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Edgar Caldwell was born in a land of extremes. The 18-year-old hails from Barrow, Alaska, America's northernmost city, which has alternating seasons of 24 hours of sun and darkness, and equally stark rhythms of life.

"I got into alcohol and drugs as an experiment," he says while flipping burgers as his Anchorage church prepares for a congregational supper. "But once you start something, your friends will keep pushing you till they get their way."

Three years ago, he came to Anchorage without a clear focus on his future. But the relocation turned out to be a life-changing step in his spiritual development. Not long after arriving in Alaska's largest city, the Inupiat Eskimo unexpectedly found himself heading to church at his cousin's invitation.

"She got me to attend by introducing me to a friend,"

he smiles, admitting that the friend was a young woman. After much discussion with church members, Caldwell made a Christian commitment at Anchorage Native Assembly of God. The church in the city's downtown has been his favorite hangout since then. Tonight is no different as he cooks food for a revival; practical ministry has replaced partying.

As a teenage Alaskan Native, Caldwell embodies all of the complexities of being a young American with a rich ethnic legacy living in contemporary, multicultural America.A significant number of Native youth never make the passage from childhood to young adult that Caldwell has made. Alaska's young Natives (15–24 years old) have a death rate more than twice that of their counterparts in the other 49 states. They are seven times more likely to commit suicide and three times more likely to die as the result of accidents. Infant mortality is 50 percent higher among the state's Natives than in the United States as a whole.Behind the numbers are complex social difficulties, such as the extreme isolation and chronic underemployment in Alaska's remote villages. Among Native families, two-parent households are less common than ever before. Divorce and cohabitation have also taken their toll on children. Alaskan Christians say all these factors play a role in causing a long-standing identity struggle for Native youth. In America teens look to their peers for help in sorting out life's complex questions. But that's not always possible in Alaska.

"Native youth, for the most part, have no peer group," says Mike Hopson, Caldwell's pastor and a fellow Inupiat. Many Native youth are being drawn back to their ethnic traditions and cultural practices as a way to address their problems. In past generations, Christian outreach may have taken a needlessly critical view of Native culture. Churches, some of them with a new crop of Native leaders, are increasingly reexamining Native practices, hoping to incorporate cultural values without compromising core biblical truth. Hopson says that over the past year he has opened his church to exploring the Alaskan past to blend Native identity into his congregation.

"We are taking that and using that, infused with Christianity, to reach Native young people today," he says. "Christianity is not just the white man's gospel. It has Native expressions. It can be clothed in Nativeness. "

As Native Christians have reexamined their ethnic past, much of Alaskan society has been on a parallel journey. Self-determination and self-sufficiency are lost legacies that Alaskan Natives seek to reclaim. In 1998 the small Native village of Venetie and the state government went to the U.S. Supreme Court over the villagers' demand to have greater sovereignty, including the right to assess taxes and ignore certain state and federal rules.The state won that case, but it lost another focusing on the right of Natives to maintain their living-off-the-land traditions, such as the freedom to hunt as they wish. Opponents of the so-called subsistence priority maintain that all Alaskan citizens should have equal opportunity to use natural resources.In 1999 the federal government instituted that priority on waterways adjacent to its vast land holdings, giving rural Natives the same privileges they have in hunting. State officials are fighting the move, but some observers believe the federal government's decision will lead in the end to a larger share of resources for Natives.As Native Alaskans of all ages have worked to gain greater control over their future, some are turning to pre-Christian spiritual practices and beliefs in search of a stronger sense of identity.

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June 12 2000, Vol. 44, No. 7