The Ghost of the Kenai, by Aurora Hardy

The Ghost of the Kenai, by Aurora Hardy In 1796, the men at Fort Kenay or Russian Redoubt Saint Nicholas are terrified. A ghost, a woman in a tattered white dress, screams nightly along the banks of the Kenai River below the bluffs where the fort stands. Young Nicholas arrives with Captain Zaikov on his…

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Ten Feet Tall and Bulletproof, Alaska Natives, by Judy Ferguson

Ten Feet Tall and Bulletproof, Alaska Natives: Blazing the Iditarod Trail, by Judy Ferguson and the Yukon-Koyukuk School District Ten Feet Tall and Bulletproof is a story of classic Alaska, in the village where the Iditarod began. It features the courageous mushers who broke trail when the Great Race was only a rough trapline experience.…

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Cold River Spirits, by Jan Harper-Haines

Cold River Spirits (192 pages) is a wryly humorous and inspirational story about a proud Alaska Native family struggling to survive in two worlds. Sam and Louise Harper and their ten children make a soul-grinding transition into a modern white-dominated society where they face bigotry, poverty, and illness. Yet, Louise, the Athabascan matriarch, remains in…

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Two Old Women, by Velma Wallis

Based on an Athabascan legend passed along from mother to daughter for many generations on the upper Yukon River in Alaska, this is the tragic and shocking story–with a surprise ending–of two elderly women abandoned by a migrating tribe that faces starvation brought on by unusually harsh Arctic weather and a shortage of fish and…

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Raising Ourselves, by Velma Wallis

Born in 1960, the sixth of thirteen children, Velma Wallis comes of age in a two-room log cabin in remote Fort Yukon, Alaska. Life is defined by the business of living off the land. Chopping wood. Hauling water from the river. Hunting moose. Catching salmon. Trapping fur. Taking care of the dogs. For a thousand…

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A Cheechako Goes to the Klondike, by C.W. Adams

The Klondike Stampede caused a transportation boom in the north, where in its thrilling heyday about 250 wooden steamboats operated in the Yukon River drainage of Alaska and the Yukon. The sternwheelers became gold rush icons. But the hardy, pragmatic entrepreneurs who ran the boats were lured by profits, not romance. In 1901, a passenger’s…

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On the Edge of Nowhere, by James Huntington and Lawrence Elliott

For sheer excitement and adventure, few novels match the true-life story of James Huntington. The son of a white trapper and Indian mother, Huntington learned early to fight for survival in Alaska’s remote Kuskokwim region, where life was hard. Huntington’s mother once walked 1,000 miles in the dead of winter to return to her family.…

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Bird Girl and the Man Who Followed the Sun, by Velma Wallis

In her spellbinding second book, Bird Girl and the Man who Followed the Sun (224 pages) award-winning author Velma Wallis interweaves two classic Athabaskan legends set in ancient central Alaska. This is the story of two rebels who break the strict taboos of their communal culture in their quests for freedom and adventure. Readers will…

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