Alaska Native Categorization

Alaska Natives and U.S. Law

Because there have been no treaties between Alaska Natives and the federal government, the federal-Native relationship has been defined by statutory actions. When the United States first took over Alaska from Russia, the federal government did not initially deal with Alaska Natives at all. The 1867 Treaty of Cession, which transferred the lands to the United States, distinguished between “uncivilized tribes” and other “inhabitants of the ceded territory.” These other “inhabitants,” by implication whites, were given citizenship in the United States and guaranteed “the free enjoyment of their liberty, property, and religion.” The uncivilized tribes, on the other hand, were “subject to such laws and regulations as the United States may, from time to time, adopt in regard to aboriginal tribes of that country.”

Those who were categorized as uncivilized tribes under American rule were for the most part those who had been classified as such by the Russian government. Federal Indian law was applied inconsistently at first, but only because of the general inattention of the government to Alaska. It was clear by the 1884 Organic Act (an early move toward statehood, which created Alaska as a judicial district with federally appointed authorities) that the federal government saw no legal distinction between the natives of Alaska and the natives of the rest of the country, and the issue of whether or not a Native was “civilized” proved relevant only in cases to do with school attendance.

The first federal actions that implied a difference between Alaska Natives and Native Americans were actually to the detriment of Alaska Natives. While federal treaties with Native Americans had accepted the premise that Native American tribes had claims of aboriginal title to large amounts of property—the acceptance of that premise being the very reason why federal recognition of tribal identity is legally important—the land laws enforced in Alaska admitted no such premise, and granted to “Indians or other persons” only that land “actually in their use or occupation,” meaning that while a tribe in the southwest might be admitted to own millions [Page 11]of acres by ancestral right, Alaska Natives were acknowledged to own only the land they were actually putting to current use. This was an enormous difference, especially considering the size of Alaska, and implied a legally relevant difference between Alaska Natives and Native Americans.

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