Events

Guest Speaker: Max Zahnd, Warwick Law School

Title: (Work-In-Progress) Legal Attacks, Tax Retaliations: Colonization, Tribal Taxation, and Counter-Mapping in Interior Alaska, 1970s-1980s.

Abstract: While scholars have long noted the grim role of tax laws and policies in settler colonial histories, few have explored their potential to generate change within Indigenous territories. Combining critical cartography, counter-mapping, and sociolegal scholarship on tax, this paper examines how taxation can produce counter-maps of highly contested spaces. Against the backdrop of the 1971 Alaska Native Claims Settlement Act (ANCSA) and the rise of the Tribal sovereignty movement, the Native Village of Venetie Tribal Government (Venetie), a Gwich’in Tribe from Interior Alaska, enacted a tax in 1978 to raise revenue from oil exploitation within its former reservation. As hopes to find oil reserves withered, the Tribe contemplated taxing a school renovation project. Drawing on court records, archival sources, interviews, and historical documents, the paper demonstrates how, within Venetie’s territory, the tax conjured up two essential settler colonial processes: the exploitation of natural resources and the education of Alaska Natives. I posit that counter-mapping lay bare dissonant Gwich’in and settler imaginaries of Alaska futurity, thus highlighting the complex relationship between the Tribe and the State. Ultimately, the tax helped Venetie reconnect with its original political ethos, dating back to the establishment of the reservation in 1943, while addressing the radical changes that followed the passage of ANCSA.