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

Academic historians tend to silo their research and teaching. As a result, we read deeply, but not necessarilywidely. Secondary teachers, whose curricula are much broader, rarely have time to delve deep into the latestscholarship. Holly Miowak Guise’s Alaska Native Resilience, therefore, is not a book I likely would have picked upon my own as either a teacher or a researcher – much to my detriment. This book’s approach, content, and even itspitfalls, 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 diversityof the region’s population. Guise points out that the United States currently recognizes 228 tribes in present-dayAlaska. 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 westernislands; and Alaskan Indians, whose ancestral homelands are further inland. Through significant archival researchand over ninety(!) oral history interviews, Guise has constructed a personalized story that first and foremostacknowledges the diversity of her subjects. Different tribal groups experienced the war differently – but so diddifferent individuals within the same Native Nation. This book’s first lesson for educators, then, is the importanceof avoiding the overgeneralization that can result from overcategorization.