Book Description

One of America s oldest civil rights organizations, the Alaska Native Brotherhood set out to win citizenship for all Alaska Natives. After securing the basic rights of voting and education in the 1920s, they continued the campaign for full civil rights and, at the 1929 Grand Camp Convention in Haines, took up the banner of aboriginal claims. The fight for a fair settlement to those claims, from 1929 to 1971, proved to be the organization s longest and most complex battle. They had to first establish the basis for aboriginal claims, then win an equitable settlement. Since enacted in 1971, the Alaska Native Claims Settlement Act has played a dominant role in the emergence of Alaska Natives as fully vested citizens of the 49th State. Of national significance, a section of ANCSA made possible the Alaska National Interest Lands Conservation Act of 1980, which assigned wilderness protection to over 80 million acres of Alaska, at the same time doubling the acreage within the national park system. But without the Alaska Native Brotherhood, it is unlikely there would ever have been a significant Native claims settlement. During the Alaska Statehood Movement, only the ANB and its allies stood in the way of government attempts to extinguish or prematurely settle aboriginal claims. This book tells the story of the men (and many women) who found a way to win recognition of their indigenous rights using the government s own court system. Their strategies and tactics led to rare successes for Native Americans their nearly two hundred year effort to define and protect their rights under US constitutional law. "