A shaman had predicted that Howard Rock would become a great man. He was born in 1911 in Point Hope, an Inupiat village in northwest Alaska where the people had lived off the land and sea for centuries. Instead of following tradition, however, Howard elected to go to a government boarding school and became a successful artist. Later he defended his people against a government plan to excavate a harbor near his village with a powerful atomic blast. Then he co-founded and edited the Tundra Times, a newspaper that aided Alaska's Native people in pressing their aboriginal claims before Congress, ultimately winning a settlement of $1 billion and 40 million acres.