Alaska Native politics since the Alaska Native Claims Settlement Act

South Atlantic Quarterly

Volumn 110, Issue 2, 2011, Pages 385-401

  Huhndorf, Roy M ^a   Huhndorf, Shari M ^a  

^a NONE

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[No Author keywords available]

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EID: 79953680197     PISSN: 00382876     EISSN: 15278026     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.1215/00382876-1162507     Document Type: Article

References (42)

1. Alaska Native Claims Settlement Act (ANCSA), Pub. L. No. 92-203, 43 U.S.C. 1601-1624 (1971).
2. David S. Case and David A. Voluck, Alaska Natives and American Laws, 2nd ed. (Fairbanks: University of Alaska Press, 2002), 29.
3. See Frederick Seagayuk Bigjim and James Ito-Adler, Letters to Howard: An Interpretation of the Alaska Native Land Claims (Anchorage: Alaska Methodist University Press, 1974).
4. See also the Native testimony collected in Thomas R. Berger, Village Journey: The Report of the Alaska Native Review Commission (New York: Hill and Wang, 1985). In the early 1980s, Berger was appointed by the Inuit Circumpolar Conference to assess ANCSA, and the book is a critical account of the settlement.
5. Bigjim, Letters to Howard, 41-42, 77.
6. See, for example, Terrence M. Cole, "Jim Crow in Alaska: The Passage of the Alaska Equal Rights Act of 1945," in An Alaska Anthology: Interpreting the Past, ed. Stephen W. Haycox and Mary Childers Mangusso (Seattle: University of Washington Press, 2002) 314-35.
7. Charlie Edwardsen Jr. quoted at Alaskool, "Alaska Native Land Claims," www.alaskool.org/projects/landclaims/LandClaims-Unit5-Ch23.htm (accessed October 13, 2010). Alaskool's site contains numerous useful articles and primary documents on Alaska Native history.
8. Among the Native organizations established to address community needs, only Arctic Slope Native Association opposed ANCSA; see Berger, Village Journey, 26. The Alaska Federation of Natives, the pan-Alaska Native organization formed to lobby for land claims, voted 511 to 56 in favor of the settlement;
9. see Ramona Ellen Skinner, Alaska Native Policy in the Twentieth Century (New York: Garland Publishing, 1997), 86.
10. For an early argument for land claims and an account of various options proposed for the settlement, see William Iggiagruk Hensley, "Why the Natives Have a Land Claim," a 1969 speech reprinted in The Alaska Native Reader: History, Culture, Politics, ed. Maria Shaa Tláa Williams (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2009), 192-201.
11. Alaska became a state in 1959, a few months after the Statehood Act was signed into law.
12. Gigi Berardi, "Natural Resource Policy, Unforgiving Geographies, and Persistent Poverty in Alaska Native Villages," Natural Resources Journal 38 (Winter 1998): 92n25.
13. The preamble to ANCSA reads: "The settlement should be accomplished. .. without establishing any permanent racially defined institutions, rights, privileges, or obligations, without creating a reservation system or lengthy wardship or trusteeship, and without adding to the categories of property and institutions enjoying special tax privileges." ANCSA, 43 U.S.C. 1601.
14. Skinner, Alaska Native Policy in the Twentieth Century, 84. Properly defined, Indian Country refers to territories officially designated as Indian lands (including but not limited to reservations), but it can also refer to Native communities more broadly. The trust relationship, or trust doctrine, emerges from the Marshall Trilogy, the U.S. Supreme Court decisions in the 1820s and 1830s that redefined the status of tribes as "domestic dependent nations," and it charges the federal government with the responsibility to protect the interests of tribes. In practice, trustee status has contributed to the disempowerment of tribes and has frequently worked in other ways against their interests.
15. See Thomas A. Morehouse, "The Dual Political Status of Alaska Natives under U.S. Policy," Institute of Social and Economic Research, University of Alaska Anchorage, March 1992, 12, available at www.alaskool.org/native-ed/historic.htm (accessed October 13, 2010).
16. See Vine Deloria Jr. and Clifford M. Lytle, The Nations Within: The Past and Future of American Indian Sovereignty (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1984).
17. Treaty of Cession, U.S.-Russ., June 20, 1867, art. 3, T.S. 301.
18. Francis Walker, Annual Report of the Secretary of the Interior on the Operations of the Department for the Year 1872 (Washington, DC: Government Printing Office, 1872), 34.
19. See Stephen W. Haycox, "'Races of a Questionable Ethnical Type': Origins of the Jurisdiction of the U.S. Bureau of Education in Alaska, 1867-1995," Pacific Northwest Quarterly 75.4 (1984): 156-63.
