Subsistence livelihood, Native identity and internal differentiation in Southeast Alaska

Ethnological interest in small-scale societies has, in recent years, undergone a shift from a past focus on the food getting practices and organizational relations of hunting and foraging groups1 to a focus on the politics of indigenism.2 This shift has much to do with the fact that, over last three decades, small-scale societies have been confronted by development forces and incorporated more fully into nation-states all over the globe (Friedman 1998, 1999). In the process, any pretense of self-sufficiency has been shattered and lifeways once based around subsistence production have become critical political elements in claims to identity and property rights within a national and international milieu (Li 2000; Niezen 2000). For anthropologists who work among small-scale hunting and foraging groups, the late 20th century thus marks a watershed in ethnographic research. As Richard Lee has noted, no longer is any contemporary researcher, whether working in the Arctic, the Amazon, Southeast Asia or Africa, free to define the ethnographic situation in purely local terms (Lee 2000), if ever this had been possible (WiImsen 1989). As a result, anthropology is left with a conundrum: what is the appropriate language in which to frame and discuss the actual lifeways of small groups, once the staple of anthropological theory and method, when past methods and ways of talking seem so hopelessly disjoined from current circumstances?One indirect result of this shift is a marked disjuncture in the anthropological literature of small-scale hunting and foraging groups, as the contemporary literature on indigenism has made little use of past research and characterizations of native life.3 In some ways, the neglect of older sources seems justified, given their ahistorical, and, in a global political sense, apolitical, nature (see Roseberry 1989). Yet, against this neglect (and the accompanying implicit and explicit criticism of older ethnography), other contemporary researchers and advocates point out that native people themselves continue to emphasize the central place of subsistence in their mutual relations and the "sense of place," as Richard Lee (2000) puts it, that these practices and relations create.4 Something is lost, they tell us, both on the ground and in theory, when local lifeways are subsumed under discussions of larger global historical processes. And so it seems.What is needed, then, if we are to be true to both the historical political processes and the people involved is some sense of how global political processes and local subsistence practices are intermeshed in the contemporary lifeways of small-scale, ostensibly marginal groups. And even more to the point, we must seek to understand how these two issues are intermeshed not simply in the eyes of those subject to and subject of them, but, in important ways, intermeshed for theoretical purposes as well.This article focusses on development politics and subsistence production in Southeast Alaska Native villages from this perspective. Importantly, throughout the remainder of the article subsistence is used in its broadest sense-conceived to include not simply the food getting practices of today's village residents but also (and indeed more importantly in almost every way) the relations entailed in and generated by these practices; the emotions and feelings these relations create; and the discourses they enable. My primary purposes are:(1) To discuss the ongoing impact of the Alaska Native Claims Settlement Act of 1971, or ANCSA5 on Native subsistence in Southeast Alaska.(2) To determine how local, village-based forms of social differentiation and inequality (particularly those surrounding the subsistence practices, relations, and discourses mentioned above) are impacted by the industrial development imposed by ANCSA.Coming at the end of the termination period and the beginning of a period of renewed recognition of Native sovereignty, ANCSA represented the desires of both of these strategies (Brown 2004). …