Alaska Natives and US Indian Policy

Abstract When the United States initiated possessory claims to what became the state of Alaska in 1867, government officials and lawmakers disagreed on whether the Indigenous inhabitants (collectively referred to as Alaska Natives) should be included in the purview of federal Indian policy. Preceding the 1871 cessation of US treaty making with tribal nations by only four years, the federal government did not dispatch any treaty commissioners to Alaska, and the commissioner of Indian affairs argued against extending the jurisdiction of the Bureau of Indian Affairs to Alaska Natives. Consequently, government officials never signed treaties with Alaska Native nations, and Congress refrained from adopting legislation that would recognize the existence of Indian Country or aboriginal title in Alaska. This foreclosed the customary means by which the United States recognized and negotiated with Indigenous people as members of sovereign nations. Because Indigenous legal and political rights hinged on nation-to-nation negotiating status in the United States, these decisions had profound implications for Alaska Natives throughout the major federal Indian policy eras of treaty making and removal, assimilation and allotment, the Indian Reorganization Act, Termination Policy, and Self-Determination. Government officials and lawmakers racially and legally conceived of Indigenous Alaskans as distinct from Indigenous peoples of the contiguous states and territories, and these distinctions came to inform law and policy at the outer reaches of US territorial expansion. This ambiguity of their legal status also informed Alaska Native legal and political strategies as they sought to compel the federal government to recognize their land rights, sovereign rights to self-government, and rights as US citizens. To this end, they mobilized their longstanding Indigenous legal and political orders and their relationships to their homelands in navigating US colonialism throughout the 19th and 20th centuries.