ALASKANS like to talk about how distant the rest of America feels. In downtown Anchorage, with its familiar fast-food restaurants and hotel chains, this line can sound a little affected. Not so in rural Alaska, the swathes of frozen tundra that the state’s inhabitants call the bush. In Napaskiak, a village of 400 people on the west coast of the state, it is not unusual to see a black-robed Russian Orthodox priest riding a four-wheeled motorbike with two children and a wife perched on the back.Rural Alaska is different politically, too. In most of the country, the more remote the location the greater hostility to the federal government. Alaska’s Eskimos, by contrast, are reliable Democrats, keen on more government. One reason for this is that Washington set up an unconventional experiment in popular capitalism that attracts admiration from development economists and scorn from congressmen in almost equal measure.After the discovery of America’s biggest oilfield at Prudhoe Bay in 1968, the government needed access to land claimed by the Eskimos in order to build a pipeline, so it made them an offer. They were given 44m acres of land, $1 billion and shares in 12 regional and over 200 village corporations that were created under the deal (a 13th regional corporation was created later). It was agreed that the corporations would be favoured for government contracts. These...
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