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I found it surprising that this community, which seemed to pay such careful attention to how its members lived, would have let the beach get trashed. I had a romantic notion of the Old Believer life—of an idyllic existence of fishing, gardening, and God—unspoiled by the desires and refuse that cluttered the modern lives of the rest of us. But the communities of Old Believers were a confounding mix of the old and the new. There were few concrete rules, but the Russians shunned modern technology, even computers in the schools. Men didn’t shave their beards, and they kept strict fasts around the holidays. Even their language was old. “That is the Russian we speak,” a Russian aide had told the teacher I knew, pointing to a children’s book written by Tolstoy before the turn of the last century. It was village Russian, a language that encompassed an older, rural life. Yet the men drove new trucks and the women could be seen wheeling around town in shiny sedans and SUVs. I would often see the mothers in the main supermarket in town, wearing their handmade dresses and surrounded by a clutch of children. I’d notice cases of Diet Pepsi, packages of hot dogs, and other modern treats filling their carts.

The Old Believers weren’t the only Alaskans who cobbled together a life that was a mixture of old and new, modern and traditional. Everywhere I looked, I saw the homestead mentality of self-reliance and resourcefulness contrasting with dependence on modern conveniences. You could find young couples living out of town in dark cabins without running water who took two-week winter vacations in Hawaii. There were houses heated by woodstoves that had gleaming white satellite dishes standing next to them. Though I was fiercely committed to harvesting wild food whenever I could, my life was modern: I drove into town to work and came home to a warm house that had running water, a television, my CD collection. John and I put up salmon but we also bought imported goat cheese. About two-thirds of the state’s population lived in cities, but these “cities” were minutes away from vast tracts of wilderness. Alaska was ranked highest in the country for Internet access, while over the course of a year Alaskans harvested eighty pounds of wild food per capita. Certainly not everyone hunted, fished, or gathered, but the fall issues of the Anchorage Daily News, the state’s largest newspaper, showed that these traditional activities were on many people’s minds; articles discussed duck hunting etiquette, caribou quotas, tips for sizing antlers accurately, alpine ptarmigan hunting, and a successful suburban moose hunt.

Nowhere was this combination of modern and traditional lifestyles as profound as with Alaska Natives. Their ancestors had been here for thousands of years, and contemporary Natives held on to many of the old ways while picking up many of the new. They used outboards on whale hunts and to bring families to fish camps where they would stay for weeks to net and dry fish to eat throughout the rest of the year. They drove snowmachines for hunting, transportation, and entertainment, and to collect driftwood for traditional sweat baths. They traveled to small villages off the road system by plane. And, like everyone else in the state, they relied on cars and trucks, and on the delivery of groceries and mail by road, sea, or air. Assimilation like this was nothing new. Since the white man first arrived in Alaska, the Native peoples to varying degrees had picked up their dress, their church, their diseases, and their liquor.

The drilling of the first commercially viable oil well pushed Alaska into statehood in 1959. And ten years later, when ten billion barrels of oil were discovered at Prudhoe Bay in the Alaskan Arctic, legislators rushed to parcel out a land area nearly one-fifth the size of the Lower 48 so that jurisdiction could be determined and a pipeline could be built across the state to get this oil to market. Officials pledged to allow Alaska Natives to retain