TOM HARDIE MEMORIAL AWARD No. 29 Subsistence in Alaska: Balancing Competing Visions of the Land in Fish and Game Management May 2003 Judith B. Harvey ‘03 SUBSISTENCE IN ALASKA: Balancing Competing Visions of the Land in Fish and Game Management by Judith Harvey A thesis submitted in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the Degree of Bachelor of Arts with Honors in Environmental Studies WILLIAMS COLLEGE Williamstown, Massachusetts 2003 Acknowledgements I would like to thank Professor Karen Merrill, my advisor, for the encouragement and academic support she provided throughout this entire project. I am also incredibly grateful to Taylor Brelsford for his input and advice, which helped to give me a deeper understanding of the Alaska subsistence issue. Additionally, I would like to thank Professor Kai Lee, my second reader, for his helpful critique of my first draft. I had the opportunity to visit Anchorage, Alaska this past January thanks to funding from the Center for Environmental Studies and the Office of the Dean of the Faculty. I appreciate the time that the following people took to talk with me while I was in Anchorage: Marianne See, Tom Boyd, Ethan Berkowitz, Gabe Sam, and Steve Colt. I would also like to thank the Alaska Office of the Bureau of Land Management, the ARLIS librarians, the Yukon River Delta Fisheries Association, and Taylor and Terry Brelsford for their accommodation and assistance. Last, and certainly not least, I am extraordinarily grateful for the constant support from my family and friends, without whom I would not have completed (or even started) this project. Table of Contents Introduction: The Relationships of Alaska’s People to the Land……………………..1 Bibliography for the Introduction…………………………………………………....12 Chapter One: The Early Development of the Subsistence Conflict…….……………13 Chapter One Bibliography……………………………………..…………………….39 Chapter Two: ANILCA and the Era of State Compliance…………………………...41 Chapter Two Bibliography......……………………………………………………….75 Chapter Three: Dual Management and the Search for a Subsistence Resolution….....79 Chapter Three Bibliography........................................................................................113 Chapter Four: Conclusions…………………………………………………………...117 Chapter Four Bibliography…………………………………………………………..134 Maps Map 1: Map of Alaska (Alaska Geographic Society)…..……………………………....2 Map 2: Generalized geographic distribution of Alaska Eskimos, Aleuts and Indians….3 Introduction: The Relationships of Alaska’s People to the Land Alaska, land of the “last frontier,” is known for its especially vast, unforgiving landscape and harsh climate. Separated by such a far distance from the lower forty-eight states and not officially admitted to the Union until 1959, Alaska is a state with a past and a path distinct from that of other states. Central to the state’s history are the changing and various relationships between humans and the land. Due to the competing conceptions of the human-to-land relationship held by Alaska’s inhabitants, natural resource access and development has been debated since the arrival of white settlers in the eighteenth century. Today, one of the most controversial topics of human land use concerns subsistence, customary and traditional practices that involve the hunting, fishing, and gathering of wild foods from the land. To better understand the contemporary debate and historical pieces of legislation that have attempted to reconcile competing visions of the land and subsistence, it is valuable to first gain an appreciation of Alaska’s geography and people. Alaska’s natural landscape Fundamental to Alaska’s geographic character are both its size and the wide diversity of its landscapes. The 375 million acres that make up the state are twice as many as the state of Texas has and four times that of California (Haycox 2002, 6). In the south of the state is the Pacific Mountain system, composed of significant ranges including the Alaska Range, in which North America’s tallest peak, Mt. McKinley, is located. Two lowland areas within the Pacific Mountain system, the Copper River Basin and the Susitna-Cook Inlet, are comprised of forested terrain and fertile farmland. North of the Pacific Mountain system are the Central Uplands and Lowlands, distinguished by gently sloping hills and the Kuskokwim, Koyukuk, Tanana and Yukon river valleys. Going north further still, are the glacier-made mountains of the Brooks Range. Beyond the Brooks Range, extending to the Arctic Ocean, is the Arctic Coastal Plain, the land of Alaska’s tundra. Also significant to note is that Alaska is almost entirely bordered by water: the Pacific Ocean to the south, the Bering Sea to the west, and the Arctic Ocean to the north. (Netstate 2003). Map 1: Map of Alaska (Alaskan Geographic Society ©1998, cited in Haycox 2002, Frigid Embrace, viii) The diverse populations of Alaska and their connections to the land As could be expected across an area so vast and varied, Alaska’s land serves diverse and dynamic economic and social purposes for its equally diverse and dynamic human population. There are