Culture-based investments pay off: filling a need for visitors and corporations.

• Author: Stricker, Julie
• Position: NATIVE CORPORATIONS

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It's a sunny, warm day in the Gulf of Alaska. A tour boat leaves a gently spreading wake in the pristine waters, swelling around countless icebergs, many capped with harbor seals. An eagle screeches from the thick forest on the near shore and colorful puffins skim along the surface of the water, their wings seemingly too short to lift their stocky bodies beyond the pull of gravity.

In the distance, ice booms as it calves off a massive blue-shadowed glacier at the head of the/lord, and tiers of mountains reach their snow-capped peaks toward the blue sky. Lucky watchers may see a sea otter floating on its back snacking on shellfish, a black bear sniffing along shore, or a humpback whale or pod of orcas surfacing in the distance.

It's a daytrip for most visitors to Alaska, but for Alaska Natives, it's home, a place they have lived for thousands of years. In recent years, many Alaska Native groups have realized that while visitors to Alaska want to see mountains, glaciers, and wildlife, they are also fascinated by life in the 49th state and want to learn more about the people who live here.

A 'Sense of Place'

"People want to feel like they're a part of a place when they travel," says Mark McKernan, director of Alaska Native Voices. "They want to imagine what it's going to be like, just for a short while, to be a part of the place. I think in the Interior, Southeast, Southcentral, any part of Alaska, any part of the world, the same principles apply with the same sense of place, the same sense of welcome. It's universal."

A good starting point is the Alaska Native Heritage Center. The nonprofit, located on twenty-six acres in Anchorage, tells the stories of all of Alaska's Native peoples, according to Melissa Saunders, director of sales and marketing.

"We call ourselves a living cultural center--an in-front-of-the-glass instead of behind-the-glass experience," Saunders says. The center pulls together eleven different cultures from five different regions of Alaska, with more than twenty languages and seventy dialects.

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"People are surprised at the diversity," Saunders says. "People come in with the perception that there's one group and they live in igloos." 3he center gives visitors a better sense of the scale of Alaska, which, if laid on top of a map of the Lower 48, reaches from the north to south borders and across the breadth of the country, she says.

The most-frequently asked questions are: "How do you get through the winters; how do you heat your house; how do you stay warm?" Saunders says. The center showcases the various styles of traditional...