Alaska Native Resilience: Voices from World War II (Indigenous Confluences) - Hardcover

Guise, Holly Miowak

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0295752513 ISBN 13: 9780295752518

Publisher: University of Washington Press, 2024

Synopsis

Alaska Native elders remember wartime invasion, relocation, and land reclamation

The US government justified its World War II occupation of Alaska as a defense against Japan’s invasion of the Aleutian Islands, but it equally served to advance colonial expansion in relation to the geographically and culturally diverse Indigenous communities affected. Offering important Alaska Native experiences of this history, Holly Miowak Guise draws on a wealth of oral histories and interviews with Indigenous elders to explore the multidimensional relationship between Alaska Natives and the US military during the Pacific War.

The forced relocation and internment of Unangax̂ in 1942 proved a harbinger of Indigenous loss and suffering in World War II Alaska. Violence against Native women, assimilation and Jim Crow segregation, and discrimination against Native servicemen followed the colonial blueprint. Yet Alaska Native peoples took steps to enact their sovereignty and restore equilibrium to their lives by resisting violence and disrupting attempts at US control. Their subversive actions altered the colonial structures imposed upon them by maintaining Indigenous spaces and asserting sovereignty over their homelands.

A multifaceted challenge to conventional histories, Alaska Native Resilience shares the experiences of Indigenous peoples from across Alaska to reveal long-overlooked demonstrations of Native opposition to colonialism.

About this title

About the Author

Holly Miowak Guise is assistant professor of history at the University of New Mexico. She is the author of Alaska Native Resilience: Voices from World War II (Washington, 2024).

Edition details

• Publisher: University of Washington Press
• Publication date: 2024
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 0295752513
• ISBN 13: 9780295752518
• Binding: Hardcover
• Number of pages: 300