three main groups of Alaska Natives who have resided in the territory dating back 10,000 years and today live clustered in separate regions of the territory. The Aleut, primarily a coastal group, inhabit the southern Aleutian Islands and the westernmost land of the Alaskan peninsula. Aleutians rely on sea mammals for food 2 and other necessities such as clothes (Haycox 2002, 27). Covering much of the interior portions of Alaska are the Athabascan Indians. The Athabascan tribes live mainly in river valleys and depend on the fish and game that are plentiful in the region. In the north and northwest are the Eskimo (Inupiat) people. To survive in the harshest weather conditions, Eskimos developed tools to better hunt and more efficiently use their main food source, marine mammals (ibid., 24). Map 2: Generalized geographic distribution of Alaska Eskimos, Aleuts and Indians groups (cited in Arnold 1976, 9) 3 Prior to the middle 1700s, when Russian settlers arrived in Alaska, the Alaska Native population numbered 74,000 people (Arnold 1976, 8). Alaska Natives, essentially without outside contact before that time, depended almost exclusively on the hunting and gathering of Alaska’s natural resources for survival. Consequently, these regionally separate landscapes and their respective climates and natural resources have forced Alaska Natives, and later, some non-Native settlers to the most remote parts of the state, to become acutely adapted to the particularities of the land in which they each reside. As the land has intimately shaped the strategies of survival, the relationship of people to the land has become a universal and central theme of Alaska’s many cultures, and of special importance to indigenous groups whose traditions of relating to the land date back thousands of years. Although the conditions of the land are extreme and challenging to adapt to, Alaska’s Native groups have consistently existed and even thrived off of the resources the land provides. Colonization and settlement of the Alaska territory first by Russia and then by the United States subjected the subsistence activities of Alaska Native groups to external influence and regulation. Because Alaska is so large and its most extreme conditions were considered uninhabitable by Western standards, at first there were relatively few conflicts between the Native Alaskans and outsiders. This changed when until an increasing influx of settlers from the lower forty-eight states in the 1800s began to encroach upon traditional Native hunting and fishing patterns. While both Natives and non-Natives depended on the land for survival, non-Natives realized the market potential of the land’s natural resources and sought to capitalize on such resources for financial gain. 4 Throughout Alaska’s many different regions, non-Native settlers developed a variety of modern industries, such as timber processing in the south and salmon canneries on the coasts. However, for the most part, at first the Native groups did not resist the non-Native settlers, as their industries did not at first interfere with subsistence activities. As Frank Norris explains in a history of National Park Service subsistence management, Native and non-Native populations coexisted without much formal governmental intervention until the early 1900s, “Alaska’s Natives…were largely ignored by governmental Indian policy during the first three decades of American rule, primarily because their land and resources were either ‘undiscovered’ or were not coveted by non- Natives (Norris 2002, 2). Yet this relatively peaceful and unregulated relationship did not exist for long. Norris continues his account of early American rule by giving examples of the increasing number of conflicts between Natives and non-Natives that occurred as white settlers began to expand their industries (ibid.). Armed with more money and power, non-Native interests generally won conflicts over the land’s resources, but Native interests did not merely fade away. Instead, two very different conceptions of the land began to more clearly surface. On one side were the white frontiersmen who hoped to get rich by mining, logging, fishing, or exploiting other sorts of Alaska’s seemingly infinite natural resources. On the other side were Native Alaskans who perceived natural resources to be central to their everyday existence and, due to their traditional dependence on them, worked to maintain fish and animal populations for future harvest seasons. From these two conceptions of land use, different definitions of subsistence emerged, which have in turn affected subsistence policy throughout the twentieth 5 century. To some, specifically a number of Euro-Americans, subsistence has connoted a bare minimum existence, a state of impoverishment in which one gets by with just enough food and other necessities to survive (Case 1989, 1009). On the other hand, for Alaska’s Natives who inhabited the territory and relied on its natural resources for 10,000 years prior to the arrival of Russian and American settlers, the land’s resources have taken on cultural as well as nutritional and monetary value.