Willie Hensley to speak about his new book
On Thursday, February 5, Willie Hensley helps us celebrate Alaska’s 50 years of statehood with a discussion about his new book: Fifty Miles from Tomorrow: A Memoir of Alaska and the Real People.
Copies will be available for sale at the luncheon.
Luncheon Information
11:30 a.m., Thursday, February 5
Golden Lion Hotel, 1000 East 36th Avenue, Anchorage
Lunch: members $16; guests of members $18; others $20
Reservations:
1. RSVP and payment through PayPal.2. Email: thetus at gci dot net by noon Tuesday, February 3.
3. Call 274-4723 and leave a message, including a phone number where you can be reached. When calling or sending an email, please include how many people are coming and their names.
More about William Hensley
WILLIAM L. IĠĠIAĠRUK HENSLEY is author of the recent book Fifty Miles from Tomorrow: A Memoir of Alaska and the Real People, which The New York Times described as “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.”
An orphan, Hensley was raised by his mother’s first cousin on the shores of Kotzebue Sound, 29 miles north of the Arctic Circle. In 1956, he left behind the schools run by the Bureau of Indian Affairs for boarding school in Tennessee, giving him a front row seat for the last days of the segregated South. In 1966, Hensley graduated from George Washington University and returned to find that the tar paper shack he had grown up in had been bulldozed.
Private ownership was alien to most Native people, Hensley writes. When statehood came to Alaska in 1959, the land was surveyed by the federal Bureau of Land Management and plots were sold cheaply. Local Inupiats, though, were out of town gathering food for the winter when the plots were auctioned off – and if they had been present, the concept of “auction” would have been meaningless to them.
In 1966, Hensley wrote a letter on behalf of the Northwest Alaska Native Association that laid claim to 30 million acres of land, thereby preventing acquisition of the land by non-Natives and the federal government without compensation, as had happened in the Lower 48. That November, at the age of 25, Hensley became a member of the Alaska House of Representatives, and although not the first Native Alaskan to serve, he was among a very few. Five years later, President Nixon signed the Alaska Native Claims Settlement Act into law, awarding Alaska Natives 44 million acres of land-about 16 percent of Alaska’s territory-and $962.5 million for relinquishing claims to the rest.
Arguing that Alaskan Natives retained “aboriginal title,” Hensley began his successful fight against the land selection provisions of the Statehood Act. His work didn’t end with the settlement, nor with building the Alaska Federation of Natives into a credible organization that represents all the tribes and villages of Alaska, but continues as he strives to preserve Native languages, customs, dances, and ilitqusiat-native spirit.
In addition to his 10 years in the state legislature, Hensley was also president of the Alaska Federation of Natives and worked with the NANA Regional Corporation, the United Bank Alaska, the Alaska Department of Economic Development, and the Alyeska Pipeline Service Company.
Hensley and his wife, Abigale, live in Anchorage, where—now an Iñupiat elder—he is the chair of the First Alaskans Institute.
Ann Secrest, Director of Communications for AARP Alaska, kicks off our new year of monthly luncheon speakers with a general talk and time for a Q&A session on communicating about issues involving the aging. She will also talk specifically about challenges of communicating effectively in a campaign of social movement.