The Praxis of Indigenism and Alaska Native Timber Politics

Abstract

This article addresses the most recent discourse on indigenism in Southeast Alaska that has emerged around the Alaska Native Claims Settlement Act of 1971 and its subsequent revisions. It argues that one must consider the "politics of recognition" in Southeast Alaska in terms of the larger political dynamics that shape state and industry access to resources, especially commercially valuable stands of timber. In Southeast Alaska, recognition of Native claims has allowed industrial timber and pulp producers to, in effect, circumvent environmental laws aimed at curbing production, thus allowing them to continue devastating the living conditions of many Natives. Among the local responses to the manipulation of Native claims and identity, the all–Native, radical Christian churches that have taken a strong stance against the recent, corporate–sponsored, cultural revitalization are unique in their resistance to indigenist politics. [Keywords: indigenism, Alaska Natives, development, Pentecostalism]

Sustainable Biomass Energy and Indigenous Cultural Models of Well-being in an Alaska Forest Ecosystem

“…The land and capital were divided among 12 regional and some 200 village and urban corporations, and approximately 80,000 Natives were enrolled as stockholders. ANCSA, along with the rapid development of the oil industry, have transformed Alaska's economy, while posing profound social and environmental challenges for Alaska Native communities (Berger 1985, Dombrowski 2002, Thornton 2007.…”

“…Lacking expertise in forest industries, many Native corporations hired outside consultants who advised them according to the prevailing forest management and timber economics paradigms of the day, which considered trees as a regenerative crop to be harvested according to maximum yield principles within the constraints of environmental regulation and market prices. As a result of this advice and a temporary corporate welfare scheme that allowed Native corporations to sell net operating losses (NOLS) from their timber operations to profitable non-Native corporations for tax relief, but only if they cut the trees, most Southeast Ecology and Society 18(3): 38 http://www.ecologyandsociety.org/vol18/iss3/art38/ Native corporations clear-cut their valuable old growth timber within their first generation of operation, drawing criticism from environmentalists and local shareholders whose subsistence activities were adversely impacted by intensive logging (Dombrowski 2002, Durbin 2005, Alexander et al 2010N. Soboleff, personal communication 2011).…”

Tania Li, Land's End: Capitalist Relations on an Indiginous Frontier

“…Land's End presents a culmination of relational historical-realist thinking about how capitalist change involves indigenous people, emerging in the wake of the late twenty-first century global rise of indigenist activism. Such thinking is already seen in Tania Li's earlier work (Li 2000(Li , 2010, and also in that of anthropologists working in similar places where capitalist changes in the relational context that indigenous people live in did not come in the form of dispossession through large-scale, internationally financed development projects or multi-national companies, but in more subtle and insidious forms (see, for example, Dombrowski 2002, Steur 2014, Sylvain 2002. The point of such work has not just been to deconstruct colonial or essentialist notions of indigeneity as capitalist modernity's Other but to understand the tremendous role that class processes and a capitalist relational context have in directing and limiting change in indigenous livelihoods and politics.…”

Music and change in Nain, Nunatsiavut: More White does not always mean less Inuit

“…But the pendulum now occasionally swings the other way, as Aboriginal peoples face a new lamentation from cultural commentators. Concerns about cultural erosion expressed in academic journals, print media, and TV documentaries often implicitly frame the discourse in terms of inadequacies: the Inuit of northwest Greenland play video games and watch too much TV (Pax Leonard 2010); the Tlingit of British Colombia are too corporate (Dombrowski 2002); so-and-so Indigenous peoples are on the verge of losing their language forever (CELC 2014;UNESCO 2014;WOLP 2014). Where Aboriginal peoples were once not White enough, now they are in danger of becoming too White.…”