arts Article The American Flag and the Alaska Native Brotherhood Emily L. Moore Department of Art & Art History, Colorado State University, Fort Collins, CO 80523, USA;
[email protected] Received: 30 August 2019; Accepted: 9 November 2019; Published: 2 December 2019 Abstract: The Alaska Native Brotherhood (ANB) (est. 1912) is one of the oldest Indigenous rights groups in the United States. Although critics have accused the ANB of endorsing assimilationist policies in its early years, recent scholarship has re-evaluated the strategies of the ANB to advance Tlingit and Haida governance at the same time that they pursued a strategic commitment to the settler state. Contributing to this re-appraisal of the early ANB, this article examines photographic documentation of the use of the American flag in ANB Halls from the period 1914–1945. I argue that the pairing of the American flag with Indigenous imagery in ANB Halls communicated the ANB’s commitment to U.S. citizenship and to Tlingit and Haida sovereignty. Keywords: Alaska Native Brotherhood; Alaska Native Sisterhood; American flag; Indigenous sovereignty; patriotic pluralism; Tlingit; Haida; Tsimshian The Alaska Native Brotherhood (ANB) is the oldest continuously active Indigenous rights’ organization in the United States.1 Established in 1912 by Tlingit and Tsimshian leaders at a meeting in Juneau, Alaska, and joined by the Alaska Native Sisterhood (ANS) in 1914, the ANB/ANS won an impressive list of battles in their first fifty years alone: U.S. citizenship for Alaska Natives in 1923, one year before Congress granted citizenship to all Native Americans; desegregated schools for mixed-race children in 1929, twenty-five years before Brown vs.