The courtyard of the Anchorage Museum/Craig Talbert, Wikimedia Commons

What drives us apart

Update: The Anchorage Museum says it has now paused its race-based admission policy while it considers “the broader community considerations and applicable museum guidelines and the law.”

In a move that can best be described as patronizing to one yet sure to drive anger in another, the Anchorage Museum has announced it is now offering “free Admission to Alaska Native visitors.”

Among the many problems with this policy – so many it is going to take a while to unpack them all here – is the reinforcement of a negative stereotype of Alaska Natives as an economically disadvantaged group needing financial assistance to visit the museum because they are an intellectually inferior people who can’t compete in America’s capitalist society.

This is a fallacy. The vast majority of Natives, or at least the vast majority of Natives living in the Anchorage metro area, are succeeding in today’s world and many of them are thriving.

Yes, some remain poor as are many white, black, Asian, Hispanic and other Americans despite the fact this country has the world’s largest economy,

Alaska is no exception to the national poverty problem despite the state’s lowest-income residents doing better than those in 38 other states – plus Puerto Rico and Washington, D.C. – thanks in part to the Permanent Fund Dividend, an annual payment to all Alaskans as their share of the earnings linked to Alaska’s past oil wealth. 

Still, according to the data compiled by KFF, a national health tracking group, there were approximately 31,900 whites Alaskans, 21,300 Native Alaskans, 9,600 Alaskans of mixed race, 6,300 Hispanic Alaskans and smaller numbers of black Alaskans and Asians/Pacific islanders living in poverty in this state as of 2022.

Statewide, according to KFF, the Native/American Indian population was also over-represented among those still trapped in poverty, primarily because of the well-known problem of joblessness in rural Alaska. KFF puts the overall Native poverty rate for the state at 23.8 percent but offers no breakdown by region.

Exact numbers for Native poverty in rural Alaska are hard to find, but after surveying the country’s rural counties and boroughs in 2022, the U.S. Department of Agriculture’s Economic Research Service reported  “many of the American Indian and Alaska Native high poverty counties are areas of historic tribal presence or were designated as reservation settlements in the 19th century. The average poverty rate for those 34 counties (which include several in Alaska) is 31.5 percent for the total population and 40.5 percent for the American Indian and Alaska Native population alone, a level considered to be extreme poverty.”

There is a simply reason for much this poverty, and the American Bar Association has described it well.

“Indian Country’s poverty rate is high because there are few economic opportunities; indeed, most reservations lack any semblance of a formal, private sector,” the ABA concluded. “Hence, the average reservation unemployment rate has been 50 percent for decades.”

The situation in rural Alaska is similar to that on the reservations despite the Alaska Native Claims Settlement Act of 1971, which abandoned the reservation model in favor of a land settlement that funded 13 regional Alaska Native corporations and more than 200 village corporations with nearly $1 billion in capital and about 44 million acres of land. 

Many of the corporations have been highly successful, underlining a secondary point made by the ABA: “Poverty is not an indigenous trait.”

Alaska can be pointed to as proof of that statement. According to Alaska Business Magazine, the state’s top-10 most successful Alaska businesses, based on gross revenues, are now all owned by Alaska Native corporations born of the Claims Act.

And the Municipality of Anchorage’s most up-to-date data report on poverty says only 15.5 percent of the community’s Native population is living in poverty, a significant improvement over the 23.8 percent statewide average and better than for some other Anchorage minorities, most notably black Alaskans and Hawaiian/Pacific Islanders who have poverty rates above 16 percent.

That Alaska Natives are doing better in the state’s largest metro areas shouldn’t come as a surprise, either given that urban Alaska is where the jobs are and given that Alaska Natives have shown themselves perfectly capable of competing for jobs in the modern marketplace if provided the education and the opportunity.

Unfortunately, this hasn’t eliminated the pervasive stereotype that the state’s Native population is somehow inferior.

