The best books by real Alaskans about the dark, gritty, beautiful truth of Alaska

This is an ancient, novel-length tale of a hero in the Alaska wilderness near the dawn of time, confronting the cruelty and grief endemic in a world in which survival always hangs on the luck and skill of the hunter. Oman, who died in 2018 at 102, told me 30 years ago about holding onto the Qayaq story, even through the years when her cultural practices were effectively outlawed. She grew up at a time in Kotzebue when her father, a shaman, could only tell the ancient stories of her Inupiaq people at night, in secret, vouchsafing them with her for another generation. As an adult she continued collecting them, and then, in her old age, published this graceful and haunting story, which seems to reach to us from another world.

Haines was best known as a poet, highly respected by other writers but uncompromising and without much commercial success or recognition. This collection of essays in the form of a memoir similarly makes no compromise, dispensing with plot, characters, or even a clear sense of time and geography. Instead, Haines takes the reader deep into the mind of a lone man surviving for decades in the harshest wilderness, thinking, observing, and writing—his own mind. And the writing is so strong, it turns out, that he doesn’t need those usually necessary tools of narrative he pointedly ignores. Instead, we feel the cold, see the hypnotic stars above the snow, and feel the brittle edge of aloneness. Through sheer stylistic austerity, those dark lonely nights are real.

Ivey’s novel imagines a magical realist mystery and adventure in the rocky and forbidding country where she herself lives, up a steep dirt road in Alaska’s backcountry. Like her first novel, The Snow Child, which was an international phenomenon, this story is thick with metaphor. But this second book is more mature, as well as hauntingly written and absolutely compelling and resistant to being put down. I read it while at a remote Alaska cabin myself, and I felt surrounded by the spirits she describes, as if transported back to that period, just before the indigenous world was trampled by White newcomers, when the land and trees themselves still had the ability to exchange form with humans. 

Kizzia’s prose and reporting are unequaled, but this dark, Gothic tale is hard to read because of the real-life horror it exposes. The Pilgrim family came to Alaska in 2002, wrapping themselves in fundamentalist Christianity and fighting with the federal government like true pioneers in the wilderness—they became a cause for the right because of how they seemed to fulfill Alaska’s frontier myth. But it turned out the patriarch of the family had created a weird prison of rape and abuse for his uneducated children, which Kizzia was able to get inside with vividly told scenes. And that truth tells us even more about Alaska, which has the worst rate of rape in the nation and a shocking level of child abuse. 

Kantner’s autobiographical novel tells of growing up in a sod igloo on the tundra of northwest Alaska, just one of many animals surviving against the cold, bare earth. The physical and emotional hardships are extraordinary and unique—especially the racial aspects of being a White child in an indigenous world—but even more remarkable is how Kantner tells the tale. The narrator comes to us with the narrow and naïve mind of the child, and the details, so vivid and harsh, never seem more than a centimeter from the reader’s nose. I’ve never read a novel that so completely and unnervingly took me into another person’s experience in the moment. The author completely disappears—or is completely, ubiquitously present—I was never sure.