"The Far North of the imagination is a cartography of cartoon proportions, made even more so by the sudden celebrity of Sarah Palin. In shorthand, Alaska is white, cold and exotic, or it’s a cruise ship fantasy of fast-melting glaciers and camera-friendly caribou seen between first and second helpings at the buffet table.

But every now and then someone comes along with a story that lays a serious claim to Alaskan authenticity, advancing the Outside’s view of what life is really like in the Great Land.

With his memoir of Alaska, the Inupiat elder William L. Iggiagruk Hensley offers a coming-of-age story for a state and a people, both still young and in the making. And while there are familiar notes in the Dickensian telling of this tale, Hensley manages to make fresh an old narrative of people who arise just as their culture is being erased — be they “Braveheart” Scotsmen or outback Aborigines. His book is also bright and detailed, moving along at a clip most sled dogs would have trouble keeping up with.

Hensley’s life runs from the Alaska at “the twilight of the Stone Age,” as he says, to the petro-dominated modern state with its thriving native corporations and ­billion-dollar energy schemes. Hensley saw it all, and shaped much of it.

On one level, his story is first-person history, for it was in Alaska that the government tried something radically different in settling land claims of indigenous people. Instead of reservations, natives set up regional corporations — everyone a shareholder with an initial stake of land and money in what Hensley calls “the most sweeping and fairest Native American land settlement.”"

Get the Story:
Coming of Age in Alaska (The New York Times 1/25)