No roads connect Savoonga and Gambell. A ticket off the island on a bush plane costs more than $400, a week's earnings for many islanders. (Nearly half of families in Savoonga make less than $25,000 a year.) Savoonga has a fishery that provides 14 jobs. The only retail business in Gambell is the general store, where food and cleaning supplies cost triple what they would on the mainland. The nearest hospital is across 150 miles of water in Nome, the closest town on the mainland. There are no hotels; when I visited last fall, I slept on the floor of the school library and in a spare room at the principal's house. The sense of community is strong. When a whale is killed, the houses and school empty as everyone races to the beach to take a share of the meat. As Wagner put it, "We're all one big family because we're so isolated."

For decades, the government sent American Indian and Alaska Native students to boarding schools in an effort to assimilate them into Western society. They were forbidden to speak their own languages and forced to do hours of hard labor each day in exchange for the chance to study. Many were malnourished.

Small communities in Alaska didn't have high schools until the 1980s, so children who wanted a diploma had to attend boarding school, where instruction took place in English. "What if beings from another planet came to the U.S. and we had to immediately learn their language and we had to be just like them?" said Barbara Amarok, a former schoolteacher who works for the University of Alaska-Fairbanks organizing cultural training for new teachers. "That's exactly what happened here." As a result, many parents and grandparents feel alienated and even hostile toward public schools.

The old ways are inevitably changing. There is less sea ice in the Arctic, so polar bears and walruses visit the island less frequently. The children drink soda and eat macaroni-and-cheese in addition to the traditional diet of fish, sea mammals, and berries. They ride snow machines along gravel roads, instead of walking. And in the evening, they prefer playing video games and watching satellite television to listening to their elders tell stories.

Rates of alcohol addiction, suicide, and teenage pregnancy are skyrocketing, according to locals. Last year, two of the 14 seniors at the Horgarth Kingeekuk Sr. Memorial School killed themselves. Alcohol is banned on the island, but villagers make their own home brew, and some sell it to minors. At the Hugo T. Apatiki School in Gambell last year, the valedictorian, Marina Koonooka, says she had a miscarriage. She said that kids, even motivated students like herself, are drawn into trouble because "there's not much to do here but play basketball."

The school in Gambell serves about 200 students from preschool to 12th grade in a prefab building with two wings of classrooms, a gym, and trophy cases full of ivory carvings, traditional clothing, and other Native art and tools. Last September, the first graders were taking a snack break with their teacher, LaRee Eldridge. "How many went berry picking this weekend?" she asked, as the children munched on goldfish crackers. Half of them raised hands.

