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Adopting the long view - and in truth, what other view is there? - it took the Iņupiat people about a century to reach the conclusion that what they really needed was a video game. That's nothing, though, when you're dealing with these kinds of timescales. The game itself has taken millennia to come together."I think that if you look back at the last several generations of Alaska Natives there has been a tremendous amount of change." This is Amy Fredeen, CFO and executive vice president of the Cook Inlet Tribal Council, a not-for-profit group serving the Iņupiat and other Alaska Natives who live in and around the Anchorage bowl area. "My grandmother had a purely subsistence lifestyle when she was born, but over time she had to shift to one where ownership of land was tied to how you used the land. When we had Western contact, I think it really shifted the value system of the Alaska Native people." A pause. "I'm not saying we lost our values, but we are still struggling to find how we sustain our values in a time where we've changed so much and so quickly."
As a result, Alaska Native youth are dealing with trauma that extends across multiple generations. "You know, the parents who suffered at boarding schools and weren't allowed to speak their language and if they did, they were punished," says Fredeen. "There were some very terrible things in boarding schools happening. You have all these negative things that came from things that happened a few generations ago. Those adults were raised to be ashamed of their culture, and now the kids have turned to do all these things that maybe aren't positive. Despair, drugs and alcohol. These types of challenge are what many indigenous cultures face when they face rapid transitions."
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