Opinion: 1991 was notable year for Natives in Alaska and Canada

Monday, January 31, 2011  

"Alaska and Canada, as we now know them, were born within a day of each other. The Treaty of Cession, by which Russia sold Alaska to America, was concluded on March 30, 1867. One day earlier, Queen Victoria gave Royal Assent to the British North America Act, which would formally establish the Dominion of Canada on July 1, 1867. In addition to sharing the same year, and nearly the same day, of birth, Alaska and Canada shared the same tumult in the early 1990s, as Native and non-Native interests clashed dramatically.

1991, the year of the Warsaw Pact's collapse, would be pivotal to Natives on both sides of the Alaska boundary.

In Alaska, as 1991 approached, Alaska Natives struggled to regain control over their land claims, for which 1991 would mark the long-feared year that the 20-year moratorium on the sale of Native lands and corporate shares would end, and when Native lands could potentially fall into non-Native hands.

The Native leadership worked hard to defuse what some called the 1991 "Time Bomb," an effort that ultimately proved successful. But at the same time, Native alienation with the new corporate culture inspired a movement against corporatism and modernism and for a restoration of tribal sovereignty. This sovereignty movement would continue to clash with the state and with Native modernists throughout the 1990s, revealing an enduring fault line of conflict that continues to challenge northerners.

On the other side of the Arctic, the lessons of the early land claims experience, and those worrisome structural flaws, were closely studied and influenced a new model for land claims settlements that ensured Native lands and corporations would always remain in Native hands, that young Natives would be automatically enrolled as shareholders upon adulthood, and that subsistence would forever be protected, on Native-owned lands as well as adjacent government lands."

Get the Story:
Barry Scott Zellen: 1991 notable for Natives in Alaska, Canada (The Anchorage Daily News 1/29)