Two Old Women
In an Athabaskan band facing a starvation winter somewhere in the upper Yukon, the chief decides to leave behind the two oldest women in the group, 75-year-old Sa and 80-year-old Ch'idzigyaak. The women, expected to lie down and die, instead get angry. They check old skills, set rabbit snares, build a shelter, and walk dozens of miles to a fish camp Ch'idzigyaak remembers from her girlhood. Velma Wallis retells a story passed down by her mother, and the book turns into a parable about age, complaint, and what a community owes the people it considers spent.
Where Two Old Women keeps showing up
One of our editors' lists features this novel.
What you might want to know about Two Old Women
The questions readers send us most often, answered without spoilers.
Two elderly Athabaskan women, abandoned by their starving tribe one winter, refuse to die in this Alaska legend retold by a Native author.
It is based on an Athabaskan legend. Velma Wallis grew up hearing the story from her mother and other elders in interior Alaska, and she retells it with fictional detail.
It won the Western States Book Award and has been translated into seventeen languages, becoming a foundational text in Indigenous literature courses.
Two Old Women was written by Velma Wallis, published in 1993 by Harper Perennial.
Two Old Women is 176 pages in standard print editions, though page counts vary slightly between hardcover, paperback, and large-print formats.
At an average reading pace of about 250 words per minute, Two Old Women takes most readers 3 to 4 hours to finish.
Two Old Women is a standalone novel by Velma Wallis, not part of a series.
Two Old Women is available in hardcover, paperback, ebook, and audiobook formats from Amazon, Bookshop.org, ThriftBooks, and most major bookstores.