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For Alaskan natives, the big questions of the moment concern the clean-up of the Exxon Valdez oil spill and the potential for new oil exploration in the Alaska National Wildlife Refuge. Both of these questions are embedded in more fundamental matters of sovereignty and identity. The question of sovereignty (or the denial thereof) for Native Alaskans is rooted in two important documents--the 1867 Treaty of Cession from Russia to the United States, and the 1971 Alaska Native Claims Settlement Act.
From the perspective of the US government, the 1867 Treaty with Russia transferred ownership of the vast Alaskan Territory to the United States. At that time, the treaty was called "Seward's Folly" due to the perceived uselessness of the land. According to David Harrison, the Attorney General of Chickaloon Village, the agreement could transfer only what the Russians actually possessed, which was limited to trading rights with some of the area's indigenous inhabitants. The Russians, according to Harrison, never pretended to own the Alaskan territory, nor did they intend to cede it to the United States.3
A little more than 100 years after the Russian Treaty was concluded, the Alaska Native Claims Settlement Act (ANCSA) was concluded by the US Congress. For the US, the ANCSA was necessitated by the discovery of large quantities of crude oil on the North Slope of Alaska at a time when land title to the territory was unresolved.4 The sponsors of the ANCSA were concerned with reconstructing the indigenous nations of Alaska as business entities (corporations) that could negotiate without the direct supervision of the Interior Secretary. The oil companies were interested in building a pipeline to transport the crude from the North Slope to shipping terminals on the southern coast of Alaska, but they needed to resolve land title before they could construct the pipeline. The ANCSA provided a means to quiet title to Alaskan territory. It assigned 44 million acres to Native ownership (surface rights only), and compensated the indigenous peoples nearly a billion dollars to cede the remainder. The lands and money were transferred to 220 federally-chartered corporations of Alaskan Native shareholders. Making indigenous nations into business corporations implied imposing Western capitalist values upon peoples who were often less than certain about what they were getting themselves into, but who also found themselves without viable alternatives.5
Several IEN participants testified about the effects of ANCSA. George Ondola, who had been involved in the negotiations that preceded ANCSA, explained that the Act was supposed to have been accepted at the village level, but it never was. Dune Lankard (Eyak), pointed out that Alaskan Natives who were born after 1971 were excluded from the Act, which resulted in thousands of Alaskan Natives being denied classification as "indigenous." Lankard said that the result has been the destruction of his people's social structure and conflict among Fourth World peoples of the region.
As in British Columbia, the indigenous peoples of Alaska are most concerned about the preservation of their lands and resources; therefore, their testimony at the IEN Conference concerned timber, fisheries, tourism, hazardous waste, oil drilling and transportation, and military activities.
Regarding the issue of fisheries, representatives to the IEN related their concern over depletion. While northeastern Pacific fisheries are still considered the best in the Northern Hemisphere, some types of fish are overharvested. Susana Santos of Greenpeace told about the resulting decline in populations of marine mammals and seabirds, which has jeopardized the continuation of indigenous traditional subsistence activities. Santos pointed out to conference participants (who were well fed on salmon) that plans by Con Agra, Tyson, and other companies threaten to decimate the fisheries.6
Tourism is big business in Alaska, and its effects are serious for indigenous peoples; so there was plenty of discussion concerning tourism at the conference. Streams of recreational vehicles come to Alaska by land, small planes rain down from the air, and hundreds of cruise ships come by sea. Casual tourists, wilderness hunters, and fishers all have negative impacts on indigenous peoples. The impact of tourist hunting on local indigenous people in Alaska is similar to that for Indians in the lower 48 states. Deneh people, for example, protest being ordered not to hunt, due to the depletion of game, while non-Indian hunters are encouraged to take game out of the area.
Meanwhile, Tlingits denounce US policies governing the tourist industry's impact at Glacier Bay National Monument. Glacier Bay was the Tlingit homeland before it was expropriated in 1925 through a Presidential Proclamation. Designation of part of the national monument as a "wilderness area" made it illegal for Tlingits to harvest plants there, even though the government kills some of the same plants in order to "control" them. Cruise ships were supposed to be banned from Glacier Bay for 15 years, because they disturb the humpback whales that are protected under US law, but now the cruise ships have now returned.7 Last year, tourism at Glacier Bay generated a billion dollars of business.
