An Alaska Anthology

Interpreting the Past

Stephen W. Haycox, Mary Childers Mangusso, Stephen W. Haycox, Mary Childers Mangusso

• Publisher: University of Washington Press
• Year: 2011
• eBook ISBN: 9780295800370
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: North American History
• Index: History

Alaska, with its Indian, Eskimo, and Aleut heritage, its century of Russian colonization, its peoples' formidable struggles to wrest a living (or a fortune) from the North's isolated and harsh environment, and its relatively recent achievement of statehood, has long captured the popular imagination. In An Alaska Anthology, twenty-five contemporary scholars explore the region's pivotal events, significant themes, and major players, Native, Russian, Canadian, and American. The essays chosen for this anthology represent the very best writing on Alaska, giving great depth to our understanding and appreciation of its history from the days of Russian-American Company domination to the more recent threat of nuclear testing by the Atomic Energy Commission and the influence of oil money on inexperienced politicians. Readers may be familiar with an earlier anthology, Interpreting Alaska's History, from which the present volume evolved to accommodate an explosion of research in the past decade. While a number of the original pieces were found to be irreplaceable, more than half of the essays are new. The result is a fresh perspective on the subject and an invaluable resource for students, teachers, and scholars.

Economic Development and Indian Land Rights in Modern Alaska

The 1947 Tongass Timber Act

This article appeared originally in Western Historical Quarterly 21 (February 1990): 20–46; it is reprinted here by permission.

STEPHEN W. HAYCOX

As salmon packers moved into southeastern Alaska in the late 19th century, the Natives began to lose control of their traditional fishing sites. Although they complained, officials took no action. Alaska's first Organic Act (1884) required that Native land claims be settled by Congress, and Congress failed to act. Then, President Theodore Roosevelt created the Tongass National Forest; which encompassed almost all of southeastern Alaska. Not until 1935 did Congress pass the Tlingit-Haida Jurisdictional Act, authorizing southeastern Natives to seek compensation for lost land in the United States Court of Claims. That suit had not yet been filed when Congress passed the Tongass Timber Act of 1947, authorizing logging in the Tongass.

Stephen Haycox, Professor of History at the University of Alaska Anchorage, has worked extensively on Alaska Native history and contemporary Native issues. His publications include “Sheldon Jackson in Historical Perspective: Alaska Native Schools and Mission Contracts, 1884–1894” (Pacific Historian, Spring 1984), “'Races of a Questionable Ethnical Type': Origins of the Jurisdiction of the U.S. Bureau of Education in Alaska, 1867–1885” (Pacific Northwest Quarterly, October 1984), and “William Paul and the Alaska Voter's Literacy Act of 1925” (Alaska History, Winter 1986). In 1988 he published A Warm Past: Travels in Alaska History (Anchorage: Press North, 1988), and he wrote a biography of Alaska's first Tlingit lawyer and politician, William Lewis Paul, for Haa Kusteeyí, Our Culture: Tlingit Life Stories, edited by Nora Marks Dauenhauer and Richard Dauenhauer (Seattle: University of Washington Press, 1994).

In the following selection, Haycox describes the conflict between those, such as the Secretary of the Interior Harold Ickes, who wanted to protect Alaska Natives and their land and others who sought to open the Tongass to logging in hopes of creating a pulp industry but in disregard of the environmental impact. He concludes that prodevelopment forces, including the U.S. Forest Service and Alaska's territorial officials; won this battle and that Native rights, Native claims, and environmental integrity lost.

Between 1933 and 1945 Secretary of the Interior Harold Ickes and Indian Commissioner John Collier attempted to extend the Indian Reorganization Act of 1934, the Indian New Deal, to Alaska. With other administration officials, Ickes was determined to protect Native land title and help Natives defend their fishing and hunting rights. He also hoped the act would provide Natives with desperately needed financial help. But although the IRA was amended to apply to Alaska in 1936 (the Alaska Reorganization Act), enabling Natives to establish village self-government and borrow money from a federal credit fund, implementation of other provisions of the act failed in the territory, due to poor administration by the Office of Indian Affairs, inadequate funding by Congress, and confusion and inconsistency in defining policy.¹ One historian has declared this attempted extension of the Indian New Deal a mistake, on the grounds that it increased tension between the territory's Native and white residents and delayed both the resolution of Native land title questions and the securing of social justice for Alaska's Native people.²

By 1945 the attempt to establish the Indian New Deal in Alaska had ended. In the next several years, as the direction of national Indian policy began to change, Congress debated several measures dealing with Alaska Indians. These included a bill to rescind the authority of the Secretary of the Interior to establish Indian reservations in the territory, a bill to guarantee in perpetuity a large number of fish traps owned by the absentee salmon industry, several versions of the Alaska statehood bill, and a bill to authorize the Secretary of Agriculture to sell timber leases in Alaska's vast Tongass National Forest.³ While the first two did not ever become law, and Alaska statehood was delayed until 1959, the Tongass Timber Act did pass Congress and was signed by the President on August 8, 1947.⁴

