A Supreme Court appeal over Alaska subsistence echoes centuries of U.S. history.
was the account of all the Indian tribes that sided with the British to keep colonial settlers away from their lands and resources. For 300 years, it would seem, America’s Indigenous tribes have been appealing to more distant sovereigns — in that case, King George III — to fend off the encroachment of pioneering settlers and the local governments they control.
It’s a story playing out again this week in our own beloved state, as Alaska Native organizations ask the federal government to protect a subsistence-fishing priority for rural residents, and the Dunleavy administration pushes to take that priority away in the name of equal access to resources for all Alaska’s settlers.The story reaches back at least to 1754 and the French and Indian War, when the powerful tribes of the Ohio River valley mostly sided with France. The French empire, more interested in trade than settlement, had ordered its military to “prevent British settlers west of the Alleghenies.” Once the British won that war and wrested the continent from France, they became responsible for placating the tribal confederacies. The Royal Proclamation of 1763, attempting to prevent settlers from migrating across the Appalachian Mountains onto Indian lands, helped precipitate the American Revolution, as Burns’ PBS documentary spells out. Some tribes — assimilated, intermarried or making strategic alliances against rival tribes — sided with the American colonists. But many were driven to oppose the ambitions of the colonists — their fears borne out after the Revolution in the “free land” expansion of the new states into tribal territory. It fell to the new federal government to keep peace on the frontier. In 1832, pushing back against the state of Georgia, the CherokeesSo it went across the Western plains. Congress, the federal courts and the military mainly served the cause of Manifest Destiny. But sometimes the government provided a measure of redress for treaty violations. Apart from the tribes’ own resilience, federal Indian agents and the U.S. Cavalry might be all that held back territorial legislatures and revenge-hungry militias. And so to Alaska, where the state’s constitution — adopted at a 1956 convention with a single Native delegate among the 55 — guaranteed equal access to all resources, including the subsistence salmon caught in fish camps for centuries before white settlers arrived. Alaska Natives went to the distant federal government for help, worried that the state’s priorities would serve commercial and sport fishing. In 1980, Congress guaranteed rural villages a priority for subsistence on federally managed lands and waters, underof the Alaska National Interest Lands Conservation Act . And so the dual state/federal management system evolved, in all its complexity. The state fought back in the name of “state sovereignty” but finally dropped its court appeals in 2001 and accepted federal management of some fishing. “We must stop a losing legal strategy that threatens to make a permanent divide among Alaskans,” Gov. Tony Knowles said. “I cannot continue to oppose in court what I know in my heart to be right.” Several decades of coexistence ended in 2018, when the state intervened in a case before the U.S. Supreme Court, seeking state control over navigable rivers passing through federal land —But Gov. Bill Walker, sticking to the state position that had prevailed since Knowles, fashioned a complicated legal argument retaining federal subsistence management on those rivers. The Supreme Court went along.who had just argued the state’s navigable rivers case before the Supreme Court. He then reversed the state’s position and assailed the protection of rural subsistence on those rivers as “federal overreach.” Dunleavy’s effort to take control of subsistence comes in a case involving fish camps along the Kuskokwim River through the Yukon Delta National Wildlife Refuge, where salmon runs are crashing. If the Supreme Court decides to hear the case later this year, Walker’s effort to exempt subsistence could quickly unravel, as the Native groups’ legal arguments appear to rest as much on the intent of ANILCA as on the text of the law.. President Donald Trump — an avowed admirer of Andrew Jackson, the president who marched the Cherokee off their Georgia lands — had earlier issuedIn December, Alaska Federation of Natives president Ben Mallott called elements of the administration’s review a serious threat, citing “our inherent rights as Native peoples to subsistence. These rights are foundational to who we are.” To be sure, important principles are at stake on both sides in the current showdown over Alaska hunting and fishing rights. As the PBS series on the Revolution makes clear, the story of American progress has been a complicated one. Historic advances in liberty and human rights often came at a cost to racial justice for enslaved and Indigenous populations. Settlers who grabbed tribal lands and resources built the nation’s prosperity.Equality before the law is a principle that can protect future subsistence access for everyone, including urban Natives. So says the state — but Alaska Natives are instead seeking help from a more distant sovereign. Above all, Ken Burns’ TV documentary is a reminder that in Alaska, America’s colonial history is still being written.covered rural Alaska and subsistence politics during a 25-year career reporting for the Anchorage Daily News. He is the author of three non-fiction books and was named Alaska Historian of the Year in 2022. His most recent work for the ADN was “Homer writer Tom Kizzia, a former reporter for the Anchorage Daily News, is author of “Pilgrim’s Wilderness,” “The Wake of the Unseen Object,” and “Cold Mountain Path.” His journalism has appeared in The New Yorker and the New York Times. He was named Historian of the Year in 2022 by the Alaska Historical Society. Reach him at tkizzia@gmail.com.
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