THE LAST LIGHT BREAKING, by Nick Jans, Alaska Northwest Books, 224 pages, $21.95.

On a whim, Nick Jans went to Alaska in 1979. He was a recent graduate of Colby College; he left a girlfriend in Maine behind. He thought, after his Alaskan adventure, he would come back to the Lower 48, and go to law school. He found his way to Ambler, an Inupiat Eskimo village in the Kobuk Region of the Brooks Range. He stayed, settling in the Northwest Arctic community where he now teaches.

“The Last Light Breaking,” a collection of 23 essays, is the result of the author’s attempt to understand and give meaning to his experiences in a place where the native Inupiat culture has been hurtled from the Stone Age and onto the information superhighway in less than 100 years.

Jans writes of caribou migrations, of wolf hunters riding snowmobiles, and of the more than 40,000 wilderness miles, on foot, in boats, and by snowmobile, he has traveled during his 15 years in Ambler. Each essay is prefaced by a story from the Inupiat culture, serving as a yardstick against which to measure the changes Jans reflects upon.

Jans’ writing style is spare, clear, and devoid of easy sentiment, especially in his description of two Inupiat women fishing with gill nets on the Black River, his account of the first time he killed a grizzly bear, and his report of the funerals of several Ambler people killed in a plane crash. The reader senses in the essays that Jans is not only deeply respectful of the ways of being he has adopted, but is honest in his intentions. He is no carpetbagger come to enlighten locals.

The collision of cultures is the main theme of “The Last Light Breaking.” Until 1897, the Inupiat were nomads, following the wild animal and bird migrations, living in a tradition thousands of years old. The missionaries arrived in 1897, as foretold by the Eskimo prophet Maniilaq; children were forbidden to speak their native language in school. The United States government, in the form of the Bureau of Indian Affairs, made its presence felt in the 1920s; Eskimo children were sent to substandard, segregated schools. Then oil was discovered in Prudhoe Bay; in the mid-1970s, pipeline oil money flooded into the village of Ambler, shoving into high gear the changes first set in motion by Maniilaq, who broke many of the old behavioral taboos, such as scraping animal hides in summer.

Jans writes of the continuing change in the Inupiat culture with intelligence and insight, making no judgments, drawing no conclusions, formulating no easy answers. He simply shows the reader the Alaska he observes and experiences. Jans does not, however, tell the reader how the fact of his presence among the Inupiat contributes to the uneasy clobbering of one culture on another.

In one essay, “The Circle of the Kill,” Jans writes, “In that instant I knew what we fear most in wolves: not their teeth, but their wisdom — an alien, elusive intelligence that refuses us, rejects our notions of superiority with a glance.” Although his subject is wolves, the message is a warning — failure to communicate with those who speak another language, with words, gestures, or total silence, endangers everything.

In “A Place Beyond,” he writes, “The Brooks Range, an old Eskimo man once told me, sings whatever you wish to hear. … I sat alone on a pinnacle overlooking the blue-white expanse of the upper Noatak Valley, wondering what it was I heard.” In “The Last Light Breaking,” Jans attempts to frame answers to that most basic of all human questions. What he discovers about himself in relation to geographic space makes interesting reading.

Ardeana Hamlin is a free-lance writer who lives in Hampden.