Eagle Blue: A Team, a Tribe, and a High School Basketball Season in Arctic Alaska

n the tradition of Friday Night Lights, an extraordinary journey into the basketball-crazed culture of remote Arctic Alaska.

The village of Fort Yukon sits eight miles above the Arctic Circle, deep in Alaska's "bush" country. The six hundred men, women and children who live there―almost all of them Athabascan Gwich'in Natives―have little to cheer for. Their traditional Indian ways of life are rapidly vanishing in the face of a modern culture that is closing in on all sides, threatening to destroy their community and their identity. The one source of pride they can count on is their boys' high school basketball team―the Fort Yukon Eagles.

Eagle Blue follows the Eagles, winners of six regional championships in a row, through the course of an entire 28-game season, from their first day of practice in late November to the Alaska State Championship Tournament in March. With insight, frankness, and compassion, Michael D'Orso climbs into the lives of these fourteen boys, their families, and their coach, shadowing them through an Arctic winter of fifty-below-zero temperatures and near-round-the-clock darkness as the Eagles criss-cross Alaska by air, van, and snow machine in pursuit of their―and their village's―dream.

Michael D'Orso is the author of more than a dozen books, including Plundering Paradise, Like Judgment Day, Like No Other Time (with Tom Daschle), and Walking with the Wind (with John Lewis).