Introduction
Alaska has been a powerful force in American cultural imagination
throughout the twentieth century. Until the present generation, its
most potent role was as America's "last Frontier," the last vestige in
America of the conquest of nature, a nature that included American
Indians. As Americans have interpreted their history, as they expanded
westward, they replaced wild nature with a tamed, cultivated, and safe
landscape, processing nature's wasted--i.e., unused--resources into the
tools and materials of democratic and capitalist opportunity and
wealth. Alaska was the last chapter in that westering saga.
In the last thirty years, however, Alaska's role in american
national consciousness has changed dramatically. It is no longer the
"last frontier"; it has become America's "last wilderness." americans
have determined that some of Alaska's last, vast untrammeled land
should be preserved in perpetuity, protected from development and
passed on to future generations in its present form, as natural
landscape, and wherever possible, as wilderness. In other words,
resources that were once seen as an impediment to progress now have
become prized objects of respect and adulation. America's environmental
crown jewels.
This change in Alaska's role for the nation reflects a fundamental
change in the nation itself. Today, virtually no economic development
project can be undertaken without a nod to environmental impact, no
matter how superficial that nod may be. Yet, as Alaska was the last
chapter in the saga of westward expansion, the sense of that saga is
particularly strong in the state. And thus Alaska may be more
conflicted over environmental protection than other places in America.
The new national environmental concern impacted Alaska society
directly and continues to reverberate across the region, manifest
particularly in politics and economy. In the 1960s, U.S. natural
resource policy evolved from conservationism to environmentalism. Under
conservationism, governments managed national and state lands by a
multiple use policy, which emphasized commodification of those
resources. New environmental policies mandated assessments of
environmental impacts on a variety of land uses, sought to guarantee
clean air and water, and protected endangered species, among others.
More visionary measures set aside one hundred million acres of national
public domain in the U.S. as wilderness, in both existing and new
conservations units*, (*a conservation unit is a federal reservation of
land in order to preserve it in its natural state; different sorts of
reserves--parks, refuges, wilderness areas--provide different degrees
of protection.) and provided for stricter controls on non-wilderness
lands in such units. This legislation was put in place remarkably
swiftly between 1960 and 1976.
Environmentalism came to Alaska in the monumental Alaska
Native Claims Settlement Act (ANCSA) of 1971 and its companion Alaska
National Interest Lands Conservation Act (ANILCA)of 1980. The latter
established 104 million acres of new conservation units in Alaska, and
designated 50 million acres as wilderness, half of the nation's total.
ANILCA also mandated a rural subsistence use preference in Alaska, to
guarantee that Alaska Natives would have access to fish, game, and
other resources they depend upon. Many analysts regard the act as the
most important environmental legislation in the nation's history. Upon
leaving office, former President Jimmy Carter said it was the
legislation during his presidency of which he was most proud.
ANILCA removed from potential development 28 percent of
Alaska's total land base, and markedly increased the presence of the
federal government in the state. Fifty-four million acres of federal
conservation units had existed before ANILCA; now 42 percent of Alaska
was reserved from development to one degree or another. Alaska's senior
U.S. Senator, Ted Stevens, has called ANILCA the worst Alaska
legislation in the nation's history. Most Alaskans would likely agree,
though the 85 percent of Alaskans who are non-Native immigrants are not
united in their opposition to the subsistence and other provisions of
ANILCA, any more than the 15 percent of indigenous heritage are united
in support.
The state legislature has steadfastly refused for over twelve
years to enact legislation to bring the state into compliance with
ANILCA's subsistence provisions. The state constitution declares that
the state's natural resources are to be enjoyed equally by all its
citizens. Those state legislators who hold to a strict states' rights
view have prevented the question of bringing the state into compliance
from being presented to the voters as a referendum. Their refusal led
in 1998 and 1999 to a federal takeover of fish and game management on
federal and adjacent lands within the state; in other states, state
agencies administer most federal land. Many, probably most Alaskans
interpret ANILCA as an unfair, even immoral, environmental
appropriation of the state's resources. Most non-Native Alaskans are
aggressive defenders of states' rights. Whether ANILCA reduces economic
potential in Alaska is a debatable point. The Alaska delegation in
Congress succeeded in protecting areas known to have development
potential by writing numerous management exceptions into the act;
recent analysis has also suggested that the tourism value of resources
in certain conservation areas may be greater in the long run than
whatever short-term gain might be realized from their development.