Another issue that concerns Alaskan Natives is the pollution of their territory by toxic wastes, especially as a result of US military activities. Conference testimony included the history of US military coal-mining in the region (to power its ships during the First World War), as well as the history of mining damage to salmon streams. Alan Larson, a Deneh official, accused the military of "considering Alaska its playground." Larson explained that the military routinely hauls toxic materials into remote areas, uses them and then leaves their wastes behind. Old fuel barrels, for example, have been crushed and buried in huge numbers; in one site alone there are over a million old barrels. The military also uses the area (and northern Canada, as well) for low-altitude overflights, which constitutes an environmental problem of a different sort: the aircraft terrorize both people and wildlife.
Among the various impacts that the military has had in the region, one of the biggest and most disturbing at the moment is the High Altitude Atmospheric Research Project (HAARP). The project was sold to the public as a way to create safe, clean energy from the Aurora Borealis, but according to long-time opponent Dennis Specht, HAARP is really a "star wars" weapon with awesome power. The technology uses natural gas that is otherwise too isolated from national markets to rationalize production. Gas-generated energy is used to produce millions of volts of electricity which is beamed at the Ionosphere, which then acts as a natural resonating chamber to bounce the electricity back to the earth. The electricity can be aimed to reach particular locations or populations, with greater destructive potential than nuclear weapons, according to project developers as well as the Defense Department. The technology can be used also to affect the jet stream and thus control weather patterns. A HAARP prototype has been built and is being tested at Gakona, a small town in southeastern Alaska, near several indigenous nations.
The one issue that captured the most attention at the conference was oil and gas production. The extraction of petroleum has disrupted indigenous people from Prudhoe Bay all along the Trans-Alaska Pipeline to Prince William Sound. The problems include disruption of animal migrations and traditional subsistence economies, uncompensated expropriation of the pipeline route, "routine" oil spills, and the continuing clean-up of the Exxon Valdez oil spill.8
Oil companies propose to expand Arctic operations all the way east to the Canadian border. The proposed drilling, which was defeated by Congress in 1991 but revived after the 1994 elections (which Republican oil-business supporters largely won), could decimate the Porcupine caribou herd. The herd forms the basis of life for the Gwich'in, a 7000-member nation scattered across 17 villages near the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge (ANWR). Faith Gemmill, a Gwich'in from Arctic Village, appealed for the protection of her people's land and life, explaining the importance of the caribou by saying: "What the buffalo is to the Sioux, the caribou is to us."9
Damage to the environment would be compounded, because the proposed drilling site includes one-quarter of the herd's prime calving ground, an area that is comparatively safe, with plenty of forage and few mosquitoes. The ANWR is also a center of whale migration, brown bear denning, muskox calving, and duck and geese nesting. It receives only six to seven inches of precipitation per year, however, which makes regeneration of disturbed areas slow at best.10 Meanwhile, drilling opponents argue that ANWR would meet US demand for no more than a few months. Gideon James, first chief of the Venetie Gwich'in government, summarized the perspective of indigenous peoples, by saying: "We will not compromise on the ANWR plan. That was a promise, and it still is a promise."11
The resource issues in northwestern North America are as vast as the land itself. In this "last frontier," both the focus on extractive industries and the deleterious effects on indigenous nations are reminiscent of earlier American "frontiers." While the great forests and glacier-fed rivers remind travelers that "frontier" can denote an undeveloped area ripe for exploitation, it was clear that IEN Conference participants were thinking about another connotation of the word. They talked about a "frontier" in terms of an international boundary--a boundary that brings new rules and authority over land and its resources. As David Harrison pointed out, a traveler has to leave the United States to enter the land called "Alaska." It is a journey not only of physical distance, but also into a new state of mind.
Fourth World Bulletin • Spring/Summer 1996
Copyright © 1996 by the Fourth World Center
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