Review - Holly Miowak Guise. Alaska Native Resilience- Voices from World War II.

Abstract

Academic historians tend to silo their research and teaching. As a result, we read deeply, but not necessarily
widely. Secondary teachers, whose curricula are much broader, rarely have time to delve deep into the latest
scholarship. Holly Miowak Guise’s Alaska Native Resilience, therefore, is not a book I likely would have picked up
on my own as either a teacher or a researcher – much to my detriment. This book’s approach, content, and even its
pitfalls, are a wonderful reminder of the perils of drawing hard boundaries.

Guise’s goal was to understand the Alaska Native experience of World War II – no easy task given the diversity
of the region’s population. Guise points out that the United States currently recognizes 228 tribes in present-day
Alaska. These Nations can more or less be categorized by geography and language into three umbrella groups –
Iñuit, who historically inhabited the Arctic Circle and Alaska’s western coast; Aleut, from Alaska’s many western
islands; and Alaskan Indians, whose ancestral homelands are further inland. Through significant archival research
and over ninety(!) oral history interviews, Guise has constructed a personalized story that first and foremost
acknowledges the diversity of her subjects. Different tribal groups experienced the war differently – but so did
different individuals within the same Native Nation. This book’s first lesson for educators, then, is the importance
of avoiding the overgeneralization that can result from overcategorization.