Generally speaking, the tribal experience in the Arctic mirrors the tribal experience around the world. [You must be registered and logged in to see this link.] One major differentiator, of course, is that the United States was fundamentally transformed by its own civil rights movement, which solidified the ideals that were militarily victorious during the U.S. Civil War.
It took a long time, but by the end of the 1960s, minority rights of all sorts, even the relatively late-blooming field of Aboriginal rights, had worked their way into the psyche of decision-makers at all levels of government, providing a fairly welcoming [You must be registered and logged in to see this link.] environment for land claims negotiations and other processes of Native empowerment. Even in places like Alaska where strong state interests have been pitted against the Native community in a long battle over who controls the resource wealth extracted from the land, the situation between state and tribe is far more harmonious than between state and tribe in other parts of the world where ethnic violence and civil warfare have erupted in response to the same centrifugal forces.In the Arctic, as in many parts of the world that were once colonized, colonial impulses long dictated the pace of the [You must be registered and logged in to see this link.] North's political development.
What the North offered the South, in terms of economic opportunity as well as military security, drove the northward expansion of government, which in turn contributed to a growing indigenous, pan-Arctic movement for greater autonomy that ultimately redrew the map of northern Canada and Alaska, as these new institutions of local and regional self-governance proliferated, first gaining regulatory powers and later, governmental authority (most dramatically illustrated by the birth of the Nunavut territory in 1999, an Inuit-governed territory.)
The roots of this drama thus date back to the expansion of commerce by Europe's great powers into the northernmost reaches of North America: Russia expanded its empire from Siberia to Russian America, extending juridical sovereignty over Alaska in the 19th century; Britain, through the Hudson's Bay Company, penetrated the interior northern territory known as Rupert's Land even earlier, transforming the political economy of [You must be registered and logged in to see this link.] the indigenous northland from pure subsistence to commercial hunting and trapping.
It took a long time, but by the end of the 1960s, minority rights of all sorts, even the relatively late-blooming field of Aboriginal rights, had worked their way into the psyche of decision-makers at all levels of government, providing a fairly welcoming [You must be registered and logged in to see this link.] environment for land claims negotiations and other processes of Native empowerment. Even in places like Alaska where strong state interests have been pitted against the Native community in a long battle over who controls the resource wealth extracted from the land, the situation between state and tribe is far more harmonious than between state and tribe in other parts of the world where ethnic violence and civil warfare have erupted in response to the same centrifugal forces.In the Arctic, as in many parts of the world that were once colonized, colonial impulses long dictated the pace of the [You must be registered and logged in to see this link.] North's political development.
What the North offered the South, in terms of economic opportunity as well as military security, drove the northward expansion of government, which in turn contributed to a growing indigenous, pan-Arctic movement for greater autonomy that ultimately redrew the map of northern Canada and Alaska, as these new institutions of local and regional self-governance proliferated, first gaining regulatory powers and later, governmental authority (most dramatically illustrated by the birth of the Nunavut territory in 1999, an Inuit-governed territory.)
The roots of this drama thus date back to the expansion of commerce by Europe's great powers into the northernmost reaches of North America: Russia expanded its empire from Siberia to Russian America, extending juridical sovereignty over Alaska in the 19th century; Britain, through the Hudson's Bay Company, penetrated the interior northern territory known as Rupert's Land even earlier, transforming the political economy of [You must be registered and logged in to see this link.] the indigenous northland from pure subsistence to commercial hunting and trapping.