Holly Miowak Guise, "Alaska Native Resilience: Voices from World War II" (U Washington Press, 2024)

New Books in the American West

The Japanese invasion of the Aleutian Islands during World War II changed Alaska, serving as justification for a large American military presence across the peninsula and advancing colonialism into the territory in the years before statehood.

In Alaska Native Resilience: Voices from World War II (U Washington Press, 2024), University of New Mexico historian Holly Guise uses a range of sources and methods, including oral history, to explain how Native people from several tribes across Alaska, experienced, resisted, and proved resiliant to, American colonialism in the mid-20th century. From forced relocation to outright warfare and sexual violence, the 1940s were a difficult decade for Alaska Natives, but through community building, activism, and even mundane forms of resistance and resiliance, Indigenous people across the region were able to, in Guise's words, engage in "equilibirum restoration" and maintain their links to each other, and to the land itself. Alaska Native Resilience forces readers to rethink what they know about World War II, and places a region often thought of as at the periphery of that war directly in the center of the story.

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