Alaska: Saga of a Bold Land

by Walter R. Borneman

While the Tlingit-Haida lawsuit was slowly working its way through the courts, Congress proposed another solution by extending the Indian Reorganization Act of 1934 to Alaska. This act provided for the creation of reservations under the same dubious reservation system that existed in the rest of the country. Like so many proposed solutions to the Native land claims issue, the reservation concept was controversial. Non-Natives feared that large areas of land would be locked up and made inaccessible. Natives, wary of the legacy of the reservation system in the lower forty-eight, feared confinement in small areas without adequate resources, particularly for hunting and fishing.