But there is dismay in Alaska over environmentalism. Many in
the state feel they may have embarked on a fool's errand. For many
Alaskans understand themselves to be a part of the national saga of the
frontier, the conquest of nature. That Saga was characterized by
struggle, for nature was a formidable foe demanding, often threatening,
frequently ruthless. But through sacrifice, determination, and
ingenuity the conquerors prevailed. The removal of the Native people of
the continent was a necessary part of this story; but natives were
ancillary to the story. The conquest would be complete when the new
settlers would stand independent of outside support, of reliance on the
Native people and, as much as possible, from nature itself.
The full development of this tale of national origins and
destiny, the triumph of the American way, was completed in the
contiguous states in the last half of the nineteenth century.
Economically, completion of the transcontinental railroads, which more
fully facilitated the practical integration of the West's resources
into the world market stream and sped the distribution of industrial
products back into the West, signaled the final conquest of the region.
Politically, the granting of statehood symbolized the completion of the
saga. With statehood, the citizen-settlers of the West achieved
equality with their brethren in the more settled East.
In reality, the process was not complete. Western legislators
were always outnumbered in Congress. And the West could not become
economically independent, for the settlers demanded a modern standard
of living, one characterized by profit and material consumption, but
until World War II, most of the goods consumed in the West were made in
the East. Moreover, the only basis for a modern economy in the West was
the extraction of natural resources, which required industrial
development, but the necessary capital did not exist in the West. its
infusion from eastern investors contributed to western dependence, as
did the need to export most of the West's resources out of the region
for processing. Subsidization of settlement and economic development by
the federal government--in the form of geographic exploration, removal
of the Indians, protection of the overland trails, dredging of western
watercourses, land grants to the transcontinental railroads, and a host
of other encouragements--also contributed to western dependence.
But dependence was not the American story. As historian Joyce
Appleby has shown, the ideology of republican independence was quickly
converted in Jeffersonian America into an embrace of capitalist
individualism. The freedom to make profit became the engine of American
democracy. Thus, personal independence became as central to American
culture as collective independence and self-direction was to the
national identity. In his essay on the significance of the frontier in
American history, Frederick Jackson Turner argued that the dramatic
struggle with nature on the frontier had created the distinctive
American character of individualism and self-reliance, which
differentiated American culture from those of its European antecedents.
Such symbols of independence and rugged individualism as the cowboy and
expansive western landscapes have served ever since to evoke the
national saga of the conquest of western nature as the origin of
American culture and character.
The culmination of this story developed just at the time the
U.S. acquired Alaska and, to the degree that writers notice Alaska at
all, the new territory was quickly linked with the conquest sage.
Alaska's role was to serve as a latter-day example of the process.
Nature presented herself there in some of her most awesome and
intimidating guises: cold, dark, snow-covered, volcanic, tectonic, and
sparsely peopled. Above all, Alaska was north, and thus a region of awe
and mystery. To carry the tale to completion in so awesome and
formidable a place, inhabitants would need to be at their most
courageous, daring and determined. Acknowledging the hostility of the
northern environment, writers gave grudging respect to the Native
people, particularly the Eskimos, who had lived and sustained
themselves in that land and climate for centuries. But neither the
writers nor the settlers respected the natives' rights to their land
and their culture, which, the conquerors assumed, must ultimately yield
before the example of civilization.
So Alaska entered the national imagination as the final
chapter in the story of the American West, the last frontier. Three
waves of non-Native settlers migrated tot he region, the first during
the gold rush, the next during World War II and the Cold War, and the
most recent in the 1970s, associated with construction of the oil
pipeline and development of North Slope oil deposits. They were there
to act out for the last time the central creation story of American
culture. They would subdue and cultivate nature, and in the struggle
establish American culture, and shape their own personal independence.
The symbolic culmination of their adventure would be the same as in the
continental states: statehood. By providing a greater degree of
self-governance, settlers believed, statehood would improve
opportunities for economic development.
Many of the old-fashioned historians who examined the
historical record of the development of Alaska from the purchase in
1867, and particularly in the twentieth century, found much to confirm
this story. There was little non-native population in Alaska until the
gold rush era at the turn of the twentieth century. The intrepid
argonauts who hiked the Klondike trail and dispersed into the vast
Alaska interior seemed the embodiment of rugged individualism. Those
few who struck it rich became beholden to no one, masters of their own
fate. Those who stayed established new towns, elected representatives
to the congressionally authorized territorial legislature, sent an
elected, non-voting representative tot he U.S. Congress, and looked
ahead to the day when statehood would establish their civic equality
and confirm their American character.
But statehood was long in coming. There were a number of
reasons. First, the population did not grow. The number of non-natives
in the territory from 1900 to 1940 was virtually the same, about thirty
thousand, and about the same as the Native population. That was
insufficient for the tax base necessary to support statehood. Second,
spokespersons for the most lucrative absentee investment in the
territory, the canned salmon industry, fought statehood vigorously,
expecting it would bring increased taxation and regulation. Third, the
question of Native land title loomed, for unlike the contiguous states,
the title had not been formally extinguished, except in several
conservation reserves set aside by the Congress before World War II.
