How Court Rulings Widened the Federal Role in Alaska’s Subsistence Management

Subsistence hunting and trapping are unusual in the national parks of the Lower 48, but Title VIII of the Alaska National Interest Lands Conservation Act (ANILCA) gave rural residents of Alaska a priority for such activities in many parks. The State of Alaska first managed them. Then a series of state and federal court decisions on the terms of the Lands Act and on Alaska’s constitution intensified the federal role.

From state to federal management

A 1988 state case, McDowell v. State of Alaska, determined that the state’s subsistence law illegally discriminated against urban residents. The Alaska Legislature could not resolve the issue, and on July 1, 1990, the federal government began managing certain subsistence activities, primarily hunting. Five years later, in a federal case, Katie John v. USA, an Anchorage district court ruled that the federal government has the legal power and obligation to take over management of subsistence fisheries on all navigable waters. A year after that, the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals generally agreed, broadening the federal role a second time.

The enlarged role shows in how subsistence is managed: proposals come through a public process, and the Federal Subsistence Board sets seasons and bag limits. It also shows in a growing series of research projects on the resources and the people who depend on them. Study of subsistence resources in parks has mixed long-term work with projects prompted by issues facing the Board.

Moose near Gates of the Arctic

In 2002 managers saw moose numbers falling in the Koyukuk drainage south of Gates of the Arctic National Park. They needed current data to support restrictions in the park, so in 2004 the National Park Service and its partners ran the first moose survey in the area since 1987. It found that numbers in the park were down from earlier levels, much like the decline reported south of the park. That information, along with other factors, led the Board to change its regulations to restrict moose hunting.

All-terrain vehicles near Cantwell

The Lands Act’s provisions on access and subsistence eligibility were tested on the south side of Denali National Park, in an area near Cantwell that was added to the park in 1980. Section 811(b) of ANILCA allows “surface transportation traditionally employed…by local residents” for access to subsistence resources. Around Cantwell, all-terrain vehicles were generally used for that access. Their legal status was debated over the years, but they did minimal damage to parkland, and the issue stayed somewhat in the background for both users and park managers.

In the fall of 2003 a small number of local hunters took their vehicles into an area where they clearly disturbed wetlands. The park promptly revisited whether such vehicles had been traditionally used by local residents before the park was established. Park managers had documented some vehicle use in the early 1980s during other habitat research, the State of Alaska had documented access for subsistence harvests inside and outside the park, and more information was gathered in the 1990s, but no definitive determination was reached.

As the issue came to a head in 2003 and 2004, more detailed research filled the gaps. The park needed to determine whether motorized access to subsistence resources had occurred before 1980 and had been a multi-generational activity, not just a chance use of a vehicle a year or two before the park was created. The park’s superintendent said in a 2005 interview that the team had interviewed residents and examined oral histories, maps, agency records going back decades, letters, community archives, family photos, mining records, harvest records and more, and that a Park Service ethnographer and the park’s subsistence manager found a high correlation among the sources. The superintendent said the park could show, without question and to a high degree of certainty, a long, unbroken pattern of vehicle use for subsistence access by several families, who shared those resources within the community, and that without the legal issues coming to a head in the 2003 hunting season and requests from the community, this extensive work probably would not have been done then.

A community view

The article adds a perspective from Eleanor C. Johnson, president and CEO of Kijik Corp in Anchorage. Johnson had heard nothing negative about the federal government taking over subsistence management and thought it positive: people felt they had more input and control as a Native group than under the state, which had not had a good relationship with subsistence users or done much to help manage fish and game.

On changing resources, Johnson linked most changes to the weather. There had been a time without fish because high water kept them from getting up the falls, while kings and silvers were now common where they had once been rare. Johnson had seen circular sores on fish that no one had seen before, and said berries now came one kind or another where years ago people got all of them. Local people, Johnson said, put it down to global warming.

Sources

• John Quinley, Subsistence, National Park Service article in the series The Legacy of ANILCA (the source gives no affiliation for the author); rewritten in hubnx's own words.