Book Review: William L. Iggiagruk Hensley's 'Fifty Miles From Tomorrow'

FIFTY MILES FROM TOMORROW

A Memoir of Alaska and the Real People

By William L. Iggiagruk Hensley

Sarah Chrichton/Farrar Straus Giroux. 256 pp. $24

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 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.