Avoidance of the Federal Acknowledgment Process: Two Hundred New Petitioners Waiting at the Door

Abstract

Two hundred plus Native villages in Alaska may join the legion of Indian groups in the long line before the gates of the federal acknowledgment process established by Congress to alleviate and rationalize selection of those groups deserving of acknowledgment as Indian tribes. Such a possibility might well seem absurd to those who have studied the pre-contact or modern lifestyle of Alaska Indians, Inuit, Yup'ik and Aleut. Their significant commitment to subsistence, their political autonomy in pursuit of a modern Native land claims settlement, and their continuing residence in rural and traditional settings has long been a matter of both academic and political record. Yet for all of this, recent court opinions by the Alaska Supreme Court and the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals, as well as a flurry of federal district court decisions, have questioned whether Alaska Native villages were and are historical tribes and whether Congress had recognized them. The State of Alaska has taken a uniformly hostile position to the proposition that Alaska Native Villages are self-governing tribal entities. The author explores the historical reasons leading to this situation and calls for the legal and historical research critical to the survival of the legal identities of tribal communities and their land base.