Fourth, conservation interest in the territory grew significantly
during the Progressive period. The Tongass and Chugach National Forests
were established before 1910, Mt. McKinley National Park in 1917,
Katmai National Monument in 1918, after the 1912 eruption near there,
and Glacier Bay National Monument in 1925. In addition, Congress set
aside National Petroleum Reserve No. 4 on the central North Slope in
1923. Many national figures who took an interest in Alaska expected
that additional federal withdrawals would be made in the territory.
The long delay in statehood confirmed the frontier character
of the territory. The permanent settlers chafed,as the citizens of all
the western territories had chafed, under the congressional rule
characteristic of territorial status. congress could disallow
enactments of the territorial legislature; the territorial delegate to
Congress did not have a vote. In addition, Congress maintained a host
of substantive limitations on self-governing power, such as retention
of authority over the management of fish and game resources. municipal
bonded indebtedness had to be approved by the Congress and was limited
to 2 percent of assessed property valuation. During World War II and
the early stages of the Cold War, residents had to obtain territorial
resident identification cards, "green cards," from the immigration and
Naturalization Service to enter and leave the territory. Clearly, buy
the post-war period, such cumbersome, restrictive territorial
governance was outmoded and unjustified.
Continuance of the territorial system suspended completion of
Alaska's pioneer history, and the final act in the national historic
westering saga. Paradoxically, Congress could not convey statehood
until Alaskan culture more closely resembled American culture
generally. The original reason for the territorial system had been to
prevent irresponsible government by migrants whose primary interest in
the West was not the construction of a new society, but their own
aggrandizement. Territorial status shaped institutions and culture into
familiar forms, consistent with national institutions and ides. So
writers before statehood celebrated the strides Alaskans had made
toward the establishment of American culture in north, often arguing
defensively that Alaskans were as capable of self-government, as
responsible and patriotic, and as committed to civic development, as
people anywhere else in America, and certainly to the same degree as
other citizens had been when they were granted statehood. And these
writers chastised Congress for failing to honor this Alaskan
achievement of conferring full "home rule."
The realities of Alaska's past were quite consistent with the
history of the American West. From soon after the 1867 purchase of
Alaska, investors across the country and from other countries gambled
that the quantity and value of the region's natural resources would
surpass the enormous costs involved in extracting a profit from their
development. Until World War II, the only economy in the territory was
generated by absentee investment first in gold, then in the salmon
industry, and later in copper. At the same time, the federal government
generously subsidized the settler culture, stepping in to assist when
the costs of development overwhelmed private efforts, later moving to
regulate monopolistic investors so as to preserve the democratic
character of the new society. These sources sustained Alaska's thirty
thousand non-Natives in the period between the Klondike gold rush and
1940. Then, with World War II, as in the rest of the American West,
military and other federal spending supplanted industrial
capitalization of resource extraction as the basis of the modern
economy. In Alaska, this phase of economic development lasted until
1970, when oil development was added to government spending as the
region's economic foundation.
But as in the history of the rest of the West, many non-Native
settlers who moved to Alaska before statehood in 1959, and many who
came afterward, as well, started north with the notion that they were
latter-day pioneers with a last chance to participate in the frontier
saga. The paradigm they carried with them was essentially imitative:
they were going to do what had been done before--to establish their
personal independence through self-reliant had work, building a new,
democratic society. Like their earlier models, they were motivated in
part by a strong sense of mission, but by now many shared the belief
that something had gone wrong in America, that the dream of individual
self-sufficiency had been corrupted, primarily by government
restrictions and bureaucracy. Only by leaving America, that thought,
going to a place as yet undeveloped and uncorrupted by government,
could they live out the old American dream, in this, they considered
themselves different from their brethren in the states. In truth, they
resembled latter-day Puritans in their determination to demonstrate how
to build a "proper" society. They did not recognize the irony that
congressional legitimization of the new society they intended to build
could come only when they had demonstrated sufficient imitation of the
culture they fled that Congress would have no anxiety regarding their
"normalcy." Nor did they, any more than did their models in the older
American West, recognize that the society they wished to build, and did
build, was possible only through the classic method of absentee
investment capital in natural resource extraction, supported by
generous, continuing federal subsidy. The fact that the capital came
from outside the region created dependence, a condition that western
settlers routinely denied, and which is still poorly understood in
popular culture today.
