Alaska Native People, Traditional Foods, and the Settler State: “Subsistence” and the Narrative of Settler Belonging
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Alaska Native People, Traditional Foods, and the Settler State: “Subsistence” and the Narrative of Settler Belonging

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Abstract

Subsistence is a unique user-group category created in the 1970s to regulate taking of fish and wildlife resources for personal or family consumption. However, the initial intent for developing this use category was to codify protection of Alaska Native peoples’ hunting and fishing rights after they were dissolved in the 1971 Alaska Native Claims Settlement Act (ANCSA). In the decades following ANCSA, several attempts were made at the state and federal level to codify a protection for Native traditional food practices, yet each was met with strong resistance by state legislators, national and local sport hunting and fishing organizations, and a vocal White settler population. Through the mobilization of equal rights rhetoric, subsistence went from being a collective Alaska Native rights issue, to a liberal White settler rights issue, giving all Alaska residents the right to practice subsistence. This dissertation thus analyzes the historic development and contemporary manifestations of the subsistence use category in Alaska, and within the context of U.S. settler colonial state-making processes. Data for this dissertation comes from ethnographic research conducted with Alaska Native traditional food experts, from various Alaska Department of Fish and Game employees and Board of Fisheries members, from Native and non-Native individuals involved with commercial and other user group categories, and from public testimony at the Board of Fisheries meetings where regulations are proposed, deliberated, and created. Archival research of newspapers and news programs was also conducted in order to gain insights into public discussions around the subsistence debates during the 1970s and 80s. I then draw connections between settler rhetorical strategies and anthropological accounts during the 70s and 80s to contemporary public discussions around subsistence issues today. From this research a picture emerges of how subsistence comes to be a site for the construction of White settler belonging rooted in a longstanding liberal frontier mythology. Subsistence is thus an ongoing mode of assimilation mobilized through a settler colonial legal reconfiguration of an Indigenous practice that effectively eliminates its very indigeneity. Subsistence is also a site for the construction and naturalization of U.S. settler state making that utilizes multiculturalist logics to challenge Alaska Native peoples’ sovereign rights.

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