The tundra is alive, reassuring, and inevitably leads back to community. Bigjim worries about the youth of today losing the sense of community with people and nature that he knew. The vast changes that Eskimo society has undergone seem to have shattered much of that bond and not replaced it with anything as cohesive and meaningful. These things unravel the bond of the Eskimo and the tundra. However, while Bigjim is acutely aware of the pain of dislocation and disassociation, his primary tendency is to place such pain in a natural perspective, to unite the cycles of human grief with the cycles of the natural world.
Human perspectives seem so limited at times, and the natural world so comforting and eternal.
Yet he knows that those hands also hold the blanket for the blanket toss. Only the hands of the community can support the far-reaching visions of the natural world, and into its receptive hands we must return. Deeply concerned with loss, both personal and cultural, Robert Davis' poems forge connections to the past by way of a commitment to reinterpreting older forms and rituals through contemporary concerns. For Davis one central way to achieve a fusion of nature and culture is to reemphasize our mythic perception of the world and its processes. The world around us is created by Tlingit stories.