Last week I spoke of visiting the Alaskan town of Ruby on Christmas Day 1968. That was a highlight of my Arctic Christmas tour some 40 years ago this week. But there is more to the story.

Christmas eve, the night before we flew Santa to Ruby, Bill invited me to accompany him to a bar in the town of Galena, just outside the base. The bar was a non-descript building there on a graveled main street. Stepping inside I was struck with the strong smell of tobacco smoke. In the dim light, I could make out an epic poem that had been beautifully hand lettered on three raw plywood walls of the large single room. We ordered and sat on a tall stool at the bar along with about six other patrons watching some eight high-school aged kids playing pool. They had obviously been there drinking much too long. Their speech, normally quite German-accented English, was becoming slurred and quite "off color." I think it was the first time that I'd heard the F-word spoken by a young girl and applied to Santa Claus and not once but many times. The beer was a tad pricey at something like three bucks a can, but Bill and I decided it was time to leave before we'd finished our first order.

The kids we watched that evening were mostly Atathabascan natives back from Indian boarding schools for Christmas vacation. Sadly at the time the suicide rate among their peers was reportedly the highest of any ethnic group in the world. I saw it as testimony to the sad effects of being too long on welfare. The main economy of the town was based upon receiving and spending welfare checks. For the kids, a heritage of hunting and trapping as a way of life was long gone only to be replaced by a white man's economy with little chance for a job or any other kind of meaningful future for them.

Admittedly, this was a snapshot of life in a very economically poor part of the United States. Hopefully things have improved over the past 40 years but I suspect that most likely the welfare hand-out to native people has continued along with the promise of a poor future for their youth. Somewhere there is a message for us as we look forward to a year of political election rhetoric. It had been a depressing evening!

At the Ruby trading post next day, those interested were offered a tour of the warehouse, actually the rest of the big building containing living quarters, the store area and warehouse all under one roof. The tour didn't take long, because being unheated the temperature was 15 below just like it was outside. We looked at new steel traps, snow mobile spare parts and all manner of other day to day living trade goods. Our old Atathabaskan native grandpa guide was proud of his business and the cold didn't bother him at all.

Suddenly he became very excited to point out a raw hide from a dark colored wolf stretched and pegged out on the wall to dry. "My grand daughter shot that" he proudly exclaimed.

Well, back inside the nice warm living quarters the rest of the story came out. The pretty, petite, 18-year-old granddaughter was there in person enjoying coffee with the crew members I'd flown in with. She too was an ethnic Atathabaskan native. She was enrolled in college in Fairbanks and had flown their Taylorcraft (small fabric-covered two place aircraft) on skis back home, by herself, to Ruby for Christmas vacation. Along the way, she'd spotted a wolf standing on the bank of the frozen Yukon River. She landed, shot the wolf, skinned it out and brought the pelt on back home with her just a few days before that Christmas.

Seeing that strong independent accomplished girl there in a frontier trading post rekindled hope in my heart that yes, these native people do indeed have a future. And it can be a bright future indeed. Merry Christmas and may God bless you too.

That is the way I see it.