Statehood Without Consent: What ANCSA Was Trying to Fix

Alaska became the forty-ninth state on January third, nineteen fifty-nine. The occasion was celebrated with genuine enthusiasm by the non-Native residents of Anchorage and Fairbanks who had spent a decade lobbying for it. The Alaska Statehood Act gave the new state the right to select one hundred four million acres of land from the federal public domain.

Nobody consulted the Alaska Native communities about which land would be selected, or what would happen to communities that sat on it.

The state began selecting land almost immediately. Some of the selections fell on territory where Alaska Native villages had lived and hunted and fished without legal title, because no legal mechanism had ever been created to give them title. The federal government had managed Alaska's lands since eighteen sixty-seven without resolving Native land claims. The statehood process had simply continued in that tradition.

Native land-claims organizations that had been organizing for decades, including the Central Council of Tlingit and Haida Indian Tribes of Alaska, which had been pressing land claims since nineteen thirty-five, filed protests and demanded a freeze on state land selections until Native claims were settled.

The discovery of oil at Prudhoe Bay in nineteen sixty-eight changed the political calculus. The pipeline that would carry the oil to tidewater would cross territory where Native land claims were unsettled. The oil companies needed clear title. The state needed clear title. The federal government needed to act.

ANCSA in nineteen seventy-one was what resulted. The twelve-year gap between statehood and the Settlement Act was a period during which Alaska Native communities existed in legal limbo, neither protected by reservation status nor acknowledged as co-equal participants in the state's governance. The Settlement Act ended the limbo and created a different kind of uncertainty that has occupied Alaska Native communities ever since.