This journalistic project funded by the Fulbright Program is dedicated to contemporary Alaska and to its vibrant Russian heritage. It presents seventeen illustrated interviews given by seventeen Alaskans who are White and Alaska Native, Russian and American, men and women. Each interview includes seventeen questions. So what is "magic" about the number seventeen? It seems that Alaska, the northernmost U.S. state also known as 'The Great Land' and 'The Last Frontier', is represented by this precise number of symbols! Each interview tells the story of a unique life, and each is part of Alaska's story, a place where heritage is kept alive from the ancient past when Alaska's First Peoples came here from Siberia, from the Russian period that ended in 1867, and from the 150 years that it has been the farthest land of the American frontier.