"When the world in which a society lives changes, its culture changes as well. When economic or environmental conditions change, society has to change. They either adapt or die out. This is a basic fact of human history over centuries of recorded history. In Alaska, from archaeology we know that the earliest inhabitants either changed or disappeared. We have had periods when there was whale hunting, the fur trade, the Gold Rush, leaving behind ghost towns, abandoned villages.

Historically, many villages, or settlements, were created after the purchase of Alaska from Russia. Before that, the Native people had to move about, from season to season, at times living in winter settlements, to survive. Our government wanted to assimilate the Natives by establishing villages, schools and missions so that the people some day would be participants in what they considered the American way of life.

Times and many other things have changed over the past century and a half. Up until the middle of the 20th century, rural people could earn enough cash from trapping or temporary jobs to supplement their subsistence way of life. Over the past few decades, we have become much more of a cash economy. We live in a world in which people want health care, electricity and petroleum products to power their new machines; they want to participate in the world of television, the Internet, modern education. They don't want to be left out. The world has changed; cultures will and must change. We can't preserve everything from the past when the past no longer exists."

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Wallace Olson: Cultures must change as the world does (The Anchorage Daily News 11/6)