Respecting their Home

I've often been asked why I haven't written a book, about my years in the Arctic especially. The answer is rather simple, actually. Because I'm a visitor to the region of their Native home. It is with the consent and support of those who have lived for centuries in this Arctic wilderness that I am here.
   To think that, by visiting for a season of my life, I am somehow entitled to present myself as a hero of some kind, worthy of special recognition to those elsewhere in the world, is to me disrespectful of those whose ancestors are buried here. They have for generations endured the primitive conditions no one else could endure, in a region no one else wanted or cared about, raising their families and preserving a culture that has survived every kind of deprivation and invasion. And have come out of it as savy as anyone else in the modern world.
   I see those of the Siberian wastelands with the same respect. Their ancestors not only come from the populations native to the area, but from those who often were left with, shall we say, no other alternative but to somehow survive and make it work.
   That I was raised as a Bush Alaskan, a villager for many years of my residency, from the time Alaska first began her struggle from emerging as a Territory into statehood, gives me an appreciation, for want of a better word, of the unique struggles associated with this type of existance. A village is literally a family, with all of the complexities that come with it. Their privacy is, to me, something to respect. And to exploit that by turning their trust into a means to generate an income goes against my grain. I certainly would resent someone who, being an outsider unfamiliar with my home and family, took it upon themselves to promote themselves as a judge entitled to draw a sum for their convictions - observations made in ignorance and often disrespect.
   There are those who, in a sincere desire to learn, come for the very reasons the native population still live here. There is a fascination in growing with others whose resourceful determination manage to create optimisim where none would seem likely to exist. The Northern cultures struggle as others, yet with a whole different climate of adversity, while still finding strength in each other that lends an enlightening perspective on life. I want to respect that diversity, by preserving it - and them - the only way I know how.
   By respecting with gratitude the privilage of being here, of being allowed the freedom to move again in the rhythm of Their land, and strengthen myself again in the pure simplicity of Their wilderness. And the honesty that still prevails in nature there. Taking the memories, and leaving the rest as I found it.

   Because I may have to come back again. And it would be good to find it still as I found the Arctic then - Their Home, with Their Welcome.

   And Peace.

-WKD