Fifty Miles from Tomorrow: a Memoir of Alaska and the Real People

If you ever wondered what life is like above the Arctic Circle, or how the Inupiat or real people survived months of minus forty degree temperatures, or how Native Americans lost most of their land-rights, and how statehood changed Alaska, or just wondered what difference one man with intelligence and dreams and knowledge of history could do for his people, this memoir by William L. Iggiagruk Hensley is the book for you. Willie and his sister Frances were aapailaurat, children without a father. Their mother was unable to care for them also, so Willie left for Kotzebue where he was adopted by other relatives. Willie's family still followed a migratory lifestyle living off the land. The Inupiat lived without water or electricity and many died young from disease. One favorite game Willie played while young was jumping from ice floe to ice floe. Unlike most of his relatives he stayed in school. But in the 1950s there were no high schools for any Inupiat children in all of Alaska except for the one boarding school at Sitka, over a thousand miles away. Willie decided at age thirteen to attend high school in Tennesee. In the South in the days before Martin Luther King, Willie learned about segregation and also about the Cherokee Trail of Tears. Later, he attended George Washington University and spent his free time at the Library of Congress researching Alaskan and Native American law. By the time, he returned to Alaska, he understood that unless his people acted fast they would lose all claim to their ancestral homeland. Willie unified the Inupiat and Yupik and other Native Americans of Alaska to sue for ownership of their lands. As a result of Hensley's work, in 1971 the US government set aside 44 million acres for Alaska's native peoples. An amazing story of courage and perservance set against the backdrop of the Great Land.