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19 NARF Legal Rev. 1 (1994)

handle is hein.journals/narf19 and id is 1 raw text is: Native American Rights Fund L.JL-W RE IVIEW Volume 19, No. 1 Winter/Spring 1994 A MOVE TOWARD SOVEREIGNTY: INTERIOR DEPARTMENT PUBLISHES ALASKA TRIBAL LIST This is : '41V what we've been working for for many years ...The acknowledgment by the Department of Interior of the government-to-government relationship that Alaska Native tribes have with the federal government is a significant step towards greater exercise of the right to self-determination. Willie Kasayulie, Chairman, Alaska Inter-tribal Council/ Board Member, Native Ameri- can Rights Fund In working to resolve the issue of tribal sovereignty, the Native American Rights Fund has taken the lead for the past nine year's in assisting Alaska Native tribes to establish that they have the same sovereign status as tribes elsewhere. In an historic move toward sovereignty for 226 Alaska Native groups, Interior Assistant Secretary for Indian Affairs Ada Deer announced the publication of a list of federally-recognized tribes in Alaska on October 15, 1993. Before a crowd of three thousand at the Alaska Federa- tion of Natives Convention in Anchorage, Assistant Secretary Deer effectively called a halt to three decades of federal waffling on the issue of the recognized status of Alaska tribes, Her action was also a critical step toward eliminating thirty years of overt discrimination against Alaska tribal governments by the State of Alaska. The State and other opponents of tribal self-determi- nation have consistently main- tained that there were no feder- ally recognized tribes in Alaska. The new list is designed to clarify that the anti-Native interest groups are wrong. Publication of the list grew out of years of concerted efforts by Alaska Native villages to assert the same rights and powers held by Indian tribes in the lower forty-eight states. Most often, these claims arose in the context of domestic relations matters, tribal taxation and control over liquor trafficking. These efforts included numerous requests to the Interior Department for a definitive clarification, but all prior administrations avoided confronting the issue. Thus, federal court litigation over the issue ensued. continued on paqe 2 NAR-VIEW Digitized from Best Copy Available