Unforgiving Geographies and the Unsettling of Alaska
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Gigi Berardi*
On December 18, 1971, PL 92-203, the Alaska Native Claims Settlement Act
(ANCSA), was signed into law by Richard M. Nixon. 1 ANCSA provided a federal
land settlement-extinguishing aboriginal claims to the state's 375 million acres of
land and territorial waters by providing Alaska Natives with 44 million acres of
land and nearly one billion dollars. One of the most significant features of the bill
was the establishment of twelve regional and approximately 200 village
corporations as owners of the land and recipients of the money. The consequences
of this corporate structure have reverberated through Alaska Native communities
and the entire Alaskan economy and society in the years since.
The Alaska Native Claims Settlement Act, arguably the most generous
settlement of Native land claims in the nation's history, is a compelling case study
for its political history, creation of new Native economic structures, and resultant
social-political struggles. It is a premise of the three articles following this
introduction, and those which will follow in later volumes of this journal, that
many of the inadequacies of the Act in achieving a widely-acceptable land claims
settlement are due to non-Native policymakers and political figures' lack of
recognition of the unforgiving physical and cultural geographies in Alaska.
ANCSA has thus had an unsettling rather than settling effect on land claims and
Native political development, as discussed in Thomas Morehouse's Native
Claims and Political Development and Heather Kendall-Miller's ANCSA and
Sovereignty Litigation. At the very least, it presents an intellectual puzzle that is
both dramatic and challenging.
* Gigi Berardi is Professor of Environmental Studies at Huxley College of the Environment, Western
Washington University. She has been department chair since 2000 and is also an Affiliate Professor at the
University of Alaska Fairbanks and a founding and Core Faculty member in the Tribal Environmental and Natural
Resources Management Program at Northwest Indian College. Dr. Berardi has worked for twenty years in natural
resources, rural sociology, and cultural geography. She was a Fulbright scholar whose edited books include Food,
Population, and Development. She is the author of articles and books on subsistence and culture, tribal
environmental issues, natural resources policy, and technology and its socio-cultural impacts. Her articles have
appeared in BioScience, Biological Agriculture and Horticulture, Ethnohistory, Human Organization, Natural
Resources Journal, Environmental Practice, Rural Sociology, Rural Sociologist, Ethics, Place, and Environment,
and the Journal of Environmental Education.
' For some Alaska Natives, the passage of ANCSA was a bittersweet victory. An editorial in the Tundra
Times (a rural and largely Alaska Native newspaper) at the time reported,
962 million [dollars]-a payment for lands lost. These are almost astronomical figures, but at the end of the
voting, they were met with ... a dead silence by some 600 Native delegates to the AFN [Alaska Federation of
Natives] convention .... The delegates must have sensed that as they voted, they were also voting to relinquish
some 300 million acres ofland forever-lands they and their ancestors were accustomed to using.... 'For several
times today, I didn't know whether to laugh or cry,' said a woman delegate... The atmosphere at the convention
hall seemed to be prefaced with a special kind of sadness-a strange ending to a great fight for justice. (Rock
1991, 61).](ViewImageLocal?handle=hein.journals/lrel24&div=44&collection=journals&method=preview&ext=.png&size=3)
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Unforgiving Geographies and the Unsettling of Alaska
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