The Fort of Young Saplings

3.6/5 ( ratings)

Vanessa Veselka grew up a child in motion. After her parents split, she'd lived in nine states by the age of seven, eventually landing with her mother in 1970s Greenwich Village. Along the way, she became enthralled with a distant part of her identity: her father’s ceremonial adoption into the Tlingit, an Alaska Native people of legendary martial prowess. As an adult, her childhood memories of Tlingit warrior tales would transform into a quest to understand her own connection to a distant people and their history.

In that history, Veselka ultimately found a deeper mystery—that of the Tlingit’s legendary battle against Russian colonizers. In 1804, sailors of the Russian Empire had orders to take Sitka, Alaska—a strategic outpost protected by Tlingit warriors whose bird-beaked helmets and spears had already repelled several Russian expeditions. The Tlingit oral histories of the battle, passed down for hundreds of years, treated it as a victory. But when Veselka began researching it, she learned that the battle had been recorded in Western history as a Russian triumph. How could the two sides have such divergent accounts? And by understanding why, could Veselka find a new connection to the Tlingit herself?

The Fort of Young Saplings is a genre-defying journey into the intersection of personal and geopolitical history, an exploration of how we're shaped by the stories we tell about ourselves—and what happens when those stories shift beneath our feet.