Holly Miowak Guise. Alaska Native Resilience

In Alaska Native Resilience: Voices from World War II, Holly Miowak Guise (Iñupiaq) provides readers with a crucial reframing of Indigenous-US relations and World War II in Alaska. Drawing on her extensive oral history work and interviews with Alaska Native elders, Guise joins the proliferation of recent scholarship that challenges “simplistic, incomplete, often nationalist U.S. portrayals” of the “Good War” (3). Following the 1942 Japanese invasion of the Aleutian Islands of Attu and Kiska, the US government executed the forced removal of over eight hundred Unangax̂ from their homelands and justified their internment in southeast Alaska as a necessity of wartime exigencies. Challenging this narrative, the book situates the militarization of Alaska as the expansion of US empire to which Alaska Natives from diverse tribal geographies responded as nations. Upending one-dimensional tropes that portray Indigenous peoples as the reactive recipients of colonialism, Alaska Native Resilience demands that Alaska Native actions throughout the war be understood as more than resistance. Rather, Guise brings into focus an Indigenous wartime political geography in which she demonstrates that the subversive strategies employed by Alaska Natives represent assertions and affirmations of Indigenous sovereignty, diplomacy, and nation-­­­­to-nation alliances.

First world war · Spanish Civil War · World history · World War II · Historical Studies and Socio-cultural Analysis · Vietnamese History and Culture Studies