The importance of tribal sovereignty through Southeast Alaskan lands, waters, and shared territories
I often ask myself, “whose land am I currently on?” A question that drifts my mind as I travel and move my body through different territories.
It’s a question I’ve formulated based on the intentions of creating a healthy relationship with the Indigenous caretakers of the lands I come in contact with. I first felt the importance of this question linger in my head as I spent more and more time in Southeast Alaska, specifically Ketchikan, a place I’ve called home each summer.
I initially knew Ketchikan was Tlingit, Tsimshian, and Haida territory because of the relationships I had with my family, friends, artists, dancers, fishermen, and canoe pullers who lived there. I saw their representation of land and their connected Indigenous knowledge systems through how they held themselves to their own interpretations of traditions and values. However, I also grew up in Seattle, Washington alongside my Coast Salish relatives, and understood that treaty rights are land rights that were again interconnected with usual and accustomed places. To my knowledge, I had always assumed that this same notion from the Lower 48 translated to Alaska, yet when I was a sophomore in college, I learned that Alaska Native rights to sovereign land were nothing like the precedents in the Lower 48.
“I often ask myself, ‘whose land am I currently on’?”
When the Alaska Native Claims Settlement Act (ANCSA) was signed in 1971 by President Nixon, the act allotted Alaska Natives into 12 regional corporations that collectively were ensured 44 million acres of land and 963 million dollars. This meant that the corporations oversaw the land rights that were given to them instead of individual tribes that had direct land treaties that were signed in the lower 48 before Alaska’s statehood. Unfortunately, today, the promise of ANCSA hasn’t been fulfilled for every Native community across Alaska. Particularly in Southeast Alaska, the region that I grew up in, learned from, and still reside in. The communities of Petersburg, Tenakee, Wrangell, Haines, and Ketchikan are still awaiting their inherent right to physical land claims promised by ANCSA.
Alaska Regional Corporations map designated by ANCSA
Photo courtesy of the National Park Service
This disconnection from physically owed land in these five southeast communities continues to hurt their community members and futures every day. For these communities, there was a time that they had autonomy over their lands, there were borders and territorial lines and they were enforced. You knew whose land you were visiting because of the designs in their totem, house, and frontal poles. You knew from the stories they told, from creation stories to childhood lessons. Each story was meaningful in its own way because they were curated and viewed from the same traditional homelands since time immemorial. However, these land claims were taken and vanished once outsiders began to stake their own claim to the region.
These injustices were supposed to be repaired once ANCSA was signed and implemented into law in 1971, but exclusion from the act only perpetuated the problem and has cost five Native communities in Southeast Alaska opportunities, cultural connection, and communal growth. 50 years have gone by and the southeast communities still have not been able to maintain the rights or control over their traditional homelands. 50 years is generations of knowledge systems that might not be around because the same land wasn’t there to be a teacher, to be a connection, to be a saving grace. It’s a generation of stories that might not be told out of fear. It’s one generation that lost their language and it’s another generation to revitalize it.
The connection to the land has always been a crucial part of Northwest Coast people’s traditions, economies, and lifestyles. Without it, you begin to feel like a salmon without a spawning stream to come back to each year.
We need to stand by and with our indigenous brothers and sisters to ensure that #LandBack truly means #LandBack for the prosperity and success of our Native relations.
Owen L. Oliver is an enrolled member of the Quinault Nation, an Isleta Pueblo Indigenous Educator, and student of American Indian Studies and the University of Washington. Learn more about Owen and his work at owenoliver.org.