In my office in Midtown Anchorage I have a limited but important library. Most of it is the managing editor’s archive, which has almost every issue we have published since our inception. The few that are missing I plan to pilfer from the larger Alaska Business Publishing Co. archive in the future after it has been fully digitized—except for one issue. Despite checking everyone’s offices (sometimes with their permission), I’ve never been able to locate an individual copy of one of our older magazines: February 1988. We have a copy that’s bound into a larger volume, which is incredibly fortunate, but that little piece of our history is gone, and the archive in my office will remain one issue short for as long as it exists.

Also on those shelves are various books my predecessors and I have collected over the years, such as editing handbooks, historic texts, and style guides. I’ve personally added two art books: Menadelook: An Inupiat Teacher’s Photographs of Alaska Village Life, 1907-1932 and The Alaskan Paintings of Fred Machetanz. Each was a gift from a leader of one of the twelve Alaska Native regional corporations. They both feature art with themes of transition and change, acting as documentation of how “what was” changed to “what is.”

Anyone who has interacted with a representative of the Alaska Native corporations formed by the Alaska Native Claims Settlement Act (ANCSA) knows that these organizations take their dual mandate to support their regions and shareholders through profitable enterprise seriously. They apply it to all their decision-making, whether acquiring a company, entering a new market, planning a cultural program, or funding a community project.

The leaders of ANCSA corporations know how critical it is to fund dividends, elder benefits, and scholarship programs; create jobs for their shareholders, other Alaskans, and people globally; and work tirelessly to preserve their culture and protect their lands.

The work is necessary because of multiple attempts to snuff their culture out. Interactions between Alaska Natives and other cultures have historically rarely ended well for the Alaska Natives. They suffered death, disease, and abuse as they endured years of deliberate attempts to destroy their way of life. The loss they have experienced is staggering: lands, whole languages, histories, and family lines.

And yet I am inspired by a sentiment expressed by Hope Roberts, an Alaska Native woman who owns and operates a sportfishing charter out of Valdez and is a guest author in this month’s special section: “Resilience is built into our DNA; where there is generational trauma, there is also transformational grace.”

Alaska Native regional, village, and urban corporations make up nearly half of the Top 49ers, Alaska’s largest local companies ranked by revenue; they have operations globally; they have subsidiaries and partners in every major Alaska industry; they employ thousands of people in and out of the state; they have scholarship and training programs; they are preserving their languages; they create and support platforms for art and performance; they train new generations in traditional skills; they celebrate and honor their elders; they develop programs to prepare their youth.

And they generously gift local editors with books that share their stories of loss and hope to fill up the holes in our libraries.