively Uncivilized examines, from an Indigenous perspective, the impact of human inhabitants on the planet Earth. Alongside personal accounts of the deterioration of salmon populations in the Pacific Northwest and the loss of Indigenous history, the twelve essays in this book emphasize the necessity of community to overcome the damage done by human socio-economic and political systems designed to isolate and shame those vulnerable to those unfair systems. Rena Priest asserts the power of storytelling and poetry to create continuity despite the disruptions caused by settler colonialism as well as cultural and physical genocide. The author is concerned not just with the past but also the present, where the same concerns for survival that her ancestors held are echoed even now in Gaza and Ukraine. Through lyric language and a vulnerability that comes from a space of determined survivance, the author calls for hope linked with action where we, as a community concerned with mutual abundance, can learn to relate to each other and all nature as beings able to make healthy compromises which recognize the importance of true reciprocity. In Positively Uncivilized, Rena Priest reflects on the traditional ecological knowledge of her ancestors, details the destructive history of the "fish wars" between her people and extraction industries, and recounts the heartbreaking journey of the Killer Whale/Orca Tokitae and the beautiful lessons that Orcas impart to their human kin.