control over their villages and the land that they used for hunting, fishing, and gathering food. The white man could think of no other way to arrange this control except by organizing tribes into for-profit corporations. This system made sense to people who had been using paper money for centuries. In 1971, through the Alaska Native Claims Settlement Act, in exchange for giving up aboriginal land claims by Alaska Natives—claims to almost all of the state’s land—the federal government gave title to one-ninth of the state’s land area and all the resources they contained to these new Native-owned corporations. Overnight, Native people became shareholders. In order to turn a profit for their shareholders, the corporations, which were organized by region, would have to sell or develop their land. No longer could the landscape merely provide fresh meat, fish, berries, clams, and wood—it could help you buy a truck. With land now a resource in a cash economy, the tensions between traditions and the corporate bottom line grew fierce. Hard lines of ownership and jurisdiction suddenly appeared. And a way of life built—out of necessity—on self-reliance was whittled away when do-gooder federal agencies doled out housing and food. Welfare undermined the skill and stamina required to provide these things for one’s family, and chipped away at self-worth. Diabetes rates in villages skyrocketed as diets were “modernized” toward mass-produced consumer foods. Urban fashions such as low-slung jeans and cocked baseball caps crept into these communities, while the traditional dress made out of gut, skins, and fur could be found more often behind glass. Over time the Native corporations got savvy. These days some of them were pulling in billions of dollars’ worth of preferential minority contracts with the Defense Department and other federal entities for construction, maintenance, and security. But as consumer culture trampled traditional cultures, and a lack of skills, education, and connections shut many Alaska Natives out of the modern definition of success, alcohol and drug use soared. “Suicide” became a verb.
Alaska was changing rapidly. We could see it every day: Undeveloped parcels were razed and built upon, roads were widened and paved, new tracks were being punched through spruce woods, and new businesses were bringing in the kind of luxuries we had complained you couldn’t get here—coconut milk, foreign films, fashionable clothes. In Anchorage, the airport was being renovated from a dingy yet practical structure to one of those gleaming shopping mall–like complexes so common in the Lower 48. The city’s demographics were diversifying to match those of big cities elsewhere in the country, and gang violence—a modern echo of frontier vigilantism—was rearing its head. But in Alaska, you still could have that feeling of going someplace undeveloped, of standing on a patch of ancient earth where no one else had been before. This is what makes the frontier so deliciously new and inviting. We were surrounded by wilderness, by landscapes uncluttered by modern facades. Here you could see ancient history around you: primeval ice grinding out valleys across the bay, million-year-old imprints of leaves, seams of coal that recalled a completely different climate. Here you could see entire watersheds, and, if you looked closely, you could see the histories of those watersheds: old beaver ponds grown over with willows; rivers that inched sideways; lakes that were sneaking across valleys, carrying their far shore with them and leaving a trail of new green growth.
WE TOOK OFF our boots and socks and rolled up our jeans to cross a swift creek that ran cold and cloudy above knee-deep. On the other side, I sat on a log in the sun to dry off and put my gear back on. John stood barefoot on a large, flat rock scanning with his binoculars. The trail curved around a thick stand of alders and there, the steep bluffs that lined the north shore of the bay pushed back, opening vast flats in front of us. Short marsh plants painted the mudflats yellow-green. This