Native Alaskan Willie Hensely recalls life before snow machines and Gore-Tex

This year Alaska celebrates its 50th anniversary, so it's no coincidence that Alaska native William Iggiagruk Hensley has penned a story of his life, from growing up as an orphan in Kotzebue to living though the era of the pipeline that brought wealth to the state and economic support to the native tribes that inhabit it.

"Alaska has a way of enveloping souls in its vast, icy embrace," writes Hensley in "Fifty Miles from Tomorrow: A Memoir of Alaska and the Real People" (Sarah Crichton Books/Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 256 pp., $24). "I was there before Gore-Tex replaced muskrat and wolf skin in parkas, before moon boots replaced Mukluks. I was there before the snow machine, back when the huskies howled their eagerness to pull the sled. The world I was born into and the life I lived in my early years will never exist again."

The book offers an interesting glimpse of the first half-century of Alaska statehood, but it is a slow read and requires the reader to have an interest in native Alaska history. Plus, the book is promoted as the first book about native Alaskan life by an Alaskan native. But in 2003, in "Raising Ourselves," Velma Wallis wrote about growing up in a traditional Athabaskan family in Fort Yukon, a remote village of 650 people in Interior Alaska.

Further, the book states that Hensley has four children, when he actually has fathered six children, a fact confirmed post-publication by his publisher.

Hensley was born in 1941, a few feet from the shores of Kotzebue Sound, just 90 miles east of Russia. An orphan, he was raised by his mother's first cousin. He writes about how important family life was in his village where everyone fished, hunted and played together. One annual event was the visit of the North Star out of Seattle, which carried supplies for the village schools. Helping unload the vessel was one of the few chances many local men had to earn some cash.

Hensley talks about how he was shocked one day when all his friends disappeared and he learned they had gone to school. He begged his family to let him attend, and even on the worst weather days school was never canceled.

As soon as he learned to read, Hensley said he tried to read everything he could get his hands on, which often was the Sears catalog and the Bible. The school wouldn't let the students take books home because they were worried they would be burned for kindling.

A white man in the village, a distant cousin to Jimmy Carter, befriended Hensley and encouraged him to continue his education, so after 8th grade he enrolled in a Baptist school in Tennessee.

"There was never a day when I didn't think of home," he said. "No matter where my adventures took me in the Lower Forty-eight, Alaska was always calling." When he finished school in Tennessee, "I headed north, like a salmon heading for the waters where he was spawned."

He eventually graduated from George Washington University in Washington, D.C., and became involved in the National Congress of American Indians. In 1966, he returned to Alaska to find progress in his little village; the house he'd grown up in had been bulldozed. He attended graduate school at the University of Alaska and studied Alaskan history. "I recognized one fact very clearly: If we were going to succeed in protecting our land, we were going to have to find a way to fight for it on our own."

Hensley began his fight for native land claims and helped found the Alaska Federation of Natives, an organization that was instrumental in settling native land claims with the state and federal government. Under the act, signed into law in 1971, Natives received 44 million acres of land and nearly $1 billion. It also formed 12 regional corporations to administer the money.

Hensley was elected, at age 25, to the state House of Representatives and helped push for the native claims settlement act.

Hensley later worked with the NANA Regional Corporation, an outgrowth of the Northwest Alaska Native Association. Today, Hensley is chair of the First Alaskans Institute, with its mission to help develop the next generation of Alaska's native leadership. He retired earlier this year as manager of Alyeska Pipeline Service Co.

Still, he continues to speak on issues important to native Alaskans. "The stronger our identity and spirit," writes Hensley, "the stronger the likelihood that we will keep our land for future generations."

Susan Gilmore: 206-464-2054 or sgilmore@seattletimes.com