§§
Modern historians and others writing about Alaska have often
emphasized the region's exceptionalities, and not without reason, for
Alaska's natural environment is unique. Alaska is vast; it has the
greatest expanses of wilderness land in the United States. Cold, long,
dark, snowy winters are aspects of a climate that can appropriately be
called harsh, under certain circumstances, brutal. Alaska has a
particular cultural uniqueness as well, for the state's population is
more culturally diverse than most places in america. Tribes from two
major Indian groups live there--Athabaskan and Pacific Northwest Coast
Indians, and two groups of non-Indian aboriginal people: Eskimos and
Aleuts. Alaska has a higher number of Native Americans as a percentage
of the total population than any other U.S. state. There are 211
designated Native villages in Alaska, and 227 federally recognized
tribes. Of the total population of 626,000, 100,000 are Alaska Natives,
16 percent. At the same time, Alaska's non-Native population was, and
remains, highly transient.
But, as suggested, these exceptionalities mask a fundamental
replication of American culture in Alaska. Alaska's social, economic,
political, and cultural commonalities with the states of the American
West are so many that the region can be said to be culturally a part of
that west. Most of its population is urban; 70 percent are concentrated
in towns and cities along the southeast and south-central coasts, and
along a rail corridor stretching inland from Seward on the Gulf of
Alaska to Fairbanks in the interior. These communities are and always
have been virtually indistinguishable from communities elsewhere in the
United States. They consist of commercial establishments and office
buildings, houses, condo and apartment structures, schools,
universities, churches and hospitals, platted subdivisions, paved
streets, parks, people, automobiles, and all the detritus of modern
civilization: community government and organizations, civic
institutions, service clubs, and traffic and congestion, noise,
pollution, and "city hall." The people work for wages and salaries;
like nearly everyone else in america they are dependent for their
economic livelihood on decisions made by corporate managers and banking
officers in places far from their homes and by people over whom they
have little influence. Yet like many people across America they tend
either not to know or to ignore these facts. They are more likely to be
convinced that they are independent and self-reliant, adopting easily
the mythology of the frontier West that is held so tenaciously by
residents of the region from Omaha to Redding.
Canadian historian Ken Coates has written that we cannot
understand northern settled places best by seeing them as exceptional.
Virtually all of their citizens have reproduced the mainstream,
settled-region's culture that characterized the places they came from.
Rather, he has argued, documented commonalities among these communities
provide a more useful starting point for analysis of their histories
and characters. Some of these might include relationship with the
"Outside," the nature of their internal politics, and their
sociocultural and structural characteristics. He suggest two
comparative criteria: remoteness and opposition. (Remoteness works
better even than nordicity, Coates argues, for there are many remote
places that are not northern.)
What are the unique qualities of remoteness? First, Coates
suggests, there is the sense of being outside the mainstream, outside
the centers and sources of culture. Since remote communities,
increasingly even Native communities, take their values from these
external centers, their leaders' expressions of community identity and
collective goals often appear defensive. When the institutions and
norms of the settled regions are finally put in place, community
leaders announce their arrival with a mixture of pride and relief.
This, every new hospital, community center, and choral society, every
new government department, every new commercial outlet elicits
proclamations of normality and progress.
It is not only Alaska's culture that is defined by outside
forces. The same is true of the economy, which today is dominated by
extraction of single natural resource: petroleum. Oil has transformed
Alaska. It is the foundation of the state's modern economy: jobs,
business, government revenue, and spending, all sectors of the economy
benefit from their dependence on oil production. The oil industry paid
about $50 billion in taxes to the State of Alaska between 1977 and
2000. It would be difficult to overdramatize the significance of oil
production to Alaska since 1970. without it, the non-Native population
of the region would be much less; there would be fewer jobs, and much
smaller regional ancillary economy. Oil dependence in Alaska is a major
theme in this study. The oil industry remade Alaska, and continues to
do so. But Alaska residents had very little to do with that
transformation, either its origins or its structure. The pipeline
project was facilitated only through Congress's passage of the Native
claims settlement act and, later, direct congressional authorization of
construction.
Economic dominance from outside the region is accompanied by
outside political control, manifest most powerfully in the presence and
activities of the federal government. In Alaska, for example, the
federal government holds title to 228 million acres of land, 60 percent
of Alaska's landbase, an area more than twice as large as California;
154 million acres are in conservation and strategic mineral reserves,
and 74 million acres are unassigned public domain, a portion of which
is also designated wilderness. In addition, since federal power is
constitutionally superior to state sovereign power, the federal
government's role in land and resource development is substantial. An
additional 44 million acres are owned by regional and village Native
corporations.
Federal and Native ownership of large blocs of land in Alaska,
together with substantial control of the region's economic survival by
the oil industry, conflict with Alaskans' expectations of independence.
