What this page is
Alaska is not a diaspora-return destination in the sense that West Africa is, and pretending otherwise would be false. What it does have is two histories that most visitors never hear, both documented, both visitable: the segregated Black regiments who built the Alaska Highway, and the Alaska Native peoples whose homeland the whole state is.
The Alaska Highway, 1942
After Pearl Harbor the United States needed an overland supply route to Alaska, and the Army Corps of Engineers was told to build roughly sixteen hundred miles of road through subarctic wilderness in a single season. It did not have enough white regiments to do it. So it sent three segregated Black regiments, the 93rd, 95th and 97th Engineer General Service Regiments, who made up about a third of the roughly eleven thousand soldiers on the project.
They were sent with the worst equipment and the worst ground. Army practice at the time transplanted segregation wholesale: separate camps, hand tools where white units had machinery, and commanders who did not expect them to succeed. They worked through a subarctic winter in tents. The road was finished in eight months, and the Black regiments built a large share of it, including some of the hardest sections.
The National Park Service tells this story properly, and it is worth reading before you drive any part of the highway, because the road is the monument. There are interpretive markers along the route and in Yukon and Alaskan museums, and the achievement is finally acknowledged in a way it was not for decades.
Black Alaska more broadly
Black Alaskans have been here since the Russian period and in numbers since the Second World War, concentrated in Anchorage and Fairbanks and around the military installations. Anchorage today is one of the most ethnically diverse cities in the United States by some measures, which surprises almost every visitor. There are Black-owned businesses, churches and cultural organizations, and the communities are not hard to find if you take the trouble.
Alaska Native heritage
The deeper history here belongs to Alaska Native peoples, and visiting it well is covered in more detail on the culture guide and the Sitka guide. The essentials:
- Eleven distinct cultures and around twenty languages, each with its own territory and law.
- The Alaska Native Claims Settlement Act of 1971, which resolved land claims through regional and village corporations rather than reservations, and which is why so much land here is Native-owned private property.
- Cultural centers in Anchorage, Sitka and Juneau that are run by Native organizations and are the right first stop.
- Living practice: subsistence, language revitalisation, carving, weaving and dance are current, not historical.
Visiting well
- Go to a Native-run cultural center before you form impressions from a cruise-port gift shop.
- Buy from the maker or a Native-owned cooperative, and ask who made a piece. Much of what is sold in ports is imported.
- Ask before photographing people or ceremonies; accept no as an answer.
- Arrange village visits through the community, not around it.
- Read the Alaska Highway history before driving it, and stop at the markers.
An honest note
There is no equivalent here to tracing a family through parish registers, because these are not migration stories of that kind. What there is instead is a set of places where something happened that was left out of the account for a long time, and where the record has now been put back. Going and standing there is the point.
Planning with LABUSA Travel
We build itineraries that include the highway history and Native-run cultural institutions rather than treating either as an add-on, and we work with guides from the communities concerned.
Sources
- US National Park Service: Black History in the Last Frontier: the segregated engineer regiments who built the Alaska Highway in 1942. Accessed 11 August 2026.
- US Bureau of Indian Affairs: the Alaska Native Claims Settlement Act of 1971 and the regional corporations it created. Accessed 11 August 2026.
- US National Park Service, Sitka: Sitka National Historical Park, the 1804 battle and the totem collection. Accessed 11 August 2026.
- US National Park Service: the authority for access, seasons and current conditions in every Alaskan national park. Accessed 11 August 2026.