Alaska Natives and American Laws

In the early days of the Alaska territory, nobody cared about it, so there were no issues. There were no settlers looking to grab farmland, so the US Army didn’t have to protect the little houses on the prairie from raids by uncivilized natives (before we learned that those savages were in fact peace-loving ecologists.) The only people going to Alaska were ships looking for animal skins and meat, until the gold rush began. Still, few prospectors had any desire for land, they just wanted to search for non-existent gold deposits and get out. Why would they want to stay, when the land was snow-bound most of the year and there was absolutely nothing to do? But when oil was discovered, the courts were hearing from the natives. They wanted a piece of the profit that the oil drillers were getting. Now the courts had to decide what rights the Alaska peoples had regarding mineral rights. Things got complicated.

The early Federal court cases involved land issues, because it was all about mineral rights, mining licenses, oil drilling licenses, and whether a tribal chief had the right to sell his peoples’ land. In later parts of the book it’s all about government services, one of which involved reindeer. The Federal government had imported them from Siberia, because the elk, seal, bear, and caribou were being wiped out and the natives were starving. The ownership and hunting rights of the reindeer were a problem; were they government property or were they to be owned by the natives under strict conditions? If they were Federal property, what kind of hunting rights did the natives have?

Alaska’s native peoples would bring more issues to court in the 20^th century, again over government services of health and education. Much of Alaska is unincorporated, and of the unincorporated parts within the state’s borders, a lot of it is Federal land. So the people are under Federal jurisdiction, and that brings even more questions.

This is definitely an interesting book, not so much on the subject of Native American rights, but the rights of people living on Federally-owned land, as opposed to that of states or towns.