field in North America was discovered at Prudhoe Bay on its northern coast. What followed was land-grab pandemonium.
It was 1968 and the fledgling state hadn’t even finished negotiating its land transfers from the U.S. federal government yet. Oil companies grasped immediately that the strike was huge but the waters too icy to reach by tanker ship. Instead, a very long pipeline over public lands was needed to decant it to southern markets, either to a year-round port in the Gulf of Alaska, or through Canada. Modern environmentalists, freshly inspired by Rachel Carson’s 1962 book
Meanwhile, another group had also galvanized to win closure of a long-suffering wound: Who owns the land upon which aboriginal people have always lived? Even before the United States purchased Alaska from Russia in 1867, aboriginal Alaskans had long asked when and how the tsar had come to acquire title to their homelands.452 But no one seemed to care much about this issue. It had simmered, neglected and out of public consciousness, for over a century.
By the time oil was found in Prudhoe Bay, times had changed. America’s civil rights movement had taught a new generation the power of organized protests and lawsuits. The Alaska Federation of Natives and other groups had been litigating Washington to block transfers of federal land to the new state of Alaska until their ancestral claims were adjudicated. Many of the claims overlapped and, when added up, covered a total land area larger than that of the new state. It was a mess, and in 1966, Secretary of the Interior Stewart Udall (father of the current senator from New Mexico Tom Udall) declared a “land freeze,” effectively stopping all transfers of land to the new state until the mess was cleaned up. When oil was struck and talk of a pipeline began, the legal implications of the aboriginal claims blew sky-high. Who, exactly, owned this land? Suddenly, Alaska—a place that was about as conspicuous as Nunavut is today—mattered to everyone. No pipeline could be built until the issue was resolved.
State legislators and oil companies began lobbying for quick congressional action on an arcane issue ignored since the Alaska Purchase of 1867. After three years of lively politics on Capitol Hill, the final result was the Alaska Native Claims Settlement Act (ANCSA), signed into law by President Richard Nixon in 1971.453
ANCSA’s grand bargain was this: Aboriginal Alaskans would forever relinquish all of their ancestral claims to land within the state of Alaska, as well as their traditional rights to hunt and fish without regulation. Also, their old reservation treaties would be nullified. In return, they won fee simple property title and mineral rights to forty million acres of land—about one-ninth of the state of Alaska—nearly $1 billion in cash, and a business plan.
The U.S. government had just made Alaska Natives (aboriginals) the largest private landowners in the state of Alaska.454 The land was geographically divided among twelve “Regional Corporations” to manage the new property and cash holdings, and oversee further incorporation of more than two hundred village corporations within their boundaries. All of the new companies were then free to pursue whatever profits they could from their new assets, which were then returned as dividends to their shareholders. To become a shareholder, one had to possess one-quarter Alaska Native blood, be a U.S. citizen, and enroll with a regional or village corporation. A special landless corporation was even set up for eligible shareholders living outside of the state.455
ANCSA differed from all previous aboriginal treaties in at least two important ways. First, an enormous amount of land was granted, more than the area of all historical Indian reservations in the United States combined. Some grumbled that even forty million acres was a pittance compared to what had been stolen in the first place, but there is no questioning it was colossal compared with past treaties. Second, ANCSA did not create permanent sanctuaries for an everlasting traditional subsistence life. Instead, it incentivized use of the granted land not simply for hunting and fishing but for capitalist enterprise, with aboriginal-owned companies and shareholders running the show, to spur development and economic growth. ANCSA had blown up the traditional model of Aboriginal Reservation and replaced it with a new one of Aboriginal Business.
Today, Alaska’s aboriginal-owned regional corporations and their subsidiaries are worth billions. They’ve spawned hundreds of companies in construction, oil and gas field support, transportation, engineering, facilities management, land development, telecommunications, and tourism, to name a few. They publish shareholder reports, elect boards, and write five-year management plans. In common with other corporations some have done well and others not. Some have been mismanaged into bankruptcy. Others have squandered their cash endowments, clear-cut their forests, and sold off land or deeded it to their shareholders. But the successful ones, especially in remote areas, have become a dominating force in Alaskan politics and society. They create jobs and attract other businesses by offering logistics services. They pay thousands of dollars per year to their shareholders.
ANCSA was really just the beginning of aboriginal empowerment in Alaska. It also set the stage for home rule governments like the North Slope Borough, an enormous success story, which has built schools, sewer systems, and water treatment facilities, and brought many other quality-of-life improvements to the North Slope by taxing oil field activities. Much of its success can be traced back to the ANCSA model. Not surprisingly, aboriginal Alaskans today are far more supportive of oil and gas exploration, of land development, and of business in general, than any prior generation.
Out of Alaska
What happened in Alaska inspired aboriginal groups around the world and propelled an era of comprehensive modern land claims agreements across Canada. By 1973 the Inuit, Cree, and others also had legal teams pressing their land claims and, following Alaska’s example, thwarting outside natural resource development projects until they were settled.456 Just four years after ANCSA, aboriginal resistance to a series of new hydropower dams led to the James Bay and Northern Quebec Agreement, Canada’s first modern land claims settlement. In 1974 the Dene, Metis, and Inuit people stunned the world by blocking the Mackenzie Gas Project, a long-planned pipeline to bring Arctic natural gas to southern markets and a cornerstone of Canada’s northern development plan. Their negotiations took even longer, but today, with their land claims agreements and businesses in place, most are now avid supporters of the pipeline.457 Like ANCSA their aboriginal- owned corporations and companies will benefit greatly from the project, which could begin as soon as 2018.458
Canada’s modern land claims agreements have evolved well beyond the simple business corporations of ANCSA. From the outset their aboriginal negotiators insisted that the new agreements affirm not only property rights but political, social, and cultural ones as well. Many settlements also set up political self-governance. They collect royalties from the extraction of subsurface minerals, oil, and natural gas, not only from the granted property but from surrounding public lands.459 Aboriginal corporations and the Canadian government now make joint decisions on development, wildlife management, and environmental protections on these public lands. Outside companies must hire prescribed numbers of aboriginal workers and companies. Numerous protections of native language and culture reverberate throughout these documents. Such complex agreements take years to negotiate, run hundreds of pages long, and often contain provisions for still more negotiations in the future.460
After nearly four decades the era of modern, geographically large land claims agreements in North America is drawing to a close. Over half of Canada is now under jurisdiction of one settlement or another, most recently in 2008 and 2009.461 The final push will be a wave of smaller agreements across Canada over the next decade or two.462 Then it will all be done.
Greenland Rules!
The third place where northern aboriginal people have clawed back political power from distant southern capitals is in Greenland. For almost three centuries this enormous, glacier-buried island just four hundred miles east of Iqaluit was a colony of Denmark, but its population and language—currently around fifty-seven thousand people —is overwhelmingly Greenlandic Inuit (“Greenlanders”) with a fair mixture of Danish blood.
