“This is a gift from God,” Ami Brown says as a few of her seven children enjoy an overcast afternoon on their northern Washington homestead, watching a spider inch through the underbrush. It’s a small moment worth savoring. Two years ago Brown—one of the stars of the Discovery reality show Alaskan Bush People—was diagnosed with advanced lung cancer and given a 3 percent chance of survival. “It was very scary,” she says. “But I never gave up hope.”
Her cancer is now in remission, but the crisis changed Brown’s family profoundly. For decades Ami, 55, and her husband, Billy, 66, had lived with their children—sons Matt, 36, Bam, 34, Bear, 31, Gabe, 29, and Noah, 26, and daughters Bird, 24, and Rain, 16—in the Alaskan bush, weathering brutal winters and…
