Bill Hess

When he was five or six, Bill Hess looked up into the ethereal shimmer of a rare display of northern lights in the Oregon night and felt a mysterious call to the north. The call persisted as his Mormon family migrated about on the land and through the mythology of the American West. Reality punctured myth during the two years he served a Mormon mission to the Lakota and the five he spent as a one-man-band tribal newspaperman and freelancer on his wife Margie's White Mountain Apache Reservation. He came to realize he had little to teach the indigenous people of America, but much to learn from them. On July 14, 1981, his 31^st birthday, he finally followed the call home to Alaska. No job awaited, no house for his family and he knew no one, yet when he drove his family across the Yukon border into Alaska and looked out upon the land, his soul felt soothed. At long last, he had come home. He has dedicated his career since to learning about his home from those who know it best – the First Peoples of Alaska. He extends his thanks to them for allowing him to walk, eat and sleep upon their lands, waters and ice, for all they have so generously shared with and taught him.