Books

...so does the Alaska Highway and so, shortly, will the Alcan gas pipeline...

...The economic future of Alaska, over which the multinational oil companies are seeking to gain control in alliance with natives, with the locally powerful Teamsters and with Chamber of Commerce boosters in the larger towns, will ultimately be conditioned by the political makeup of the state, where about half a million people inhabit a sixth of the area of the United States...

...Put that in "your pipeline & smoke it COMING INTO THE COUNTRY John McPhee Farrar, Straus, $10.95 [438 pp.] LOST FRONTIER: THE MARKETING OF ALASKA John Hanrahan & Peter Gruenstein Norton, $10.95 [363 pp.] George Woodcock I am writing this review in British Columbia, the Canadian bufferland between Alaska and what Alaskans call "lower-48," meaning the big land mass of the United States as it existed while Hawaii and Alaska were still territories...

...McPhee's narrative, like Hoagland's, is essentially personal and impressionistic, with the narrator's day-to-day life in the land playing as important a part as his observation of the inhabitants, whether whites or Indians or the grizzlies who—in his narrative at least—seem intent on decimating the intruders into their wild and beautiful country...

...It describes McPhee's time among the people of the upper Yukon, near the Canadian border...

...Book II—"What They Went Hunting For" — tells of McPhee's experiences when he accompanied a commission that traveled by helicopter seeking a site for the new capital of Alaska that would replace windy Juneau...

...Both regions share large but dwindling wildlife populations, and both are environmentally threatened by the abundance of their mineral resources...

...The minute towns are inhabited mostly by people who came in a series of small waves after World War II and who in various ways are trying to find a purer life than they might live in "lower-48...

...Book III—' 'Coming into the Country "—is the most nostalgic and perhaps the saddest part of the book of the same title, the most deeply felt and vividly projected...

...A similar giganticism characterizes other figures about Alaska...

...McPhee creates his effect by a series of disconnected narratives, which we read in succession but which in memory arrange themselves spatially in a kind of wide-screen vision of Alaska outside the towns...

...McPhee evokes the immediate, the particular, the subjectivity of experience...

...The caribou herds cross the international border...

...William p. loewe is a professor in the School of Religious Studies of the Catholic University in Washington...

...Many native spokesmen are turning towards corporate industry and are becoming advocates of Boom rather than of the old subsistence way of life...

...the small gold miners are being harried by inspectors who are reluctant to take on the big corporations...

...it contains the largest untouched stores of metallic ores and fossil fuels in North America, and its native peoples, under the Alaska Native Claims Settlement Act, which gave them a billion dollars and 44 million acres, have been thrust into the modern commercial world on a scale that may soon make them the most prosperous indigenous groups on the continent...

...This is the most amusing part of the book, with its satiric vignettes of official life and sharp portraits of the people who are shaping the future of Alaska...

...My travels in Alaska are limited to the southeastern corner of the state...

...Apart from the Indians, there are few left of the old Alaskans...

...Some of them, like some British Columbians, are northwestern secessionists, dreaming of an independent Alaska and deeply resenting the Texans and Oklahomans who came in such numbers during the pipeline construction...

...They are all sharply individualist...

...It was eventually found at Willow, thirty miles from Anchorage...

...The fact is that far-western Canadians and Alaskans share the last of the North American frontiers, the surviving remnant of their virtually unbroken continental wilderness where the Norsemen landed a thousand years ago as forerunners of the civilization that has destroyed so much of the land in the process of humanizing it...

...It is the old frontier life the remotest of these people represent that plays the central role in John McPhee's Coming into the Country, which is the Alaska counterpart of Edward Hoagland's marvelous chronicle of northern British Columbia, Notes from the Century Before...

...Yet there are many ways in which, as a western Canadian, I find myself empathizing with the situations, the problems, the experiences recorded in the books I am discussing, John McPhee's Coming into the Country and Lost Frontier: The Marketing of Alaska by John Hanrahan and Peter Gruenstein...

...It is likely that Canadians learned a great deal from the history of the trans-Alaska oil pipeline, whose social effects on Anchorage and on Alaska as a whole are graphically described by Hanrahan and Gruenstein, whose Lost Frontier is a remarkable social, political and economic report on the rapidly changing condition of present-day Alaska...

...The pipeline, which cost nine billion dollars after an original estimate of $900,000,000, is the world's most Commonweal: 764 wastefully expensive engineering project to date...

...George woodcock is a Canadian author whose books include Faces of India, South Sea Journey and Peoples of the Coast...

...Already radical changes in native attitudes are emerging, and in many areas the oilmen are replacing the environmentalists as allies of the Indians and Eskimos...

...Catholic Conference in Washington...

...24 November 1978...

...Northwestern Canada, like Alaska, has a high proportion of native peoples living largely off the land in a traditional way...

...These people are populist by instinct, ruling themselves largely through initiatives and referenda and maintaining a good deal of the voluble libertarianism of the traditional frontier...

...There are fundamentalists—escaping from urban sin, there are gold miners seeking that last mystical lode, there are natural lifers trying to exist as close to the land as humanly possible, there are trappers and welfare artists and people who have reversed traditional patterns by retiring into the wilderness instead of going—as so many of the gold miners did—to end their days in the cities...

...What with the Boomers' desire for highly organized exploitation of resources, and the environmentalists' desire to close the wilderness to human residence, time seems to be growing short for the last frontier, and the people who cling precariously to life beside the Yukon look like the last survivors of Thoreau's America rather than the forerunners of a new age, as the multinationals and the Japanese corporations close in for the kill...

...The Yukon valley is shared between Alaska and Canada's Yukon Territory...

...the communes of farther south do not seem able to survive in this harsh country...

...The people who have followed a long tradition and squatted in remote forests are being turned out of their cabins by wilderness bureaucrats...

...Book I of Coming into the Country —'"The Encircled River" — describes a journey by canoe and kayak into the forest and high tundra of the Brooks Range, where the rivers are still used mainly by the forest Eskimos...

...It is a fine life for the those who can survive the long dark winters...

...REVIEWERS erazim kohak is a professor in the Philosophy Department at Boston University...

...Robert miola is assistant professor of English at Lafayette College in Pennsylvania...

...Thomas e. QUIGLEY is on the staff of the Division of Latin America, U.S...

...But how much longer can it last...

...It is significant that in Lost Frontier the authors, as well as Ralph Nader in his introduction, make special reference to the epoch-making report of Justice Thomas P. Berger of the British Columbia Supreme Court which was instrumental in eliminating the possibility of a pipeline taking Alaskan gas down the environmentally vulnerable course of Canada's Mackenzie Valley...

...Hanrahan and Gruenstein expound as good investigative journalists and give the comprehensive view...

...some of the critical political battles in both Canada and the United States have recently been fought over the closely linked questions of preserving the environment and saving the native way of life...

...father gerard s. sloyan is professor of religion at Temple University and author of A Commentary on the New Lectionary (Paulist...

...The rivers of southeastern Alaska flow out of the mountains of British Columbia...