The presence of so much federally owned and protected land, and the
large bureaucracy responsible for it, challenges Alaskan's notions of
their destiny, for most still believe the land should be "opened up,"
i.e., made to serve economic development. The Alaska Native Claims Act
of 1971 (ANCSA) and the 1980 Alaska National Interest Lands
Conservation Act (ANILCA) both significantly influence life in the
state because they so directly define the opportunities for and
character of economic development. Collectively their provisions impact
72 percent of Alaska's vast land area, whose resources hold the only
potential for future economic development.
Many Alaskans, perhaps most, have chafed mightily under
federal sovereignty. Most non-Natives have come to Alaska poorly
informed regarding the federal/state relationship articulated in the
U.S. Constitution and adjudicated through two centuries of political
development. many confuse the moral right of self-governance with
limitations on that right imposed by the federal constitution and
membership in the federal union. Thus, they are surprised to discover
that residence in Alaska does not guarantee control over the real
estate and natural resources in the state. This partly explains how the
atmosphere in which the Alaska lands act was debated in the 1970s and
passed in 1980 became highly charged and volatile in Alaska.
Over thirty years, congressional action has defined Alaska,
and Alaskans generally resent Congress's proprietary role in their
state. Nor surprisingly Alaskans are less resentful of corporate
control of the economic conditions of their lives by the oil industry.
The oil industry provides jobs and supports the ancillary economy; the
federal government also provides jobs but in addition threatens to
prevent the creation of new ones and perhaps even reduce the number
already existing through land withdrawals. So it easily becomes an
agent of villainy for Alaskans. But development in Alaska today and in
the future will continue to depend, as it has historically depended, on
investment of private capital from outside the region and cooperative
development strategies by the federal government. Alaskans joke about
the future of their state being determined in the boardrooms of British
Petroleum in London and Phillips Petroleum in Bartlesville, Oklahoma.
These corporate boards act in response to a variety of factors which
may influence profit and development, in particular market forces.
this, when the price of oil fell to less than $15 per barrel in 1985,
producers in Alaska curtailed exploratory activity. When the price
recovered to $25, and the industry received assurances of support from
state government, British Petroleum and ARCO resumed exploratory work
in Alaska's North Slope. In far northwest Alaska, on the Arctic Ocean
coast, the world's largest known zinc deposit, called Red Dog and owned
by the Canadian firm Cominco Mining, was discovered several decades
ago. But development began only in the mid-1980s and production in 1989
because the world price of zinc would not support development until
that time. In 1999 the mine produced #123 million worth of zinc. In the
1990s, two pulp mills operating in southeast Alaska, in the Tongass
National Forest, closed down. These were the only pulp mills in Alaska.
Though environmental factors contributed, the primary reason for the
closures was the collapse of the pulp market. Such immediate dependence
on forces beyond Alaskans' control exacerbates their sense of isolation
and powerlessness.
Another feature of remote regions has to do with
self-perception. People in remote regions often seem to deny their
dependence on the "Outside." Alaskans who are by choice living
physically outside the mainstream of American culture call people who
are not Alaskans "Outsiders" and refer to the place where non-residents
live as "Outside." Politicians frequently call for diversification of
the regional economy, proposing unrealistic projects. Former Alaska
Governor Steve Cowper, for example, urged that Alaska attempt to
attract electronic banking and stock-trading firms and other
cyberbusinesses whose physical locations are theoretically independent
of their activities. The governor seemed to think that Alaska's unusual
winter living conditions would not be an impediment to the personnel
who work in those industries. Sometimes politicians assert more
influence than they actually have over the federal government and
distant corporation boards, and sometimes may act on their own naÏve
assumptions. In 1991, for example, Alaska Governor Walter Hickel's
administration sued the U.S. in federal court for breach of contract,
charging that passage of the Alaska native claims act in 1971 and the
Alaska lands act in 1980 constituted a violation of Congress's
statehood compact with Alaska, asking for $29 billion in compensation.
As predicted by a number of constitutional lawyers, the judge dismissed
the case, stating that a statehood compact cannot be analogized to a
commercial contract, and that as federal sovereignty is superior to
state sovereignty, Congress can amend its previous legislation as it
deems necessary.
As Coates's analysis suggests, the power of the federal
government in Alaska exacerbates greatly the sense of being outside the
mainstream. Not only have Alaskans felt the federal presence in the 60
percent of the land base that is in federal ownership, but they have
felt it, also, in regard to federal protection and representation of
Alaska's Native people, and their distinct concerns. Alaska natives,
with all native Americans, enjoy a special trust relationship with the
federal government. The Alaska lands act manifested one aspect of that
special relationship in the provision mandating a rural preference for
subsistence hunting and fishing. The state's failure to provide for
rural subsistence preference led the state's principal Native
organization, the Alaska Federation of Natives, to resolve, in the
spring 2000, to rely on Congress and the federal government, rather
than the state government, as previously, to fairly address the
subsistence issue. Alaskans, then, have an acute sense of their
relationship to and dependence on "Outside" forces, one which
exacerbates their perception of difference.
