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A shaman had predicted that Howard Rock would become a great man. He was born in 1911 in Point Hope, an Inupiat village in northwest Alaska where the people had lived off the land and sea for centuries. Instead of following tradition, however, Howard elected to go to a government boarding school and became a successful artist. Later he defended his people against a government plan to excavate a harbor near his village with a powerful atomic blast. Then he co-founded and edited the Tundra Times, a newspaper that aided Alaska's Native people in pressing their aboriginal claims before Congress, ultimately winning a settlement of $1 billion and 40 million acres.
About the author
Lael Morgan teaches web-based writing and journalism classes for the University of Texas from her home in Saco, Maine. A former associate professor at the University of Alaska Fairbanks, where she taught journalism through most of the 1990s, Morgan has been researching the history of the Far North for more than thirty years. She was named Alaska's Historian of the Year in 1988 for her research on this book. Her work has been published in the Los Angeles Times and National Geographic, and she is the author of numerous other nonfiction titles, including Art and Eskimo Power: The Life and Times of Howard Rock and Eskimo Star: From Tundra to Tinseltown: The Ray Mala Story.
