The Interrelationship between Alaska State Law and the Social Systems of Modern Eskimo Villages in Alaska: History, Present and Future Considerations

The Interrelationship between Alaska State Law and the Social Systems of Modern Eskimo Villages in Alaska: History, Present and Future Considerations

Conn, Stephen

Date: 1985-08

Publisher: Justice Center, University of Alaska Anchorage

Subject: Alaska history ; Alaska Native Claims Settlement Act (ANCSA) ; Alaska Natives ; bush justice ; legal anthropology ; local option (alcohol) ; rural justice ; subsistence ; traditional law ways ; tribal government

Type: Working Paper

Table of Contents: Eskimo Villages in Alaska - Communities of Resilience and Change / Who are the Eskimos? / The Early Period / Western Legal Socialization: Early Agents of Change / Late Territorial and Early State Period / Critical Factors in the Oil Boom and Land Claims Era and Their Bearing Upon the Relationship Between Social Structure and Law / The Process of Legal Change During the Claims Settlement Decade / The Local Option Law and its Rationale / Juvenile Matters / Tribal Governments - The Next Step? / Bibliography

Abstract:

Yup'ik and Inupiat villages in Alaska (the territory and the state) experienced a process of legal socialization that was strongly influenced by serious constraints in the allocation of resources. These constraints resulted in legal socialization into what was in essence a second legal state system and provided an opportunity for cultural autonomy by Eskimo villages, even though this de facto situation did not recognize these groups as sovereign tribes. The actual implementation of a single full-blown legal system in village Alaska in the mid-1970s has resulted in a loss of control and serious efforts by Alaska villages to reinstitute village law ways as tribal legal process.

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