How Alaska redefined US colonialism through Indigenous resistance and legal innovation

Long treated as the symbolic “last frontier,” Alaska was, in fact, the United States’s first experiment in overseas empire. Settler Imperialism reveals these concepts as fictitious stories promoted by government officials and offers a sweeping history of Alaska Native legal and political struggle in the face of a colonial structure that defied the norms of US expansion. Examining Alaska as both a settler and imperial space, Jess Arnett challenges familiar narratives of American growth, sovereignty, and law.

Following the 1867 Treaty of Cession when the United States purchased Alaska from Russia, the federal government refused to sign treaties with Alaska Natives, excluded them from the Bureau of Indian Affairs, and denied the region designation as Indian Country. These departures from standard Indian policy created legal ambiguity that enabled new opportunities for land dispossession and resource extraction by state and corporate interests. Focusing on history from the late nineteenth century through the 1971 Alaska Native Claims Settlement Act, Arnett uncovers how the Tlingit, Haida, Tsimshian, and other Indigenous nations navigated—and contested—Alaska’s peculiar legal terrain. Members of these communities forcefully petitioned for US citizenship, mobilized Indigenous legal orders, and engaged selective federal Indian law to assert land rights and political authority.

By placing Alaska at the center of US colonial history, Settler Imperialism turns a critical lens to the evolution of America. To understand US expansion, race, and legal formation, one must understand Alaska first as a proving ground for empire, not the last frontier.

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Jess Arnett is assistant professor of comparative American studies and environmental studies at Oberlin College.