Fifty Miles from Tomorrow by William L. Iggiagruk Hensley

Author:William L. Iggiagruk Hensley [ Hensley, William L. Iggiagruk]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 978-0-374-15484-4
Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Published: 2009-01-15T00:00:00+00:00

I have often been asked why I decided to run for the legislature when I was so young. What made you think that you had a chance to win when you had been away from home for ten years and barely knew anyone other than your family and friends in Kotzebue? Were you not running against adults with real experience who had lived in the district all their lives? What possessed you to take this path?

The primary motive was my hope and prayer that I could do something about preserving the Native land. But the truth is, there was more. I knew intimately the daily living experience of our people. As a youngster, I had experienced neglect, hunger, and cold. I understood the hard work it took to survive in the wilds. I knew the intimate details of keeping warm and dry and the pain of sickness without medical care. I understood what it was not to have the money to buy the bare essentials of daily life. I knew how much labor it took to trap, skin, and dry the furs that brought in needed cash.

As a student, I had become aware of economic systems, the mechanisms of land tenure and ownership. I had studied political systems and governance and a bit of philosophy. And I had begun to see that our people had virtually nothing to say about the most important things that affected our lives. No one in authority paid attention to our language and how valuable it could be in helping ease our people into the changing world we were a part of.

When a doctor operated on one of us, there was no one on the staff to tell us in our own language just what was being done to our bodies. When the flight attendants made their announcements, they did it in English and many Iñupiat did not comprehend the safety issues being discussed. It was as if our people and language didn’t exist.

No one understood how we had governed ourselves for ten thousand years. Rules were being made for us by people whose mandate was to change us by attacking the very essence of what made us unique: our languages, our names, our religion, our customs, and our values.

My goal was to see our own people participate in making decisions that affected their lives and their children’s lives. Inexperienced as I was, I sensed that the key was to gather facts, learn the rules, press hard, make alliances, fight for position, and be respectful, but above all to build the Native power base as strong and as united as we possibly could. This game was new to us, and we had to play it very seriously.

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