Winner of the 2025 Robert M. Utley Award, Western History Association
Winner of the 2025 John C. Ewers Award, Western History Association
Winner of the 2025 Robert G. Athearn Award, Western History Association
Winner of the 2025 Caroline Bancroft History Prize, Denver Public Library’s Special Collection and Archives
Finalist for the 2025 Shapiro Book Prize, Huntington Library
Honorable Mentionn for the 2025 Erminie Wheeler-Voegelin Prize, American Society for Ethnohistory
Alaska Native elders remember wartime invasion, relocation, and land reclamationThe 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 the Author :
Holly Miowak Guise (Iñupiaq) is assistant professor of history at the University of New Mexico.
Review :
"A timely addition to the scholarly literature on the Pacific War [that] offers new, ethical, and intersectional ways of working with war memory, remembrance, archival absence, and Indigenous testimony."
"Our American history needs continual revisiting and reevaluation, and Holly Miowak Guise has made an important contribution. She's shown that Alaska Natives, far from being passive participants in a war brought to them, actively protected their lands and cultures—leading to strengthened tribal connections and greater equality."
"[P]rovides readers with a crucial reframing of Indigenous-US relations and World War II in Alaska. . . . Alaska Native Resilience not only reframes 'the Good War' but challenges historians to recognize oral history methods and Indigenous Studies methodologies as imperative to their craft."
"Alaska Native Resilience is a groundbreaking, well-researched, ethically sound work of intersectional history. . . . The author's extensive collection and use of oral history in collaboration with Indigenous elders models the discipline's best practices for working with communities everywhere."
"Alaska Native Resilience has much to offer educators, especially those not familiar with this history. By crossing boundaries—between fields, between nations, and between Indigenous Nations—it offers new ways to conceptualize the single lesson or two most of us are able to devote to World War II. It broadens our idea of 'the homefront,' where the United States begins and ends, reminds us that the Japanese Empire was not the only empire operating in the Pacific theater of the war, and, perhaps most importantly, introduces the idea of 'resilience' into our curricula."
