Kaasteek - The Breaking Forest (Hardcover) (ISBN-13: 9798295865275)

A forest does not break all at once. It breaks where too much has been carried by too few hands.

In Kaasteek: The Breaking Forest, the adult arc of the Kaasteek Saga reaches its most difficult threshold. The language has returned. The people have gathered around fire, drum, water, food, grief, and memory. But what returns is not simple, and what is carried together does not always become whole.

As old wounds surface and responsibility begins to pull the community in different directions, Kaasteek refuses the easy role others keep trying to place in her hands. She will not become the answer. She will not let the Copper Shield Drum, the language, the grief, or the future belong to one person alone. Around her, the people must learn what it means to speak accurately, wait without owning, carry without claiming, and remember without turning memory into power.

Through place-based, mythic storytelling shaped by Tlingit land, language, and worldview, The Breaking Forest follows a community learning that fracture is not always failure. Some things break because they were never allowed to grow whole. Some break because the truth finally reaches the surface. And some, once broken, reveal what was still alive inside.

This volume deepens the saga's language-centered form, weaving Tlingit words, sentence lines, weather, place names, animals, food, water, and body memory into the movement of the story. It is not a traditional story and does not claim clan authority. It is a modern work of imaginative fiction written with care, gratitude, and respect for the generations who have protected and carried Lingít yoo x̱'atángi.

For readers drawn to mythic fiction, Indigenous futurity, language revitalization, intergenerational healing, and stories where land and language remember, Kaasteek: The Breaking Forest is a powerful meditation on what a people owe one another after the old center no longer holds.

All author proceeds from Kaasteek: The Breaking Forest are pledged to the Central Council of Tlingit and Haida Indian Tribes of Alaska in support of their Language Revitalization Programs.