"Nature, Value and Territory in Alaskan Subsistence Politics: The View from Brown Bear Bay" by Danielle DiNovelli-Lang

Danielle DiNovelli-Lang

Deposited 2010

Abstract
My dissertation identifies and analyzes the stakes of contemporary tensions over subsistence management in Alaska from a materialist, postcolonial and posthumanist perspective. The argument is grounded in an ethnography of a small portion of Huna territory — a large area of land and water on the northern Southeast Alaska panhandle historically occupied and claimed by the Huna Tlingit — focusing on several different forms of encounter among humans, non-human animals and the structures of governance and value they, successfully or unsuccessfully, bear with them. At the same time the setting is also the United States, and the spatial imaginaries of wilderness and freedom that Alaska continues to offer the US nation-state. These ideas are as often as not at odds, and the persistence of the subsistence controversy since the passage of the Alaska National Interest Lands Conservation Act (ANILCA) in 1980 is a testament to this contradiction. Rather than performing a cultural analysis of the conflicting world-views of Alaskan fish and game managers, Federal land managers and Alaska Natives, I attempt a material, relational analysis of the kinds of encounters with which all parties to the subsistence debate are concerned — those between hunters or fisherman and the animals they hunt or fish. I show that subsistence is such an important issue for the Huna Tlingit because it is the means through which they lay claim to their territories, both novel and traditional. Yet it is also a way that the State of Alaska and the US government have made claims to the same land, which is of course the actual source of conflict, and thus the starting point for a democratic reinvigoration of the subsistence debate.