The Tongass act authorized timber lease sales in Alaska, despite protests by the resident Tlingit and Haida Indians, by their Washington, D.C., attorneys, and by the last proponents of the Indian New Deal in the Interior Department. Debate turned principally on the question of Indian land rights and then on whether the economic development of Alaska should take precedence over protection of Indian rights and land title.⁵ Sharp debate divided departments within the government, and in part disagreement over the bill represented the clash between the last remaining supporters of the Indian New Deal and the new proponents of Indian assimilation and termination, to whom federal protection represented dictatorial guardianship contrary to the principles of individual freedom. Many conservatives in the 80th Congress were determined to reduce government involvement in the American economy. Some westerners chafed particularly under federal control which they thought impeded rather than encouraged development of the West's resources.⁶ Opponents of New Deal policies undoubtedly saw in the Tongass Timber Act an opportunity to replace such control with private development of critically needed resources, development supported by the government rather than hindered by it.

Action on the Tongass bill also took place at the same time that Congress began to develop the policy of termination, and debate on the timber and other Alaska bills likely contributed to the growing opinion that Indians should be assimilated into the mainstream of American culture through the ending of special federal services for them.⁷ A bloc of western Senators, including Hugh Butler of Nebraska and Arthur Watkins of Utah, led the effort to develop termination at that time.⁸ Although in the Congress the House Committee on Agriculture did most of the work on the Tongass Timber Act, and debate on it in the Senate was desultory, Butler and Watkins were its two chief sponsors there.⁹

Though conceived by allies of Secretary Ickes and supporters of his policies as a way to protect Indian rights in Alaska, the Tongass bill became law in a form so different from its original version as to be angrily denounced by Ickes and New Deal advocates and by the Indians themselves as a betrayal. Some called it Alaska's Teapot Dome, claiming that the act was the result of collusion between the U.S. Forest Service and private investors, intended mainly to benefit developers who sought to establish a pulp industry in Alaska utilizing land and timber which belonged to the Indians by aboriginal title but to which the Forest Service was quite willing to provide access for the industry, over the Indians' objections and to their disadvantage.¹⁰ At the same time, supporters of the final legislation, most particularly the U.S. Forest Service and Alaska territorial officials, hailed its passage as a victory for land and resource development and a reprieve from New Deal Indian policy.¹¹ In Congress, Senator Watkins proclaimed that the act actually did protect the rights of Alaska's Indians.¹² Such widely opposing interpretations suggest the significant degree of difference within the government over how to approach not only Alaska Indian matters, but national Indian policy as well.

The genesis of the Tongass Timber Act was a severe newsprint shortage which followed World War II.¹³ Industry analysts searched the continent for untapped pulp timber, and spokesmen expressed considerable interest in Alaska's Tongass National Forest, where there were suitable stands of western hemlock, Sitka spruce, and red and yellow cedar.¹⁴ Established in the first decade of the twentieth century, the forest comprised sixteen million of the eighteen million acres of Alaska's southeast panhandle.¹⁵ Interest reached a high pitch in 1946 when the Senate established a special subcommittee to investigate the newsprint shortage and dispatched the chairman, Homer E. Capehart, to survey Alaska resources.¹⁶

Capehart reported favorably on the Tongass forest and encouraged investors to conclude negotiations already under way with the Forest Service. The regional forester of the Alaska National Forest Region (USFS), B. Frank Heintzleman, representing the government, had found three companies which were particularly anxious to establish pulp facilities in Alaska: Puget Sound Pulp and Timber, the D. & F. Co. of New York City, and American Viscose Corporation.¹⁷ An enthusiastic advocate of Alaskan economic development, Heintzleman assured the potential investors that the Forest Service was just as prepared as the pulp industry to see the effort move ahead. With them he worked out a comprehensive pulp development program. The plan projected five mills to be built in the Tongass Forest, each with a fifty-year life-span. Each would produce daily five hundred tons of pulp or paper, an annual level of production which would supply a significant amount of the nation's demand for newsprint.¹⁸

The project would have a dramatic economic impact on Alaska. Heintzleman estimated that two and one-half persons would be employed in the forest and in the mills (combined) per ton of daily production, amounting to 1,250 persons per mill. There would also be a need for one and one-half service persons for each mill, an additional six hundred twenty-five. Adding wives, children, and other nonworking dependents of employees, Heintzleman said, the total would be 6,500 persons dependent on each mill, needing housing and services within commuting distance of the site.

