In 1971, Congress passed the Alaska Native Claims Settlement Act (ANCSA), the largest indigenous land claims settlement in U.S history. Intended to resolve disputes over land and to spur economic development, ANCSA remained silent on issues of indigenous governance, or tribal sovereignty, as well as on subsistence rights, a particularly urgent issue because many Alaska Natives remain dependent on subsistence practices for survival. Consequently, Alaska Native politics since ANCSA has centered on campaigns for sovereignty and subsistence rights. Despite these shortcomings, ANCSA accorded Alaska Natives unprecedented possibilities for economic development that enable other forms of community self-determination. This essay explores the limits and possibilities of ANCSA by examining the ways it has transformed Alaska Native communities and politics. It also traces the legal conflicts that have ensued from the settlement, including those culminating in the landmark Venetie (1998) and Katie John (2001) decisions on sovereignty and subsistence that pit Alaska Natives against state and federal authorities.
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Since the 1980s, political shifts within Native America, including the transnational indigenous peoples movement, have increasingly emphasized connections among indigenous communities, illuminated the place of Native America in global imperialism, and reshaped indigenous cultural production. Indigenous transnationalism, this essay argues, carries particular weight for feminism and other contemporary anti-colonial strategies as it also draws Native studies into a closer but frequently vexed relationship with postnationalist American studies. Parallel transnational tendencies in American studies and Native American studies have heretofore worked at cross-purposes: as pan-tribal alliances draw attention to U.S. internal colonialism and its connections to global imperialism, postnationalist American studies has largely neglected the ongoing colonization of Native America. Through an analysis of Leslie Marmon Silko’s novel Almanac of the Dead and Shelley Niro’s multimedia installation “The Border,” this essay addresses this neglect by considering what happens to postnationalist American studies when you put Native studies at the center.
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