ANCHORAGE, Alaska — During an hourlong walking tour of reconstructed Native Alaskan dwellings, outbuildings and ceremonial spaces at the Alaska Native Heritage Center, the thing that stuck in my mind is the home of the people who lived in the Port Barrow area, in the cold, dark, far northeast of Alaska.

This dim, cozy space illustrated the ingenuity of all the widely different cultures we learned about at this impressive living history museum, each culture dealing with a different set of challenges in the sprawling land we call Alaska.

In Port Barrow, on the Beaufort Sea, it is dark for two to three months of the year.

And there, polar bears share the land with man.

Well, actually, polar bears don't share. They are, our guide Kyle Roberts told us, the only animal known to deliberately stalk, hunt and consume humans. He told of one man who was out trekking in the snow and felt with a prickle of his skin that he was being followed. Looking back repeatedly as he hurried along, he finally spotted a polar bear following him and — this was the chicken-skin part — in the snow-blind landscape, the bear was purposely covering his black nose with one paw and squinting his eyes so that he would fade into the whiteness. The man shot the bear. (You don't travel in that land without a rifle, and you don't hesitate to use it.)

Other bears will kill, but usually only if they feel threatened or their young are in danger.

To polar bears, Roberts said, "we taste like chicken." (This was typical of the sly humor that the guides and interpreters threaded through their stories of Native Alaskan life.)

The Inupiaq and Island Yupik solved the problem of defending themselves from polar bears admirably: They dug huge pits 6 feet underground, and used whale bones and other driftwood as supports for walls and an earthen roof covered with sod. These subterranean houses were entered by narrow tunneled doors — a front entrance just large enough for the largest man, or a pregnant woman, to squeeze through, but too narrow for a bear — and they built an escape hatch in the back, just in case. A single skylight of translucent seal, whale or caribou intestine offered some illumination, along with seal oil lamps.

Inside, the home was about the size of the average contemporary living room, with benches lining the walls where the elders slept; the younger people got the fur-lined floor. A fire pit occupied the center of the room. Perhaps 25 or 30 people would live in each house, along with their sled dogs.

(In some cultures, another interpreter told us, large rocks would be heated white-hot in the fire pit, then carried to the four corners of the room to radiate heat throughout the room.)

Even with all these precautions, the Inupiaq and Island Yupiq were not safe from bears, who would sometimes climb the berm above their heads and try to claw through the skylight. In that case, they used a looped trap on a long pole to snare the bear's paw, holding him fast until the men could kill it with spears.

There were storage pits cut into the permafrost for the reindeer and caribou meat they ate, and there was a bathroom and sometimes even guest rooms.

As we walked, learning about the five different cultural groups into which the vast lands have been divided, we learned about the people's resourcefulness, so similar to that of the Hawaiians before Western contact.

They made purses or packets of fish skin (and still do, and these are much prized artworks now).

In some cultures, you were given a food bowl at birth, which you would use all your life. "To prevent disease, but also so nobody had to worry about doing all the dishes," our interpreter quipped. In other cultures, bowls were color coded: a certain color for food, another for waste.

To prevent snow blindness, they made goggles of seal intestine and carved wood.

They ate the leaves of the fireweed, rich in vitamin C, and made sweet jam from the flowers. They knew that, if you wandered into some stinging nettles, you could rub the itchy spots with dandelion leaves for relief. And when they needed another form of relief, they drank horsetail tea, "Mother Nature's Metamucil," joked Roberts, our guide.

To catch waterfowl, the people of southeast Alaska (the Eyak, Tlingit, Haida, Tshimshian) developed a special pronged spear that would first impale the bird, then capture it in the sharp prongs. The interpreter for the cedar home representing this area, a young Native Alaskan named Dustin, told us proudly, "We are the only people, not only in Alaska, but in the world that made a weapon like this, the waterfowl arrow." Another unique spear, shaped in a "V" or "U" form, was used to catch specific sizes of halibut.

Hunters in this area wore white jackets dotted with tassels of red and black, a form of camouflage, to break up their silhouette and fool the animals, Dustin said.

Atsaq, an interpreter who is of the Cup'ik people (80 percent to 90 percent of whom speak their native language), greeted us in a long speech, then translated it humorously as "Hey! What's up?"

She told of how important the seal was to these people of southeast Alaska; every part was used. The meat was eaten fresh and dried. The fat was used for lamp fuel or as a dip when eating other foods. The soft fur skin formed rugs or clothing. The intestines became skylights. Kept whole, a small seal could serve as a backpack, a float or buoy or as a storage unit. Everyone, men and women, kept a sealskin sewing kit, and knew how to create or repair sealskin items.

Atsaq, who, like all the interpreters, appeared to be in her 20s, summed up the spirit of the Alaska Native Heritage Center when she said, as she completed her spiel, "Our lives are changing, but we are still living our values."