Growing up in Kotzebue was like being on a farm where one's muscle and strength were always needed.

"Giving children up to school was a hard thing to do, for parents, in those days -- in my lifetime," he said.

Nevertheless, at 15, Hensley left for the Lower 48, attending boarding school in Tennessee. The curriculum was somewhat foreign to a youngster from coastal Alaska. Hensley smiled as he ticked off such engaging subjects as, "Dick, Jane and Spot, and Thanksgiving, black hats and buckle shoes, Santa Claus and Valentine's Day, but nothing about our own world."

Upon graduating from college, Hensley admitted, he had very few really practical skills. Delightfully self-deprecating, he said all he knew how to do was go to school.

"Useless, really," he said. "I still think, 'What can I do when I grow up?"

For many Alaska Natives, adapting to Western culture was a challenge. For instance, there was no equivalent in his native tongue for the word "career," he said.

"In a way, for us to work for cash, even in my lifetime, was almost turning yourself in to the jail, because the way of life we had was sort of 'Mother Nature was the ruler,'" he said. "We did what you had to do at certain times of the year at certain places in order to live in our part of the world. So the notion of being under somebody's thumb or confined in time and space was like being in jail."

Hensley was still a youngster as Alaska began its final push toward statehood in the mid-1950s. Yet, from the Native perspective, statehood was a matter or "poor timing." Many issues critical to Alaska's indigenous peoples -- land, language, education, subsistence and the like -- weren't discussed, much less addressed, at the Constitutional Convention.

"It couldn't have been a worse time for Native interests because they waited until we were a minority in our own homeland," he said, noting that even with 20 percent of the population, there was but one Native representative, Marvin "Muktuk" Marston.

By 1967, however, Hensley had been elected to the Alaska House, where he served four years, after which he would serve four more in the Alaska Senate. Throughout the late 1960s and early 1970s, he worked tirelessly on behalf of Alaska Natives, seeing those efforts come to fruition in 1971 with the passage of the Alaska Native Claims Settlement Act, which conveyed 44 million acres to and earmarked $1 billion for Alaska Natives.

Hensley helped found the NANA Regional Corporation, serving 20 years as its director. He also was a founder of the Alaska Federation of Natives, served in the Alaska Legislature and twice headed the state's Democratic Party. His remarkable career included a stint as Commissioner of Commerce and Economic Development under Gov. Tony Knowles, a position on the Oil and Gas Policy Council, the Board of Directors of the Alaska Permanent Fund Corporation, the Alaska Railroad Corporation and the Alaska Industrial Development Authority. He is now retired, he said.

Writing a book, a memoir no less, meant overcoming certain cultural inhibitions, Hensley said.

"Even in my lifetime, one didn't say anything that smacked of self-congratulatory tinges," he said. "If you do something of value, others will speak of it. Besides, anything of value to society involves the energy, time and ideas of others as well."

Yet he was motivated to put words to paper because so little is known about Alaska in general and its Native peoples in particular. What had been written by explorers, missionaries, government bureaucrats, teachers, anthropologists, sociologists, and the occasional traveler, often revealed an ignorance of Native cultures. Indeed, many had axes to grind, Hensley said.

"They were here after our spirit, our whales, our walrus, our fur seals, our fish, our language, our gold, copper, zinc, and the oil in the land," he said. "In short, they were out to control our space and our minds in every way possible. I never understood this as a youngster; never really thought about it."

"Fifty Miles from Tomorrow" is an effort to broaden the limited perspective many non-Natives have of Alaska Native life and history, to bridge the gap, to tell Alaska's story through the eyes of those living an ancient culture.