In 1962 Howard Rock reluctantly embarked on a fourteen-year career as the founding editor and publisher of the Tundra Times, a statewide Alaska newspaper concerned with the cultural, political, and economic needs of the indigenous people of that state. For the most part mainstream dailies had not seen Alaska's multicultural natives as part of their audience, often claiming that they were urban papers that did not cover the rural areas inhabited by natives. When the mainstream press did cover or give voice to these people, it did so in trivializing and disparaging ways, or it focused on them as standing in the way of economic progress for a state newly admitted to the Union.

Rock's minority medium began as a crusade against two technological projects that sought to alter or manage nature and threatened the very lives of his fellow Inupiat Eskimos in the process. The first project was...