Coates suggested another characteristic of remote settlements:
intense internal political struggles. One such struggle is between
native and non-Native peoples, regions, and communities. Issues which
have divided northern societies along racial lines include conflicting
visions of land ownership, resource harvesting, and social policy. As
noted above, the federal government has intervened to guarantee Native
rights. Alaska manifests a long history of such intervention and native
empowerment. Other circumstances have empowered Alaska Natives, as
well.
The federal government executed no treaties with Alaska Native
people. Congress halted treaty making in 1871, just four years after
the Alaska purchase; the only mention of Natives in the purchase treaty
was a clause stating that the "uncivilized tribes" were to be "subject
to such laws and regulations as the United States may, from time to
time, adopt in regard to aboriginal tribes of that country." In the
first civil government act for Alaska, in 1884, Congress elaborated on
the relationship between natives and non-natives. The statute protected
Indians "In the possession of any lands actually in tehir use or
occupation." native title to land in Alaska would not be fully
clarified until the modern claims settlement act, in 1971.
The same 1884 legislation authorized the government to
establish schools "without regard to race" wherever there was
school-age children in the territory, a duty, carried out by the U.S.
Bureau of Education. (This did not mean, incidentally, that the schools
were integrated; it meant that the government assumed a responsibility
to provide schools where there were children, native schools for Native
children, white schools for white children.) The schools empowered
Natives, both by imparting literacy, general knowledge, and some
practical skills (i.e., acculturation) and by encouraging leadership.
School personnel accepted, nay, celebrated, the concomitant suppression
of traditional Native culture, and were naive or ambivalent on the
question of racial equality. As we shall see in subsequent chapters,
Alaska Natives early developed the capabilities to pursue their own
objectives, and profited immensely from the absence of treaties,
reservations, superintendencies, annuities, and dependence on the
government for direct survival, a dependence often enough betrayed by
the trustees in the contiguous states and territories.
There have been moments of cooperation between Alaska Natives
and non-Natives: passage in the territorial legislature of an
anti-discrimination act in 1945, the battle for statehood in the 1950s,
the framing of the Native claims settlement between 1968 and 1971, and
others. But there have also been many other moments of discord,
distrust, and frustration, most recently over the guarantee of access
to subsistence resources, the question of Native sovereignty, and the
allocation of state funds for material infrastructures and to support
economic sustainability in Native villages.
Access to subsistence resources is but part of a larger issue,
connection to the land. Indigenous people not only have a permanent
commitment to residence in the state, but are rooted to the land, both
as a homeland and as provider of daily resources. In most of Alaska's
211 Native villages, many people could not get by without reliance on
subsistence, for fish and for game. The contrast is extreme between
their sense of identification with the land, and the attitudes of
short-term periodic oilfield workers whose commitments lie far outside
Alaska and whose livelihoods depend on commodification of the land. But
the social structure is more complicated, for the indigenous people who
live in the vicinity of Prudhoe Bay, where they have created a
municipal government which permits them to tax oil production, support
the commodification of these resources. The Athabaskan Indians, living
several hundred miles away, but dependent upon caribou herds that
migrate through lands adjacent to the oil patch, fear such
commodification, and the development which accompanies it. This is only
one of the tensions among native groups in the state.
In his history of the American West, Richard White identified
three types of westward migration: community, utopian, and modern. The
first two types of migrants went West to stay, either to build a new
but replicated society from a base of kinship or former acquaintance,
or to build a wholly new kind of society, with alternative values, such
as the Mormons. The third type, increasingly important in the later
history of the West, comprised the individuals who went to get rich and
then transfer their new worth back to more settled regions. Coates
suggests that another important struggle in remote regions is that
between permanent and transient residents. Newcomers, Coates asserts,
always outnumber permanent residents, and greatly outnumber the
indigenous population.
There has not been much study of transiency in Alaska.
Analysts recognize that it may be manifest in political commitment--or
lack of it--and social programs, but disagree on the nature and degree
of its impact. Transients may not participate in politics at all,
judging that they know too little. Or if they do participate they may
favor candidates who endorse short-term policies with immediate
benefits, such as low taxation and a refusal to pass bond issues or
zoning ordinances, over longer term measures that might call for
greater sacrifice. Transience seems to have been an accepted aspect of
the northern experience in Alaska. In a series of oral history
interviews of people who had lived in Anchorage before 1940 and were
still there in 1996, several respondents, including a newspaper editor
and a noted civic leader, spoke without malice or bitterness of
employing the talents and financial contributions of "short termers."
