Book review: Exploring 12 key cases in Alaska Natives’ fight to retain traditional access to lands, waters and wildlife
Booksology “They Came but Could Not Conquer: The Struggle for Environmental Justice in Alaska Native Communities”
By Diane J. Purvis; University of Nebraska Press; 314 Pages; 2024; $29.95
In 2014, the United States Supreme Court denied a state of Alaska petition asking it to reverse a 9th Circuit Court of Appeals decision protecting rural subsistence fishing on federal lands, favoring such use over Alaska’s state constitutional clause granting shared use of resources equally among all of its citizens.
The rejection of the appeal brought final closure to what had come to be known as the Katie John case, and a year after the revered Ahtna elder’s death, it mostly awarded her victory. The court battle, too complex to detail here, bitterly divided Alaskans between those who held that all residents should be allowed impartial access despite their ethnicity or location of residence, and those who believed that the state’s Indigenous people, having lived on its lands for millennia and drawing survival from their fauna and flora until the arrival of white settlers, should be allowed to maintain their cultural practices upon them.
The story of how this battle took place over the span of 30 years provides the penultimate chapter in “They Came but Could Not Conquer” by Diane Purvis, a retired professor of cultural history at Alaska Pacific University.
Purvis has written extensively on resource and environmental conflicts between Alaska Natives and those who came into the region seeking to enrich themselves from its offerings with little to no regard for the inhabitants already here. With this book, she explores 12 key cases where Alaska Natives, with mixed results, fought to retain their traditional access to lands, waters and the wildlife living there against federal, territorial and state governments, corporate interests, scientists and others, including, yes, environmentalists.
The core argument in this informative and deeply fascinating book is that Alaska Natives have turned to Western judicial systems that they did not inherently understand in order to preserve ways of life that those courts were often largely incapable of grasping.
Unlike Native Americans elsewhere on the continent, Purvis reminds readers, Alaska Natives were never conquered through warfare. Thus, she continues, they never ceded their lands and therefore, by their understanding, maintained ownership of them even as the United States government asserted its authority over its northern possession.
With assistance from lawyers both white and Indigenous, Alaska Natives, Purvis tells us, researched written law and threaded their way through the labyrinth of America’s multilayered judicial system, using the government’s own policies and laws, seeking to outmaneuver it and gain autonomy over their lives.
The subtitle of this book is “The Struggle for Environmental Justice in Alaska Native Communities,” and while that captures much of its essence, Purvis casts a far bigger net. Hopscotching across Alaska over the course of more than a century, she details a dozen instances when Native subsistence practices and territorial claims were infringed on by Western interests intent on forcing their will over both.
Purvis begins in Auke Bay early in the 20th century, where the government, seeking to establish a recreational tourist destination atop a traditional Tlingit site, evicted former Minnesotan William Murphy, who had married into the Native family that had used the land for generations. He sued and, though a white man, was the first to argue in court for the right of Native occupancy.
Murphy lost his case, as would others following his path, but increasingly, some of them won.
At the other end of Alaska, around the same time Murphy was fighting in court, Indigenous reindeer herders near Nome were overrun first by gold rush stampeders, and then by the city’s politically and economically powerful Lomen brothers, who elbowed their way into the industry.
Reindeer had been introduced by Sheldon Jackson to provide a food source for Iñupiaq and Yup’ik people whose historic nutritional source had been depleted by the arrival of East Coast whalers. The herders successfully argued in court that the reindeer program had been set up for their benefit, and were able to reassume control over it, although the judicial decision was paternalistic.
These two cases prefigure the seesawing David v. Goliath struggles of Alaska Natives from all of the state’s regions against multiple, often allied forces aligned against them.
On one end, the Tlingit village of Hoonah fought commercial fishing companies for rights to their traditional waters with little success. And in Prince William Sound, Alutiiq traditions were wiped away, first by the 1989 Exxon Valdez oil spill, and then by courts that denied their lawsuit for restitution because Western judicial standards were incapable of recognizing subsistence, a cultural economic system, not a financial one, and thus one carrying no price tag.
Far greater luck was had by Eben Hopson and Charlie Edwardsen, who defended Iñupiat subsistence against the International Whaling Commission and an array of environmental organizations solely focused on eliminating hunting of the mammals. Residents of Point Hope fought off the absurdly conceived Project Chariot, which called for creating a nearby deepwater port by detonating a hydrogen bomb 30 miles from their village. And Interior Athabascans prevented the Rampart Dam, which would have flooded much of the Yukon Flats, washing away traditional subsistence lands and numerous villages.
Purvis tells all these stories and others with precision and finely tuned language. And regardless of where one falls on the political spectrum, she fearlessly shows where broad gaps in cultural understandings, either intentional or passive, dismissed the rights of Alaska Natives, who have persistently fought to be recognized under U.S. laws.
Sometimes the efforts of Native activists and legal advocates fell short. Other times, such as the Katie John ruling, substantial victories were won. But as Purvis writes about the successful halting of the Rampart Dam, in words applicable to her larger narrative, these struggles “brought Native communities from across the state in a common cause, reinvigorating the fight to redeem land and resource rights and consequently exposing Alaska’s provincial politics, peculiar priorities, and the common struggle against the forces of Western expansion and colonization … (T)his had been a tug-of-war between human advancement as determined by a Western yardstick pitted against Indigenous survival.”
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