but they also brought doctors and cures. Medicine and religion went hand and hand. The traditional shaman was not powerful enough to fight the new diseases the Nets’aii Gwich’in encountered, which, in time, would further strengthen the power of the Christian church (Mackenzie 1985: 8).
The creation of the Venetie Reservation did not fully resolve all land claims issues and struggles between the Nets’aii Gwich’in and the White settlers, who were slowly but surely coming to Alaska throughout the postwar period. Politicization of Alaskan Gwich’in interests also increased in the 1950s as the community struggled with the United States federal government to protect and maintain its traditional lands. The Nets’aii Gwich’in sought to increase the amount of land beyond that initially allotted to the reservation in 1943.
In 1950 and again in 1957, Arctic Village petitioned the US Department of the Interior to enlarge the Venetie reserve west and north (Lonner and Beard 1982: 101), but to no avail. Rather than surrendering land, the US government adopted a different approach to dealing with Indigenous Americans. By the early 1960s, the Johnson Administration had implemented its Great Society initiative, which extended into Native Alaska. On the one hand, the Nets’aii Gwich’in of Arctic Village benefited from the War on Poverty plan, insofar as new housing and buildings were constructed to help improve the communal standard of living (at least, from a Western perspective). At the same time, however, the programs also fostered increased dependence on the government and greater participation in the cash, wage-labor economy (131–32).
Illustration 1.2 The village context—the Vashr’aii K’oo Creek as it drains into the East Fork of the Chandalar River (July 2011).
Soon thereafter, in 1971, the Alaska Native Claims Settlement Act (ANCSA) was developed and implemented, a major outcome of which was the creation of 13 Native regional corporations and 203 village corporations (Arnold 1976: 146). The regional corporations were to serve as for-profit companies, as holders of traditional Native lands and the resources therein that invested their by-products in order to “promote the economic and social well-being of [their] shareholders and to assist in promoting and preserving the cultural heritage and land base” (Doyon 2015). The village corporations were governed separately from the regional corporations and did not “replace village councils or the governing bodies of municipal governments” (Arnold 1976: 160).
Thirty-seven villages were included in the Doyon Native Regional Corporation, established in Alaska’s interior region. Arctic Village and Venetie determined they would take title of their own reserve rather than participate in the land claims settlement. In so doing, the Nets’aii Gwich’in opted to take fee simple title of the 1.8 million acre Venetie Reservation from the federal government, furthering Nets’aii Gwich’in control of natural resources in the region (Stern 2005: 47). Bureau of Land Management studies at the time indicated that the area in and around Arctic Village potentially held gold, iron, zinc, tin, lead, tungsten, silver, chromium, and other minerals, and that oil and natural gas might also be found locally (DCRA 1991).
Thus, the 1.8 million acres were patented to the Venetie and Nets’aii corporations. As “tenants in common,” the two villages shared the land, dividing on a percentage basis, with 303 total residents and others with land claims in Venetie and Arctic Village combined. Venetie was given 156 out of 303, or 51.5 percent interest of the land, and Arctic was given 147 out of 303, or 48.5 percent interest of the land, as a temporary first step. The ultimate goal was to control the land and its resources, and to go through the necessary legal processes that would lead to that end. “Subsequent to acquiring the patented lands, the two corporations transferred title of the land in trust to the Native Village of Venetie Tribal Government [NVVTG] for the purpose of managing the land and its resources. Following this transfer the two corporations dissolved” (DCRA 1991).
As a result of working out these various legalisms, the NVVTG (which, as noted, includes both Venetie and Arctic Village) would be independent of the Doyon Native Regional Corporation, and Doyon would have no obligation to the government (Arnold 1976: 200). In the words of Alaskan Gwich’in community leaders (Arctic Village Council 1991):
Our system of self-regulation and self-determination is based largely upon self-respect and self-esteem, which allows us to then work for the common good of our village … Our leaders believed ANCSA was a trick to “ripoff” the land from Native people. We feel we were right in our decision to stay with the way we know best, our Indian way (38).
While “rip off” may not necessarily be the right term to describe the ANCSA settlement, it is true that the settlement was not fully resolved at this juncture. Years later, the United States Supreme Court, in a unanimous February 1998 ruling (not 1988, as reported in Stern 2005: 48), determined that while the Nets’aii Gwich’in did hold the land in perpetuity, the reservation lands were not completely under Nets’aii Gwich’in jurisdiction when it came to certain conditions (i.e., the reserve is not “Indian country”). The tribe cannot, for example, levy taxes on non-Native outside interests such as private contractors operating on tribal lands.
Moreover, throughout the early 1970s and thereafter, following the building of the oil pipeline out of Prudhoe Bay, it also became increasingly common to suggest that the “traditional” Alaska Native was now on the verge of “extinction,” about to be replaced by the business-savvy, “oil age,” materially oriented capitalist (Jorgenson 1990; for an alternative perspective, see Haycox 2002: 283). This sentiment has been suggested in such popular literature as John McPhee’s Coming into the Country (1977). The image of the “Brooks Brothers” Native (see Kollin 2001: 168–69) has also been reinforced by academics who suggest that capitalism began taking hold in Alaska Native communities with the creation of ANCSA, if not before, fostering an achievement orientation that supplants an ascriptive culture and facilitating the development of a new class structure that includes the creation of an “Alaska native bourgeoisie” (A. Mason 2002).
By the late 1970s, Arctic Village, if not the Nets’aii Gwich’in in general, had changed a great deal when compared to only twenty years earlier, despite efforts to opt out of ANCSA and to maintain control of the land and its resources. New oil-related job opportunities on the North Slope, as well as new “income” provided by the permanent fund annual payments, which had also been created by the oil industry, all served to bring new wealth to the community and with it, new spending behaviors (Nickelson 2013). New buildings, such as a communal laundry (see chapter 4), were added to the existing log housing, church, and school
Caulfield (1983) cites several of these changes, including “the availability of limited wage employment opportunities and government transfer payments, changes in resource distribution, the use of new technology such as high-powered rifles, outboard motors, and snow machines, changing demographic patterns, and resource competition” (101). The preponderance of all-terrain vehicles (ATVs) on village roads occurred during this period as well, lending to greater geographic dispersion of village residences away from the old village center, especially in the direction of the airport (now known as the Airport Road) and the mountain (now known as the Mountain Road). A large peeledlog Community Hall, perhaps the most notable building in the village, would not be added until 1988.
Concurrently, the Nets’aii Gwich’in leadership increased its efforts to exercise greater power, particularly in relation to the federal and state governments. In large part, this was due to an increasing perception among residents that outside interference and control (seen most clearly, perhaps, in the proposal developed at this time to conduct exploratory oil and gas drilling in the ANWR, the traditional calving ground of the Porcupine caribou herd) were directly endangering their subsistence lifestyle and culture. Indeed, the Nets’aii Gwich’in began to see themselves as a “state within a state” in the early 1980s (Lonner and Beard 1982: 107) as they sought control