On the other hand, most respondents acknowledged the potential negative
effects for long-term community goals of a highly transient population.
The rate of transience has declined slightly in the most
recent years in Alaska as production at the Prudhoe Bay oil field has
passed its peak, and there is no new economic boom on the horizon. But
it is still high, and rapid turnover in public-and private-sector jobs
is the norm. Anecdotal evidence suggests that the tension between
community and modern migrants is not substantial in Alaska; people seem
focused on the demands of the present, with little historical
perspective, and little vision of the future.
§§
Coates's analysis of all of these factors led him to conclude
that northern settlements are characterized by a culture of opposition.
Struggles between indigenous and non-indigenous peoples, between
transient and permanent residents, between the region and the nation,
between the desire to control the development of their natural
resources and the realities of the global market, and finally, between
popular culture and the realities of northern economies seem to
preoccupy northern residents. They have certainly preoccupied Alaska.
These oppositions are rooted in the regions' histories, and are
perpetuated and exacerbated by contemporary influences. They have been
internalized, Coates suggests, into a culture of antagonism. opposition
has generated a regional consciousness built on a sense of grievance
that is usually ill founded. It has made northern populations
vulnerable to political manipulation, both from without and within. And
it has contributed to an inflated sense of region importance. It has
been, Coates argues, a barrier to development and has been intensely
destructive of community bonds and the generation of a positive,
supportive culture.
Coates's analysis seems to fit Alaska well. The
inconsistencies in Alaskans' views of themselves and their history, the
confusion regarding Native culture and legitimacy, the high transiency
rate, and the dependence on global, absentee investment are all
consistent with Coates's characterization of other northern and remote
places. In the following pages we will examine Alaska's history in
light of this analysis, with the hope of understanding more fully the
nature of Alaska's society.
Two oppositions in Alaska's history, however, claim pride of
place as preoccupations for Alaskans. The first is between indigenous
and non-indigenous people. Today Alaska Natives are perhaps more
empowered than any other groups of Native Americans, yet distrust
between Native and non-Native residents is potent. Historically, Alaska
Natives suffered significant discrimination. They achieved economic and
political parity only with the passage of the Native claims settlement
act in 1971, and while that parity has produced substantial social
equity today, it is hardly complete and cannot be taken for granted, as
is manifest in statistics dealing with the criminal justice system, and
with sexual crimes and abuse.
The other opposition is that directed at environmentalism, and
restrictions, primarily federal, on current land use and potential
future development in Alaska. Today, most Alaskans favor congressional
action to open a portion of the Arctic national Wildlife Refuge to oil
exploration, and should oil be found, development. Most people in the
nation apparently do not, though the majority view on the issue seems
somewhat related tot he price of gasoline. Alaskans have attacked
federal conservation and environmental actions through most of the
region's history. Federal policy on game, on fish, on migratory mammals
and waterfowl, federal creation of conservation areas such as Mt.
McKinley and Glacier Bay, and the creation on the Alaska lands act of
vast wilderness areas in Alaska have consistently been vilified and
resisted. Only in their reaction to the Exxon Valdez
oil spill in 1989 have Alaskans seemed broadly supportive of measures
to restrain development in the name of environmental protection. With
other Americans, Alaskans profess concern for the environment. But a
majority of state politicians, as well as spokespeople for commercial
and financial interests, argue that industry can develop Alaska's
resources without damage to the environment. Such groups as the
Resource Development Council, the Alaska Miners' Association, the
Alaska Loggers Association, and the Alaska Chamber of Commerce,
together with the predictable Alaska Oil and Gas Association and the
development giants British Petroleum and Phillips Petroleum, assert
that ANWR, for example, can be drilled with no significant alteration
of the land or its resources. In this they are supported by those
Iniuit people who have municipal governmental jurisdiction over
existing north Slope development and who control part of ANWR. Alaskan
leaders supported the Atomic Energy Commission's nuclear test regime on
Amchitka Island in the 1960s, and that same agency's planned use of
low-yield nuclear devices to create an artificial harbor on Alaska's
western Arctic coast in the 1950s. They supported the U.S. Army corps
of Engineers' 1950s plant to construct a massive hydroelectric dam on
the Yukon River. They supported construction of the trans-Alaska
pipeline, and vigorously and vociferously opposed the Alaska lands act.
