Between Empires And Frontiers: Alaska Native Sovereignty And U.S. Settler Imperialism

Abstract

“Between Empires and Frontiers: Alaska Native Sovereignty and U.S. Settler Imperialism,” examines territorial Alaska as a critical borderland: a settler colonial space alternately framed as the “Last Frontier” of the American West or as the first experiment in U.S. overseas imperialism. Drawing on indigenous, territorial, federal, state, Congressional, and corporate records, I argue that these competing understandings generated tensions in the legal relationship of Alaska Natives to the federal government and informed Alaska Native political strategies as they made claims on land, sovereignty, and U.S. citizenship. Unlike in the contiguous states, the federal government never signed treaties with Alaska Natives and the Bureau of Indian Affairs refused jurisdiction to what it considered to be “races of a questionable, ethnical type” and therefore categorically different than American Indians. Beginning in 1867, when the federal government purchased the territory from Russia, to 1959 when Alaska was admitted to the Union as the 49th state, my dissertation traces the processes by which these racial distinctions engendered a new legal framework that I call settler imperialism. I argue that the tensions inherent in this legal framework were fundamental to the broader structure of U.S. empire in which “incorporated” territories were instrumental. In this way, Alaska had far-reaching implications for United States international policy and global hegemony in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. I argue further that Alaska Natives strategically leveraged these tensions in shaping their relationship to the federal government as indigenous nations and as U.S. citizens. Alaska Natives organized their political strategies around what territorial and federal officials referred to as “uncertainty” as to their legal status, alternately drawing similarities between themselves and American Indians or maintaining distinctions. In doing so, they enacted sovereignty, made claims to citizenship rights, and tailored elements of federal Indian policy to suit their political, economic, and social organization and networks of relations in ways that territorial and federal officials did not expect. The outcomes of their efforts are crucial to understanding U.S.-indigenous relations in the contiguous states and globally.