The Inconvenient Indian: A Curious Account of Native People in North America

Content Warning: Both the source material and this guide contain extensive discussion of racism against the Indigenous peoples of North America, including the genocide of Indigenous peoples and forced assimilation.

The ANSCA was passed in the years after Alaska became the 49th US state in 1959, as Alaska’s Indigenous peoples asserted that the land the United States had just purchased was rightfully theirs. The ANSCA gave Alaska’s Indigenous tribes 44 million acres of land—out of a total Alaskan land area of roughly 365 million acres—and nearly $1 billion in exchange for the land that was lost. While the settlement was “the largest land-and-cash settlement” in North American history, King argues that ANSCA has several drawbacks (254). Chief among these is that the land was given to the tribes as “fee-simple,” meaning that the land is privately owned rather than owned in trust. While the fee-simple land is owned by a group of Indigenous regional and village corporations, preventing individuals from selling it off, King argues that the turn to corporations has caused Indigenous people to become detached from the history and culture of their tribes. King also argues that corporation ownership means the land is vulnerable to corporation mismanagement.