Native Land Claims and Culture are Inseparable

My interest in Indigenous territorial claims began in my childhood. I grew up during the Native land claims era in Alaska. Throughout the twentieth century, Alaska Native people watched their lands and livelihoods slip away as settlers came to the territory in search of resources. In 1959, Alaska became a state, and the government began to select 103 million acres of land, an area about the size of California, including entire Native villages. In the 1960s, Native people began to organize to protect their lands. Many of the organizers were young people who had grown up in orphanages and mission schools. Few had finished high school. They fought a hostile government and Big Oil to win a land claim for Alaska Native communities. Their activism brought about the largest Indigenous land claims settlement in U.S. history.

As a child, I watched the fight for Native land claims and the settlement unfold. Most white Alaskans vehemently opposed the idea that Native people had claims to the land. Year after year, my father donned a bulletproof vest during the day and attended college classes in the evening to earn a degree that would help him meet the challenges of the moment. Threatening phone calls awoke my parents, along with other Native families, in the dead of night. When the Alaska Native Claims Settlement Act (ANCSA) passed the U.S. Congress in 1971, it delivered nearly $1 billion in cash and conferred title to 44 acres of land to Native people. The settlement enabled them to address their communities’ lack of adequate housing, health care, education, employment, and clean water, the legacies of dispossession and Jim Crow-style segregation. Despite the historic size of the settlement, activism for Alaska Native land claims has been called the forgotten Indigenous rights movement.

The land claims movement in Alaska is part of a larger story of Native people asserting their territorial rights. Indigenous territorial claims emerge from histories of use and occupancy of land codified in the common-law doctrine of Aboriginal title. In the U.S. and Canada, the post-1960s era marked the beginning of land claims movements made possible by legal decisions and policy changes. In 1970, the return of Blue Lake to Taos Pueblo became the first instance of the United States returning land to a Native nation. In Canada, the 1973 Supreme Court decision in Calder v. British Columbia opened the door for Indigenous land negotiations in that country. To date, the Canadian government has signed twenty-five modern treaties with Native communities. During this period, some high-profile events have garnered international headlines. In 2016, protests on the Standing Rock reservation against the construction of the Dakota Access Pipeline Standing Rock became the largest Indigenous resistance movement in recent history.

Today, through movements such as Land Back and women-led Rematriation, Native groups seek to reclaim land, protect sacred sites, and exercise stewardship over their traditional territories. Widening recognition of dispossession has prompted governmental and even private returns of land to Indigenous communities. Land reclamation has enabled these communities to assert sovereignty rights, rebuild social infrastructure, and revitalize cultural practices.

In Alaska, the victory of Native activists meant, among other things, that my generation gained access to higher education. Had there been no land claims settlement, I would not be a Berkeley professor. But for me, my love of culture meant that my education took an unusual path for someone from my background. I earned a PhD in comparative literature, and throughout my career, I have studied Native literature, film, and art. This interest might seem far afield from the world of Native politics. But in fact, the work of Native artists and writers is profoundly engaged with issues affecting Native communities. This includes land claims.

Take, for example, the image on the cover of my new book Native Lands: Jaune Quick-to-See Smith’s Memory Map (2000), part of a series of the artist’s map paintings. In the painting, Smith superimposes Native cultural symbols on a map of the United States, making visible Native histories and meanings of land. “We are the original owners of this country,” Smith explained her painting, “My maps are about stolen lands, our very heritage, our cultures, our worldview, our being… Every map is a political map and tells a story—that we are alive everywhere across this nation.” The United States, in Smith’s rendering, is Native land.

Native Lands examines the connections between Indigenous culture and politics, focusing on the ways that Native artists and writers represent histories and meanings of land that support Indigenous territorial claims. In the book, I show how their work depicts longtime Native presence on the land and the violence of settler expansion, thereby leveling a critique of dispossession that lends moral weight to Indigenous claims. Cultural works also restore community knowledge and social practices suppressed by settler policies. Whereas dispossession is premised on Native erasure, culture itself becomes a site of encounter where viewers engage with ongoing Indigenous presence and relationships to land, including those shaped by traditions. As cultural production constitutes a means of self-representation that aligns with campaigns for political autonomy, the imaginative dimensions of culture enable these works to conceptualize possibilities for social and territorial justice in the future.

By taking up these concerns, Native Land draws together my lifelong interest in Native land claims with my passion for Native culture. It also demonstrates that Native land claims and culture are inseparable.

Source: Julie Sasse, “Postmodern Messenger,” in Jaune Quick-to-See Smith: Postmodern Messenger, ed. Mary Sasse (Tucson: Tucson Museum of Art, 2004): 8.

This post was originally published on the University of California Press blog and is reprinted here with permission.

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