I had first learned of Johnson as a teenager when I watched the 1970 movie, The Great White Hope, starring James Earl Jones, and it stuck in my mind that he was no ordinary pugilist, but a larger-than-life character, a black man who refused to play by the rules of a racist society…

When I lived in Alaska, I became fascinated by carvings of the Inuit gods, and began to find out all I could about them and the people who carved their fantastic images…