20. These include the 1934 Johnson O'Malley Act (also called the Indian Reorganization Act), which was extended in 1936 to include Alaska Natives, as well as the 1972 Indian Education Act and the 1975 Indian Self-Determination and Education Assistance Act. Since the passage of ANCSA alone, more than fifty statutes affecting Native issues have been specifically applied to Alaska Natives. Case and Voluck, Alaska Natives and American Laws, 32.
21. The Organic Act of 1884, 23 stat. 24, sec. 8. The 1955 Tee-Hit-Ton Supreme Court decision, however, held that the Organic Act did not recognize aboriginal title in Alaska, but neither did the decision determine that the act had extinguished aboriginal title; the decision thus left open the question of a legal basis for Native claims. Tee-Hit-Ton Band of Indians v. United States, 348 U.S. 272, 7 S. Ct. 521 (1955).
22. and Tlingit and Haida Indians of Alaska v. United States, 177 F.Supp. 452 (Ct. Cls. 1959).
23. See Berardi, "Natural Resource Policy," 89-90.
24. Starr of Tanana quoted in Donald Craig Mitchell, Sold American: The Story of Alaska Natives and Their Land, 1867-1959 (Hanover, NH: University Press of New England, 1997), 176.
25. For a history of the organization and Alaska land claims generally, see the AFN's Web site www.nativefederation.org/about/history.php (accessed October 13, 2010). AFN remains a key political organization devoted to addressing social, tribal, and economic issues.
26. The history of subsistence legislation is long, complicated, and contradictory. For a discussion of the legal foundations for Native subsistence rights and relevant court decisions, see Case and Voluck, Alaska Natives and American Laws, especially ch. 8.
27. For a useful time line of subsistence decisions from statehood to the present, see Subsistence Management Information, "Management History," at www.subsistmgtinfo.org/history.htm (accessed October 13, 2010). Alaska National Interest Lands Conservation Act (ANILCA), Pub. L. No. 96-487 (1980).
28. John Active, "Why Subsistence Is a Matter of Cultural Survival," in Alaska Native Writers, Storytellers, and Orators: The Expanded Edition, ed., Ronald Spatz, Patricia H. Partnow, and Jeane Breinig (Anchorage: Alaska Review, 1999), 186-87.
29. See the 1988 Ninth U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals decision requiring the state to establish a subsistence fishery for the Kenaitze tribe, previously deemed by the state to be ineligible for subsistence because it categorized the Kenai Peninsula as "non-rural." The tribe, however, ultimately failed in its suit to reverse the nonrural categorization. Kenaitze Indian Tribe v. Alaska, 860 F.2d 312 (9th Cir. 1988).
30. See the Alaska Supreme Court decision in McDowell v. the State of Alaska, 785 P.2d 1 (Alaska 1989).
31. Katie John v. State of Alaska, No. A85-695 CV (D. Alaska 1985).
32. Katie John v. United States of America, 95 C.D.O.S. 9660 (9th Cir. 1995).
33. These conflicts sometimes pit tribes against one another. In the debate over the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge, for example, many Inupiat support oil drilling because of benefits such as schools and public services that oil revenues would provide. See Arctic National Wildlife Refuge, "ANWR Information Brief," at www.anwr.org (accessed October 13, 2010). Neighboring Gwich'in Athabascans, by contrast, oppose drilling, fearing endangerment of the Porcupine caribou herd on which they depend.
34. Under federal law, aboriginal sovereignty can be extinguished only through explicit means.
35. For detailed discussions of sovereignty as it pertains to Alaska Natives, see Morehouse, "The Dual Political Status";
36. and Douglas K. Mertz, "A Primer on Alaska Native Sovereignty," available at www.mertzlaw.com/Native-Sovereignty.html (accessed October 13, 2010).
37. See Mertz, "A Primer on Alaska Native Sovereignty." In 1936, Congress amended the Indian Reorganization Act to establish reservations in Alaska, but only six IRA reservations were created. With the exception of Metlakatla, these were dissolved under ANCSA. The situation of Alaska Natives often elicits comparisons to that of Native Hawaiians, but Native Hawaiians, although they never signed treaties, can invoke previous federal recognition of the Kingdom of Hawai'i in their sovereignty claims.
38. P.L. 83-280, 18 U.S.C. § 1162 (1953); 28 U.S.C. § 1360 (1953); and 25 U.S.C. § 1321-1326 (1953); commonly referred to as Public Law 280.
39. Native Village of Stevens v. Alaska Management and Planning, 757 P.2d 32 (Alaska 1988).
40. State of Alaska v. Native Village of Venetie Tribal Government, 101 F.3d 1286 (9th Cir. 1996).
41. See, for example, Evon Peter, "Undermining Our Tribal Governments: The Stripping of Land, Resources, and Rights from Alaska Native Nations," in The Alaska Native Reader, 178-83.
42. See David Case and Dalee Sambo Dorough, "Tribes and Self-Determination in Alaska," Human Rights: Journal of the Section of Individual Rights and Responsibilities 33:2 (Spring 2006): 13-14.