Nunavut tigummiun Hold on to the land It was just fifty years ago that the territory of Alaska officially became the state of Alaska. But no matter who has staked their claim to the land, it has always had a way of enveloping souls in its vast, icy embrace. For William L. Iggiagruk Hensley, Alaska has been his home, his identity, and his cause. Born on the shores of Kotzebue Sound, twenty-nine miles north of the Arctic Circle, he was raised to live the traditional, seminomadic life that his Inupiaq ancestors had lived for thousands of years. It was a life of cold and of constant effort, but Hensley's people also reaped the bounty that nature provided. In Fifty Miles from Tomorrow, Hensley offers us the rare chance to immerse ourselves in a firsthand account of growing up Native Alaskan. There have been books written about Alaska, but they've been written by Outsiders, settlers. Hensley's memoir of life on the tundra offers an entirely new perspective, and his stories are captivating, as is his account of his devotion to the Alaska Native land claims movement. As a young man, Hensley was sent by missionaries to the Lower Forty-eight so he could pursue an education. While studying there, he discovered that the land Native Alaskans had occupied and, to all intents and purposes, owned for millennia was being snatched away from them. Hensley decided to fight back. In 1971, after years of Hensley's tireless lobbying, the United States government set aside 44 million acres and nearly $1 billion for use by Alaska's native peoples. Unlike their relatives to the south, the Alaskan peoples would be able to take charge of their economic and political destiny. The landmark decision did not come overnight and was certainly not the making of any one person. But it was Hensley who gave voice to the cause and made it real. Fifty Miles from Tomorrow is not only the memoir of one man; it is also a fascinating testament to the resilience of the Alaskan ilitqusiat, the Alaskan spirit.

"Although this fascinating memoir is set hundreds of |miles from where most Americans have ever dared to travel, Hensley brings to life this 'little-known part of America' through myriad tales of toil, triumph and the Inupiat Ilitqusiat — the Inupiat spirit. Growing up in what he calls the 'twilight of the Stone Age,' Hensley grew up without what many would consider basic necessities; in his homeland on the Kotzebue Sound in rural Alaska, 'survival was the primary concern.' But even through the illness and hardships that plagued his and other families, the life lessons learned as a child stayed with him for decades. As such, despite attending high school and college in the Lower 48, he found himself always drawn back to his homeland, 'like a salmon heading for the waters where he was spawned.' Hensley became a crusader for the Inupiat people, starting as a fresh-out-of-college activist, then his tenure as a state representative, and later his work in the corporate sector. Through his entire adult life, Hensley's mission has been simple: to ensure the Inupiat are allowed to keep their rights and their land. There are rich details of hunting adventures and typical childhood struggles, but the deep-rooted values and strength of the Inupiat people are what make this work truly sing." Publishers Weekly (Copyright Reed Business Information, Inc.)

Late in this illuminating memoir, the author recounts a transcendent moment. The time is 1977, the place is Barrow, Alaska, and the occasion is a whaling convention that has evolved into a momentous gathering of Inuit (the "real people" as they call themselves) from the United States, Canada and Greenland. As William L. Iggiagruk Hensley explains, it's the first meeting of these far-flung Inuit groups... Washington Post Book Review (read the entire Washington Post review) since they migrated eastward from Asia 5,000 years ago. Amazingly, given the millennia of separation, they find the several versions of Inupiaq, their common language, to be mutually intelligible. Powered by linguistic euphoria, they talk and dance and, above all, sing. "We celebrated as long as our bodies didn't fail us," Hensley writes, "and slept only long enough to resume the orgy of Inupiaq communication that had so long eluded us."

Hensley's life story epitomizes the upheavals his people have endured. He was born above the Arctic Circle, alongside Kotzebue Sound, Alaska, in 1941, to a Lithuanian fur trader and an Inuit mother. His father deserted them, and his mother was a mess. When a cousin discovered the boy and his sister (from a different, unknown father) living in squalor in Nome, he took them back to Kotzebue, apparently with their mother's consent. There they grew up in straitened circumstances: tiny house, not enough beds, no indoor plumbing, no electricity.

"I think of those early years of my life as the twilight of the Stone Age," Hensley writes, but he was now among villagers who knew how to get the most from the land and sea. High among the qualities that sustained them was their awareness of having inherited a proven way of life, in which older female relatives commonly raised kids who turned out just fine despite being fatherless. It was a vigorous, outdoorsy existence, though the absence of dentists and the Inuit habit of using their teeth as tools (to cut animal skins, for example) wreaked havoc inside everyone's mouth.

Most of the defeats inflicted on the children had nothing to do with absent fathers or the unforgiving natural environment. It was their "betters" who relentlessly humiliated and punished them: the Christian missionaries, who condemned their traditional religion and frowned on dancing; the teachers at the Bureau of Indian Affairs school, who forbade them to speak Inupiaq and saw to it that, in Hensley's words, "schoolwork ... excluded any mention of the ancient music, art, dance, and history of their own people."

Hensley's deracination became more severe than most: At age 15, encouraged and subsidized by a local minister, the boy was sent off to Tennessee, where he attended high school at a Baptist academy. Like most teenagers, however, he was eager to conform, and his intelligence and football skills helped him fit in. He went on to George Washington University. Being in the capital awakened an interest in politics (he attended the 1963 March on Washington and listened to Martin Luther King Jr. deliver his "I Have a Dream" speech); after graduating in 1966, Hensley returned to Alaska a budding activist.

He worked on various phases of the 1971 Alaska Native Claims Settlement Act, which conveyed 40 million acres of federal land in Alaska to its natives, to be managed by native-run corporations set up for that purpose (as a young lawyer at the Interior Department, this reviewer played a very small part in getting the law passed). In 1974, Hensley ran unsuccessfully for the U.S. House (he lost to Don Young, who, more than three decades later, is still Alaska's congressman).

But as Hensley tells it, the signal event of his life was an "epiphany" in Nome, a town where the wreckage of native Alaskans' lives was starkly visible. Earlier, his greatest fear had been that his people would lose their land; in Nome, he became saddened by the possible loss of their identity. In trying so hard to assimilate, he decided, "we were digging our own cultural grave."

Hensley followed through on this insight by helping to develop a camp at which young Inuit can learn their folkways. This is an admirable initiative, but Hensley says little about what success, if any, it and related programs have had. Are young Inuit growing up able to speak both Inupiaq and English these days? Have hunting skills been passed on? Has the incidence of chronic alcoholism declined?

Even without the answers to such questions, however, "Fifty Miles From Tomorrow" is an entertaining and affecting portrait of a man and his extraordinary milieu.

Reviewed by Dennis Drabelle, a contributing editor of The Washington Post Book World, Washington Post Book World (Copyright 2006 Washington Post Book World Service/Washington Post Writers Group)
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In 1971, after years of Hensley's tireless lobbying, the U.S. conveyed 44 million acres and earmarked nearly $1 billion for use by Alaska's native peoples. This is the inspiring true story of one man's quest to preserve and defend his people's "Ilitqusiat," or Native Spirit.