Protecting Our Ways of Life

“We have lived in places with such efficiency and grace that later people who have come to our homelands have considered them to be empty of human beings; and they've called this a wilderness because they didn’t see us in those places.  They couldn’t imagine that a people could live so well in a land that it would appear untouched by them.  And we live with the dilemma of that to this day.” - Paul Ongtooguk (Iñupiaq), remarks made at the Alaska Native Education Summit, November 2001