Carolyn Beeler: Wow. Some places that get a lot of tourists, I think of as kind of “Disneyfied.” The place, or parts of it, looks like it’s entirely for tourists and has lost all its local character. Is that how this village feels, or is the tourism kind of separate from where people actually live?

Paul Salopek: Here’s the situation: They had an abandoned fish cannery, about a half-hour’s walk away from their village. The village elders, the community leaders, decided, ‘Let’s, if we’re going to develop ourselves for tourism, let’s put the tourism a little bit at a remove,’ in the hope that they could keep their own village’s character and culture intact. That has kind of changed over the years. The village is very much a village still. But there are tourists who are carried on little golf cart trains through the village. There are some new businesses that cater pretty much to the tourists. It’s kind of an idea that was good at the beginning, but it certainly has changed the character of the village a little bit.

Interesting. So, it’s interesting that the community there was quite intentional about how it developed tourism. How do folks feel about it now?

Complicated. I think, by and large, the community still supports this very huge decision that they made a couple of decades ago. It certainly gives a little money in people’s pockets because they own the corporation that handles all these hundreds of thousands of cruise ship passengers. But it’s like any small village, Carolyn; there are fault lines within it. And there are now questions of like, “Did we give up our cultural memory? Are we renting out our cultural memory? Are we getting enough back?” There are questions about whether, “If we’re working in the service industry, we have any time to do the hunting and gathering activities that we normally do as an Indigenous community in the summer.” So, I guess they’re just weighing, after all these years, these trade-offs of economic agency; they’ve got the most economic power they’ve had probably in generations. But they’re seeing that it comes with strings attached.

You’ve written that the Tlingit communities are, or were, pretty self-sufficient by design and by necessity. They hunt and fish and are not connected by road to the rest of Alaska. Do you think that has changed the self-sufficiency of this community?

Some people had this concern. They’re a one-industry town now, right? That bothered some people, especially those who were more concerned with cultural traditions. And other people, though, Carolyn, said, “We’re part of the modern world, and why shouldn’t we have the same things that our neighbors have?” In fact, the neighbors’ reaction to this community was almost as interesting as what was happening with tourism in the community itself.

Neighbors, like nearby villages?

That’s right. And these nearby villages are heterogeneous. They’re complex. There’s some Tlingit villages. Some villages are primarily white. Whenever I would tell somebody, “Hey, I’ve just come from Hoonah; I spent four or five days there,” some communities looked on with envy. Some Tlingit communities said, “Darn, I wish we had that kind of a cruise ship economy here because all of our young people are leaving.” Some of the progressive communities said, “We’re suspicious of this. We’re worried that they’re mishandling the environment or that they’re going to start expanding their cruise ship terminals to other islands.” So, it was really fascinating to see. They’re almost like a mirror of other communities’ anxieties.

Yeah, it sounds like a complicated picture. I understand you spoke with someone who has special expertise in this: an anthropologist from Hoonah. I’m curious what her take was.

In your writing, you say she thinks tourism is ultimately doomed, like other businesses in the area. So, industrial logging, commercial fishing. Why does she think that?