They supported opening the Tongass National forest to time lease sales
in 1947 despite protests by Tlingit-Haida Indians who had an active
land claim for the area before U.S. courts. And in the 1980s they
loudly protested reforms to the Alaska lands act which, when passed in
1990, reduced the annual federal subsidization of lease sales on the
forest and reduced the mandated annual number of board-feet to be cut.
Not all Alaskans took anti-environmental positions on these issues, but
most did. And in every case, opponents argued that environmental
concerns were overstated and alarmist.
Writing in the Anchorage Daily News on the eve of the
millennium celebration, editorial page editor Michael Carey wrote that
several themes ran through Alaska history in the twentieth century. He
chose the paradigm "tension" to express them. There had been, he wrote,
"tensions with the federal government," which expressed themselves in
battles over land use, resource management, the question of statehood,
and federal obligations to Natives. To many Alaskans, Carey wrote,
Washington "is still the distant, careless landlord." There were as
well, he wrote, "tensions with Outside interests." Alaska has been "a
resource colony to generations of Outside investors." Long before the
oil industry showed serious interest in the north, the great Alaska
fortunes were in Seattle, San Francisco, and New York and other
stateside cities. The statehood movement was in good measure, Carey
wrote, a rebellion against the canned salmon interests and mining
companies that "refused to leave a nickel in Alaska." Outside capital
has long been sought, but feared. Politicians' frequent outbursts
against environmentalists also have their roots in Alaskans'
traditional fear of the power of Outsiders over their lives. Finally,
Carey wrote, there were "tensions between regions and races." Alaska
Natives' assertion of their rights, and their growing economic power in
the state following the Alaska Native Claims Settlement Act of 1971,
have "not always been greeted with enthusiasm by their non-Native
neighbors."
Carey's was an astute analysis of Alaska's history. born in
Alaska and raised in the bush and in Fairbanks, Carey spoke from the
perspective of fifteen years of editorial work at the state's largest
circulation newspaper. His conclusions were remarkably consistent with
Coates's theoretical analysis. In the following pages we shall examine
these oppositions in Alaska history, especially the issues of
indigenous rights and environmental protection. While they are not
unique to Alaska in content, they may be quite unique in magnitude, and
in their history. But Alaskans do not recognize the historical
character of these issues and the oppositional stance their
predecessors have taken toward them; they are not well educated about
the history of the region and the high transiency rate mitigates
against historical understanding. Thus, most Alaskans miss the
historical context, which gives force to native reactions to
contemporary policies which disadvantage Natives to the benefit of
urban Alaskans. A per capita redistribution of state education funds in
accord with population increases in urban Alaska, for example, reminds
Native Alaskans of the long history of educational discrimination. Not
realizing that the issue is not new condemns modern Alaskans to failure
to appreciate its depth of meaning.
By the same token, ignorance of the realities of the
federal/state relationship, together with lack of understanding of the
rise of environmentalism and the history of conservation withdrawals in
Alaska, condemns Alaskans perpetually to fight on the wrong
battleground, challenging "violations" of the "statehood compact." Most
particularly, such ignorance condemns Alaskans to misunderstand the
legitimacy and the origins of federal environmental regulations applied
in the state. It is particularly important that each new generation of
Alaskans have the opportunity to understand and assess the significance
of the state's historical legacy, for only then can they bring an
informed view to their participation in the shaping of public policy.
To the oppositional mode of thinking on these issues, I will
add another in the following pages: greed. I will argue that the false
notion of Alaska's history, together with the recent phenomenon of the
Alaska Permanent Fund dividend program, has exacerbated the pattern of
modern migration delineated by Richard White, migrants whose primary
interest is not the creation of a society for their progeny, but
self-aggrandizement, primarily economic self-aggrandizement. Oil
production in Alaska has supported a high material standard of living
for many more people than could be sustained by all other economic
factors presently extant in the state combined. Distrust of government,
partly a function of a jaundiced view of federal sustenance of Alaska
and stemming partly from ignorance of the nature of the federal/state
relationship under the U.S. Constitution, seems to have focused the
attention of the citizenry on what they can get for themselves. The
Alaska Permanent Fund dividend is a tangible benefit of being in
Alaska, tangible benefit of being in Alaska, tangible in the year 2000
in the amount of nearly $2,000 per resident. Many citizens seem to
agree with the writer of a letter to the editor of the state's largest
newspaper but one of many, who said "to the government: keep your hands
off my dividend." That the dividend is generated by a taxing structure
enacted by the state legislature and administered by the executive
branch, and that the distribution of the earnings of the Fund as a
dividend to Alaska citizens was and is a program created and sustained
by the legislature, seems not to have registered with this citizen.
We shall take up the story of Alaska's historical reality with
the establishment of the first modern economy in the territory,
thirteen years after the region's purchase by the United States in
1867.