"Eagle Blue": Basketball, community north of Arctic Circle

"Eagle Blue: A Team, a Tribe, and a High School Basketball Season in Arctic Alaska"
by Michael D'Orso
Bloomsbury, 323 pp., $23.95

At one point in Michael D'Orso's book "Eagle Blue," he quotes a fan of the Fort Yukon, Alaska, high-school basketball team as saying the team is "like that movie 'Hoosiers,' only better."

The same could be said of D'Orso's book.

"Hoosiers" is about a small high school in Indiana taking on bigger schools. "Eagle Blue" follows a small-town, Native American team as it takes on 1,500-mile road trips, temperatures falling past 40 degrees below zero and modern Native Alaskan problems: suicide, domestic violence, drug and alcohol abuse.

The per-capita income of Native Alaskans is $9,113. The suicide rate of this group is the highest in the nation, four times the national average. For teenagers, it is even higher; in remote villages in the bush, the highest.

Despite its problems, the Fort Yukon community, just north of the Arctic Circle, is one where "villagers still have each other, in a way that's been lost in the rest of this country," writes D'Orso, who spent five months chronicling the Eagles from first practice to postseason.

The Native Alaskans of Fort Yukon, the Gwich'in, exist somewhere between the trap-

lines and moose hunts of the old ways, when a man could measure his worth by navigating a treeless winterland using only stars and prevailing winds and the modern ways of GPS, snow machines and oil money.

That money started bringing bush villages new schools and gymnasiums beginning in 1971, and the basketball courts became the new proving grounds and a unifying factor for the villages.

D'Orso follows Dave Bridges, Fort Yukon's coach for seven years, as he tries to guide the Eagles to another state tournament for 1A schools, those with enrollments of fewer than 50 students.

Fourteen of the 32 Fort Yukon high-school students are on the boys' and girls' basketball teams, and Bridges argues that this shows the game is keeping kids in school, a huge concern given the graduation rate for the 150 or so bush-village schools is 37 percent.

Others in the village think the $50,000 a year spent on the teams is too much. There are other dissenters, men who think they could do a better job of coaching, men who are trying to wring self worth out of their past glory on the court.

But for the most part, the basketball program seems to inspire almost total unanimity, compared with the disagreements over oil drilling in the Arctic National Wildlife Reserve or over swapping rights to natural-gas deposits on Native Alaskan land near Fort Yukon for land elsewhere.

While arguments in Congress and other parts of the country are concerned with oil dependency and national security, the people of Fort Yukon see the fight in terms of tradition, autonomy and the land. Many of them would choose the land over the dependency that comes with more oil money.

But when there is a basketball game on, arguments are set aside and nearly all gather to cheer "Eagle Blue."

Many pages are devoted to the play-by-play of the games, but they are crisply written, like a good radio broadcast.

And by the end of the book you'll be rooting for the team to advance to state, for the next shot to fall, for the ball to bounce right for Eagle Blue.