Junior Achievement Alaska Business Monthly Hall of Fame Laureate: Willie Hensley.

• Author: Stomierowski, Peg
• Position: Junior Achievement 2009 Special Section

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As he prepares for retirement, Willie Hensley has been busy finishing up contract work for Alyeska Pipeline Service Co. and other business interests, and explaining his life and times as chronicled in his book "Fifty Miles from Tomorrow: A Memoir of Alaska and the Real People."

As a founder of NANA Regional Corp., one of the 13 Alaska regional corporations formed in settlement of Native land claims and whose shareholders are of Inupiat descent, Willie's story is intricately interwoven with Alaska Native and Statehood history. He served for 20 years as NANA's director and finished there as president.

COLLECTIVE ACTION

Thirty years ago, in 1979, Hensley was named one of the young leaders of America by Time Magazine in a cover story. While the recognition surprised him back then, he agrees "we did make a huge difference." Shaping your world is not that easy to do, he observes. "I think, for one thing, it takes more than single individual to do anything of consequence.

"Collective action--that's cultural," he adds. "You couldn't survive in the Arctic by yourself ... You had to be aware of other people and their needs.

"Besides, you don't put yourself into power. Other people put you into power."

Hensley was born in 1941 in Kotzebue, 29 miles above the Arctic Circle. His family lived about 15 miles from the village at locations around the Noatak River Delta.

"We lived in sod houses in the winter and tents in the summer, moving about, following the fish and game," he recounts. "We traveled by dog team in winter and eventually secured a 5-horsepower outboard. I didn't know it at the time, but we were living in the twilight of an ancient way of life."

After eighth grade, he left home to attend a small boarding school in Tennessee, visiting Alaska only once in those four years. He then studied at the University of Alaska Fairbanks before receiving his bachelor's degree in political science in 1966 from George Washington University in Washington, D.C. He'd planned to secure his master's in finance at UAF when a Constitutional Law course taught by a Harvard graduate changed his life.

To hear him tell it, the times were beckoning and he somehow, at a young age, had the passion to respond to the challenges of his time.

"I was a student," he recalls. "I'd just finished my land claims paper and realized we had a huge problem. I decided it was important to return home and run for the House of Representatives." Although "it was a long...