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Eagle Blue: A Team, a Tribe, and a High School Basketball Season in Arctic Alaska
by Michael D'Orso
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Synopses & Reviews In the tradition of Friday Night Lights, an extraordinary journey into the basketball-crazed culture of remote Arctic Alaska.
The village of Fort Yukon sits eight miles above the Arctic Circle, deep in Alaska's "bush" country. The six hundred men, women and children who live there — almost all of them Athabascan Gwich'in Natives — have little to cheer for. Their traditional Indian ways of life are rapidly vanishing in the face of a modern culture that is closing in on all sides, threatening to destroy their community and their identity. The one source of pride they can count on is their boys' high school basketball team — the Fort Yukon Eagles.
Eagle Blue follows the Eagles, winners of six regional championships in a row, through the course of an entire 28-game season, from their first day of practice in late November to the Alaska State Championship Tournament in March. With insight, frankness, and compassion, Michael D'Orso climbs into the lives of these fourteen boys, their families, and their coach, shadowing them through an Arctic winter of fifty-below-zero temperatures and near-round-the-clock darkness as the Eagles criss-cross Alaska by air, van, and snow machine in pursuit of their — and their village's — dream. Review: "Eight miles above the Arctic Circle, there's a village with no roads leading to it, but a high school basketball tradition that lights up winter's darkness and a team of native Alaskan boys who know 'no quit.' D'Orso (coauthor of Like No Other Time with Tom Daschle) follows the Fort Yukon Eagles through their 2005 season to the state championship, shifting between a mesmerizing narrative and the thoughts of the players, their coach and their fans. What emerges is more than a sports story; it's a striking portrait of a community consisting of a traditional culture bombarded with modernity, where alcoholism, domestic violence and school dropout rates run wild. One player compares Fort Yukon to a bucket of crabs: 'If one crab gets a claw-hold on the edge... and starts to pull itself out, the others will reach up and grab it and pull it back down.' Among D'Orso's unusual characters are the woman who built a public library in her home, the families who adopt abandoned children, and, of course, the boys for whom 'hard' has an entirely different meaning (e.g., regularly trudging through 'icy darkness' to board flights to Fairbanks for games). With a ghostlike presence, D'Orso lends a voice to a place that deserves to be known." Publishers Weekly (Starred Review) (Copyright Reed Business Information, Inc.) Review: "You can't help losing your heart to the Gwich'in kids of 'Eagle Blue,' Michael D'Orso's captivating literary documentary of the 2004 Fort Yukon High School basketball season. The Gwich'in are Indians, not Eskimos or Inuit; though nowadays many of them are children or grandchildren of interracial marriages, they are related to the Navajo and the Apache. Their town lies just inside the Arctic Circle, ... Washington Post Book Review (read the entire Washington Post review) 150 miles northeast of Fairbanks, Alaska, and in 2004 their high school had an enrollment of 32. Fort Yukon is not free of the alcoholism, cultural confusion and defeatism that poison so much of Native American life. 'That's one thing that really sucks about life here, (a student named Matt Shewfelt) will tell you straight up. Whenever someone tries to do something worthwhile, to make something of themselves — and this is true of the grown-ups as well as the kids — it seems like everyone else tries to pull them back down.' But the town has a tradition of good basketball, thanks in no small part to coach Dave Bridges, who has repeatedly taken his boys to Anchorage for the state tournament in their small-school division. The 2004 crop showed exceptional promise. They weren't tall — only two players were a bit over six feet — but they were fast, with some standout shooters, especially from beyond the three-point line. They had bench strength, and, at Bridges' insistence, they were in terrific shape. (Before the season was over, they came from behind to win more than once, their stamina helping them overtake wobbling opponents.) D'Orso is such a spirited writer that he could surely make the reader empathize with boys from any of the teams Fort Yukon played over the season, including the one from a town of Russian Old Believers where the people still wear Amish-like garb. But he persuades us that there was something special about these Eagles, a blend of selflessness and maturity that kicked in when the boys took the court. Many of them came from broken homes, or had grown up seeing their once-athletic fathers go to seed, or had themselves already gotten into trouble. The boys might claim that they shot hoops to attract babes, but for virtually all of them, basketball — with its excitement, its wholesome relief from domestic anxieties, its opportunity for travel outside of bush Alaska — was the most enriching part of life. Previous teams had come so close to winning state so often that a current of hope seemed to ripple through the cold Fort Yukon air: This might just be the year. D'Orso ably sketches the mentality of rural interior Alaska: a combination of fascination with the urban world (the sweetest kid on the team affected gangsta outfits and lingo) and disdain for city slickers who think they can just waltz into the backcountry. For example, the players couldn't figure out the fuss over Chris McCandless. He, you may recall, was the young man who in 1992 hitchhiked to Denali National Park, intending to live off the land despite his utter unpreparedness. After he was found dead of starvation, two books were written about him. According to D'Orso, the boys on the team considered McCandless 'an idiot — the same kind of idiot who's been coming up to Alaska forever, all the way back to the gold-rush days. ... What galls the hell out of the people who live here ... is the lack of respect shown by these backpackers and hippies and seekers-of-truth who have no idea what they're in for in roadless Alaska and don't take the time or the trouble to find out.' D'Orso also has a gift for bringing ball games to life. He dwells on the Eagles' attempts to implement their coach's perennial strategy, which is to force the other team to play Fort Yukon's game, not the one they've grown comfortable with. And D'Orso brings to life the 'run,' in which a combination of steals, fouls by the other team and a three-pointer or two can propel a team from a few points back to a few points ahead in a matter of seconds. Reading 'Eagle Blue' has the same nerve-wracking effect as watching a real-life game in which someone you know and love is playing. You can flip to the back of the book and find out how the Eagles' 2004 season turned out, but I wouldn't advise it. Better to take each game as it comes, living the season much as did the boys themselves in D'Orso's sensitive, exhilarating account. Dennis Drabelle is a contributing editor of The Washington Post Book World." Reviewed by Dennis Drabelle, Washington Post Book World (Copyright 2006 Washington Post Book World Service/Washington Post Writers Group)
(hide most of this review)Review: "An intimate look at how a high-school basketball team carries the flame of ethnic pride for the native citizens of an Alaskan bush village." Kirkus Reviews About the Author Michael D'Orso is the author of more than a dozen books, including Plundering Paradise, Like Judgment Day, Like No Other Time (with Tom Daschle), and Walking with the Wind (with John Lewis).
Product Details
- ISBN:
- 9781582346236
- Subtitle:
- A Team, a Tribe, and a High School Basketball Team in Arctic Alaska
- Author:
- D'Orso, Michael
- Publisher:
- Bloomsbury Publishing PLC
- Subject:
- General
- Subject:
- History
- Subject:
- Basketball
- Subject:
- Basketball players
- Subject:
- Ethnic Studies - Native American Studies - Tribes
- Subject:
- Basketball - General
- Subject:
- Fort Yukon School (Fort Yukon, Alaska) -
- Subject:
- Fort Yukon Eagles (Basketball team) - History
- Edition Description:
- Us
- Publication Date:
- March 2006
- Binding:
- Hardcover
- Language:
- English
- Illustrations:
- Y
- Pages:
- 323
- Dimensions:
- 9.50x6.26x1.12 in. 1.32 lbs.
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