Introduction

      Alaska has long provided Americans in the Lower 48 states, as well as peoples around the world, with a multitude of romantic ideas and images. To many, this is a land of wide-open spaces teeming with abundant wildlife. Bears, wolves, caribou, moose, and sheep roam below a midnight sun that never sets or in the shadows of the northern lights perpetually dancing overhead.

      In recent years, a spate of reality television programs that have sprung up on cable networks reinforces these views. A “Jack London” lifestyle prevails in such shows; there are few roads (and those that exist are quite treacherous), and survival for both “man and beast” is precarious and hardscrabble. Life in America’s “Last Frontier” is one of outdoorsy strength, independence, fortitude, and take-no-prisoners gutsiness not found elsewhere. Reinforced by the media coverage of former Alaskan Governor Sarah “Mama Grizzly” Palin’s 2008 vice presidential bid, such fancies about the state, its people, and its culture have become increasingly common throughout the latter twentieth and early twenty-first centuries. In short, Alaska sparks the postmodern imagination; it is one of the few places left on the planet that is seemingly “untouched” and “primitive”—a so-called frontier teeming with possibility and potential.

      Moreover, of course, residing throughout this vast land are the “Eskimos,” or at least some vestige of Native peoples who, according to popular stereotypes, ride swiftly across the tundra by dogsled, dressed in oversized parkas and skin mukluks. Very few Americans in the Lower 48 have ever interacted with actual Alaska Natives, who remain the stuff of high school English class reading assignments. Even visitors of the state are unlikely to venture out into the Native bush; rather, a more likely scenario includes a chance encounter along Two Street in Fairbanks or Fourth Avenue in Anchorage during a search for souvenir trinkets on a cruise side trip. The romantic image of the benign Native hunting seals in the Arctic with a primitive spear—the winter sun just barely peaking over the horizon—in total peace and harmony with the natural environment and essentially frozen in time alongside the sea ice begins to fade, only to be replaced with other equally destructive images of the Native as lazy, an alcoholic, or, worse, an obsolete anachronism in the modern era.

The Disneyesque visions of Alaska and its Native peoples are all well known. In an age of rapid change spawned by globalization, Orientalist ideas and images about Alaska, especially her Native peoples, often do a disservice rather than make a true contribution to a more accurate perception of what is in fact happening in Alaska today. The purpose of this study is to contribute toward a better understanding of one tribe,¹ the Nets’aii Gwich’in of Arctic Village, and to correct many of the misleading beliefs now perpetuated about this land and her people.

      To be sure, I do not claim to offer a complete picture of every aspect of Alaska Native life in the early twenty-first century. Rather, I seek to provide an important window into the rapidly changing world of an Alaska Native community emblematic of such indigenous communities not only in North America but indeed across the globe. I have no interest in romanticizing the past or writing about “noble savages” now passing from “tradition” to “modernity.” I strive neither to nostalgize nor to present the Gwich’in as static beings who belong on a museum shelf. Rather, I believe the following pages well reveal that theirs is a culture that continues to grow and evolve; the narrative presented here tells the story of who the Gwich’in once were, who they are now, and, most importantly, who they are becoming.

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      I begin the first section by introducing the Nets’aii Gwich’in, who they are and how they came to live in Arctic Village in the early decades of the twentieth century. While their story is similar to other Alaska Native tribes that began to settle throughout the latter nineteenth and early twentieth centuries—to be sure, such a narrative has befallen many indigenous communities through North America and indeed the globe—it is particularly filled with interesting and charismatic individuals who played significant roles in the settlement and development process. Moreover, I seek to show in this and succeeding chapters of this first section that the colonial impact on the Nets’aii Gwich’in, though certainly considerable, was not in and of itself an avenue to “cultural destruction.” Rather, only in the latter part of the twentieth century, several decades after initial European contact, did the Nets’aii Gwich’in community of Arctic Village begin to show signs of wear and decline currently viewed as “typical” of postcolonial indigenous environments.

      In chapter 2, I delve into this issue, namely the initial impact of contact with the White, non-indigenous world, in greater detail. I show that Episcopalian Christianity was pivotal in facilitating the community’s concentration and eventual settlement and that this highly aggressive aspect of colonialism has a complex history in the Arctic. The role it played in erasing indigenous, land-based spirituality and other social values is undeniable. Yet, I argue too that the Episcopal Church served well to bridge Nets’aii Gwich’in and “White” cultures in creative and distinctive ways. Here I rely on materials such as archival sources concerning and written by the Church’s Native and non-Native “founding fathers,” as well as data I personally gathered via participant observation while working in the village on a church reconstruction and historic preservation initiative (2002–2005). My task in this chapter is to suggest that in truth the introduction of Christianity was a unifying force in the early years of Nets’aii Gwich’in settlement; just as communal cohesion began to unravel in the final third of the twentieth century, so too did religious activities, behaviors, and affiliations.

      I then turn in chapter 3 to the role that schools and education also play in facilitating settlement and social change within the Nets’aii Gwich’in community. Using data from the 1960s to the present, including data gathered from several household surveys over the past fifteen years (six in total), I address formal education as a tool of assimilation,