This was a remarkable projection. The total population of Alaska in 1947 was approximately 120,000, but the population in the southeast approached only 30,000, of which about 6,500 were Tlingit, Haida, and Tsimshian Indians. The primary economic resource in the region was the salmon fishery, which dominated all other industry, but was seasonal and utilized a sizeable imported labor force.¹⁹ By Heintzleman's calculations, establishment of the pulp industry in Alaska would provide significant economic livelihood for the entire population of the panhandle region, including the Natives, on a year-round basis.

But implementation of these ambitious plans was hampered by the question of Indian land title, for there were fourteen Tlingit and Haida Indian villages within the boundaries of the Tongass National Forest.²⁰ Moreover, much of the best timber was situated near the Native villages. One of Secretary Ickes's objectives in extending the IRA to Alaska was to protect forest lands in the vicinity of those villages.²¹ He thought Forest Service policies threatened such lands, and in 1944 he had invited Indians in the Tlingit and Haida villages of southeast Alaska to prepare claims on lands they had traditionally used in the forest. He promised that the Interior Department would protect Indian lands once they were appropriately identified.²²

Interior Department attorneys helped the Indians prepare their claims. In doing so they relied on a new interpretation of the theory of aboriginal title, in conjunction with unique circumstances involving Indian lands in Alaska. In American law, Indians are held to have “aboriginal title” to lands which they have demonstrably occupied at some time.²³ Such title does not include the ultimate fee, i.e., only the federal government or those authorized by it may purchase such lands. In some instances it has been held to include fishing sites in coastal waters and rivers. Only the United States can extinguish that title, either by purchase, the usual practice, or simply by taking it. The courts have found that takings of Indian lands by the U.S. are legal and not necessarily compensable, a controversial finding. Indians may sue for damages for lost value resulting from such takings.²⁴ Indians are regarded as having “possessory right” or title to lands in their actual use and occupation, even if such title has not been confirmed by an act of the government. Such title is made more secure by being formally recognized by the United States either by federal treaty or by statute. Though Indians were prohibited in 1863 from making claims for treaty violations or mishandling of tribal resources before the U.S. Court of Claims, Congress from time to time authorized an extension of the jurisdiction of that court in specific cases.²⁵ Before 1941, it had been assumed that lands once used by Indians but subsequently abandoned, the title to which had not been formally recognized by the federal government, came under the jurisdiction of the U.S. to dispose of as it might desire. However, in an important decision of the U.S. Supreme Court in 1941 involving the Santa Fe Railroad and the Walapai (Hualpai) Indians of Arizona, Indians were held still to retain aboriginal title over formerly used but abandoned lands.²⁶ This decision was highly significant, for it meant that, even if the U.S. had taken and disposed of lands formerly used by Indians, if the Indians could prove their former use of the land and its resources they could sue the U.S. for damages.

This new departure in Indian land law was seized upon by the brilliant Indian rights attorney Felix Cohen, who served in the Interior Department Solicitor's Office from 1933 to 1948.²⁷ Cohen saw the Walapai decision as providing the basis for protection of Indian lands in Alaska. The United States had never signed treaties with any of Alaska's Natives, as it had been done in other western territories, and had not established tra...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title page
• Copyright
• Contents
• Preface
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction
• Alaska History
• Finding America
• Russian Dependence on the Natives of Alaska
• Ivan Pan'kov: Architect of Aleut Literacy
• Astor and Baranov: Partners in Empire
• Two Missions to Alaska
• The Sale of Alaska in the Context of Russian American Relations in the Nineteenth Century
• American Public Opinion and the Purchase of Russian America
• “Hemmed In”: Reactions in British Columbia to the Purchase of Russian America
• The Early Ministry of S. Hall Young, 1878–1888
• Female Native Teachers in Southeast Alaska: Sarah Dickinson, Tillie Paul, and Frances Willard
• Chief Sesui and Lieutenant Herron: A Story of Who Controls the Bacon
• Controlling the Periphery: The Territorial Administration of the Yukon—Alaska, 1867–1959
• Gold Rushers North: A Census Study of the Yukon and Alaska Gold Rushes, 1896–1900
• Sourdough Radicalism: Labor and Socialism in Alaska, 1905–1920
• The Pacific Salmon Fisheries: A Study of Irrational Conservation
• Anthony J. Dimond and the Politics of Integrity
• The New Deal and Alaskan Natives, 1936–1945
• Governor Ernest Gruening’s Struggle for Territorial Status: Personal or Political?
• The Realities of Strategic Planning: The Decision to Build the Alaska Highway
• Jim Crow in Alaska: The Passage of the Alaska Equal Rights Act of 1945
• Economic Development and Indian Land Rights in Modern Alaska: The 1947 Tongass Timber Act
• The Governor Who Opposed Statehood: The Legacy of Jay Hammond
• Project Chariot: Alaskan Roots of Environmentalism
• Corruption: Alaska Size
• The End of Wilderness