Each entry conforms to principles of U.S. Board on Geographic Names and lists location, brief history and meaning of name.

An alphabetical listing of the names of natural features in Alaska. A paragraph cites the location and the origin of each name. Does not include towns or settlements. The "index" is a cross-reference of alternative names.

Romantic history-filled names have long fired the imagination of every reader and visitor to the Northland. In Alaska-Yukon Place Names, author James W. Phillips takes the vacationing tourist, historian, and armchair traveler through the most memorable places in the Alaska-Yukon region. Since the most popular routes north to Alaska and the Yukon are the Marine Highway and the Alaska Highway through Canada, the entries of Alaska-Yukon Place Names include ghost towns, islands, waterways, mountains, and glaciers in northern British Columbia. Whether more interested in the scenery, the historic past, or the fabulous yarns connected with the area, you will be delighted by the colorful towns of Alaska and the Yukon: Poorman, Shaman’s Village, Chicken and Eek, and will have no trouble imagining the mettle of those pioneers who traveled Moose Pass, shot Squaw Rapids, or panned in Pure Gold Creek.

Haa Leelk'w Has Aan' Saaxu / Our Grandparents' Names on the Land presents the results of a collaborative project with Native communities of Southeast Alaska to record indigenous geographic names. Documenting and analyzing more than 3,000 Tlingit, Haida, and other Native names on the land, it highlights their descriptive force and cultural significance. With community maps, tables, and photographs, this book will be invaluable for those seeking to understand Alaska Native geographic perspectives. As Tlingits from the Hoonah Indian Association explain in the book: "Long before Russian, French, Spanish, and British explorers mapped and named the mountains and bays of the Huna Tlingit homeland, we identified special places in our own vibrant, descriptive ways. Tlingit place names reflect important natural resources, ancestral stories, sacred places, and major geological and historic events. Our place names describe more than just inanimate locations for we perceive the mountains, glaciers, and streams to be as alive and aware as ourselves. Rather, they capture the history, emotions, and stories of our enduring relationship with a living, evolving landscape." "The new benchmark against which all future work will be measured." -Richard Dauenhauer, author of Russians in Tlingit America "Thomas Thornton and his Tlingit colleagues show how 'grandparents' names on the land' provide exquisite scaffolding for human ecologies in North America's far northwest--a moral universe inhabited by a community of beings in constant communication and exchange. This book will be a resource for the ages." -Julie Cruikshank, author of Do Glaciers Listen? Local Knowledge, Colonial Encounters, and Social Imagination "Restoring Tlingit placenames and their meanings will root our people back in place and decolonize the landscape, and Thornton has provided us with a fundamental tool to do exactly that. Sh t--oghaa xhat ditee--I am grateful." -Lance A. Twitchell, Xh'unei, University of Alaska Southeast Thomas F. Thornton is senior research fellow and director of the Environmental Change and Management Program at the Environmental Change Institute, School of Geography and the Environment, University of Oxford He is the author of Being and Place among the Tlingit.