ANCSA: A Visual Explainer

Alaskan Indigenous peoples have unique cultural, historical, and spiritual relationships with the land. Subsistence has been, and continues to be, an important way for many Alaska Natives to celebrate their culture, and to get food more affordably, healthier, and more sustainably than they could in grocery stores.

Many Alaskan Inuit communities, for example, rely on seal hunting as a primary source of food.

In the Lower 48 states, colonization occurred much differently than it did in Alaska. European settlers in the Lower 48 states of the US engaged in warfare with Indigenous peoples and forced them to sign treaties. These treaties serve as the basis for Indigenous land claims and Indigenous nationhood today.

Alaskan Natives never signed treaties with the federal government, many Natives in the interior of Alaska only encountered white settlers around the turn of the 20th century. The discovery of gold in Alaska brought white settlers, land disputes, and disease epidemics.

Though the colonization was no less devastating for Native communities in Alaska than it was in the Lower 48, it was a much slower encroachment in Alaska than in the continental US.

In 1959 Alaska officially became a US State, which meant the state had to select land areas for state lands. The state of Alaska selected lands that contained native villages, which sparked protests.

In 1966, the Indigenous people of Alaska formed the Alaska Federation of Natives, and one of their first victories was getting the Secretary of the Interior to issue a land-freeze on all new state land claims until aboriginal land rights were resolved.

ANCSA extinguished aboriginal subsistence claims to 375 million acres of land and water in exchange for providing Alaska Natives with 44 million acres of land and $962.5 million. These lands weren't administered by tribal governments on reservations, however. Instead, ANCSA mandated that land and resources are manage by for-profit Alaska Native Corporations.

ANCSA made Natives form for-profit corporations to benefit from the provisions of the Act. ANCSA created 12 Alaska Native Regional Corporations and around 200 Alaska Native Village corporations. These corporations own the Native land, but they also have subsidiaries and are eligible for federal contracts.

Instead of tribal membership, ANCSA recasts tribal members as shareholders. Any Alaska Native who could prove they were 1/4 Native by submitting their family tree to the federal government, and was born before December 18th, 1971, would get 100 shares in their Alaska Regional Corporation. The only way for Alaska Natives to obtain shares after this date was receive them from dead relatives.

Alaska Native scholar, Fred Bigjim wrote a critique of the Act when he was a law student in Harvard. The series of letters published in the Native publication Tundra Times, criticized how complicated the legal requirements to prove one's Indigeneity were, and warned of the possibility of a group of "lost Natives" who deserved recognition but were unable to demonstrate proof to the US government.

There are alienability restrictions in place which prevent shares from being given to non-Natives. These alienability restrictions were originally supposed to last until 1991, but subsequent amendments changed it so that Native Corporations would have to opt-out through shareholder vote. Today, only one ANC has voted to loosen alienability restrictions.

The extinguishment of the alienability restrictions as they were written in the original law point towards the intent of the settler colonial government to eventually have white settlers take over Alaska Native land.

Alaska Village Corporations and Alaska Regional Corporations have the power to select lands for ownership within their regional territory. Alaska Village Corporations own the surface of their lands, and the Regional Corporations own the subsurface of the land. This provision was written to make the extraction of oil from Indigenous lands easier.

On the other hand, courts have ruled that ANCs do no have the same rights as recognized tribal governments to impose taxes, for example. While there are tribal governments in Alaska, they do not own land and, therefore they don't have the same sovereignty as Tribes in the Lower 48. There are sometimes tensions between tribal governments and Alaska Native Corporation boards.

Another point that Chaffee made was that ANCs are arguably institutions that foster community, and that a corporate structure allows for collective ownership of the land as shareholders can vote on decisions being made about the land. Corporations could be seen as uniting Alaska Natives towards a shared future.

However, the Act can also be argued to cause divisions in Native communities. Chaffee argues that the capitalist structure of the Act pits corporations against each other in competition for capital and resources, which could lend itself to divestment in cultural institutions.

Chaffee finally highlights how ANCSA simultaneously provided Natives defined legal protections, while also encasing Alaska Natives within the confines of a complicated law. The corporate form of Alaska Native Corporations provides Alaska Natives with often times more stable, clearly defined rights than Native Americans in the Lower 48.

However, the Act also forces the corporate form onto Alaska Natives. Further, the Act essentially created a new type of legal entity when mandating the ANCs, which means Alaska Native Corporations have to spend a lot on specialized lawyers to abide by the terms of the law.

Indigenous scholar, Shari Huhndorf argues that although ANCSA was designed by Congress to assimilate Alaskan Natives into capitalist society and extinguish conversations dealing with subsistence rights and sovereignty, Alaska Natives have found ways to promote Indigenous futurity through Alaska Native Corporations by supporting subsistence rights politically and executing projects for tribal sovereignty.

Artwork by Susie Silook (Yupik/Iñupiaq) Titled: Mighty Elder