Culture war

That the Musem has chosen to subconsciously reinforce this stereotype is troubling, but equally troubling is its seeming willingness to pour gasoline on the flaming culture war now driving Americans apart along social, financial, educational and racial lines

The Museum’s new policy provided no end of fuel for arguing over race, racism, reverse racism and race-baiting in the comments section of the conservative MustReadAlaska news site. Meanwhile, the liberal Anchorage Daily News – which in 2020 decided to block comments on news stories because “the tenor” of some comments drove away “other contributors to that space” – posted the briefest of stories about the new Museum policy.

Race is today an extremely touchy subject in a country that once prided itself on being the world’s “melting pot,” a place where different peoples, cultures and races came together to form a cohesive whole dedicated to creating a nation true to its founding principles.

“When the architects of our republic wrote the magnificent words of the Constitution and the Declaration of Independence,” the late Dr. Martin Luther King, a black man, observed in a now-famous speech from the steps of the Lincoln Memorial in 1963, “they were signing a promissory note to which every American was to fall heir. This note was a promise that all men – yes, Black men as well as white men p would be guaranteed the unalienable rights of life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness.”

A leader of the Civil Rights movement, King on that August day in the nation’s capital confessed to having a dream, “a dream deeply rooted in the American dream. I have a dream that one day this nation will rise up and live out the true meaning of its creed: We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal.”

In the years that followed, the nation moved a lot closer to that dream. Less than a year after King’s speech, the Civil Rights Act of 1964 banned employment discrimination based on race, color, sex, religion or national origin and created the the U.S. Equal Employment Opportunity Commission (EEOC) to help end workplace discrimination.

The Voting Rights Act of 1965, intended to block Southern states from making black voters submit to onerous “literacy tests” before being allowed to vote, became law the next year. The Fair Housing Act followed in 1968. And in 2008, the country elected its first black president, Barack Obama.

Since then things have just sort of gone to hell, and one can now find black Americans accusing Jews, the world’s historically most abused minority and one of black America’s strongest allies in the push for civil rights, of “upholding white supremacist beliefs” for warning that U.S. anti-discrimination efforts have turned toward trying to guarantee “equality of outcome, not equality of opportunity.”

Equality of outcomes is sadly impossible to achieve as is best illustrated by American professional sports, which are businesses that operate as cutthroat meritocracies. The rules there are simple: You perform or you are gone.

Some races have done very well in this system. More than 56 percent of the players in the National Football League today are black, according to the data tracking website Statista, even though blacks comprise only 13.6 percent of the U.S. population. 

While the reasons why have been much debated over the years, geneticists have pretty well proven it’s not solely about race given the vast genetic variation among humans of all skin colors.

Great NFL running backs, for instance, are all genetic outliers. They are naturally gifted with athletic abilities most lack. Christian McCaffrey, a white running back, is so blessed that he has been talked about as a candidate for the prize of Most Valuable Player in the NFL this year. That prize hasn’t been claimed by a running back since 2012 when Adrian Peterson, an equally gifted black man, won it. 

Both McCaffery and Peterson worked their asses off to reach the levels of success they achieved, but the country is full of football players of all colors who worked their asses off and never achieved much of anything.

Among running backs, a disproportionate number of the losers might have been white, but there is no way of knowing why they failed to reach the level of McCaffery. Did they give up on football because there were better opportunities? Did coaches discourage them? Were they just mentally incapable of investing that extra half a percent of training effort that would have separated them from everyone else?

These are questions that can’t be answered an easier than the one that asks “Why do the Norwegians win so damn many Olympic medals in the winter Olympics?” The “secret,” CNN once reported, is that Norwegian “children are encouraged to join local sport clubs to help with their social development.”

Great, but lots of children participate in lots of sports in a lot of countries without finding the success that Norwegians have had in skiing and other winter sports. A better explanation might be that success breeds success, and thus younger Norwegians see the success of older Norwegians while they are growing up which creates expectations they can rise to the same heights.

Given the mind-body connection in sports, this possibility cannot be dismissed, and it might help explain why more black kids than white kids make it to the NFL and the National Basketball Association (NBA), or why Jews are over-represented among intellectual elites, or why Hispanics punch above their number in boxing, or why Asians are over-achieving in American universities.

One can debate these differing achievements on the basis of race or ethnicity forever, but at the end of the day, the reality is that every human is an experiment of one and all are born into this world with different genetic strengths and weaknesses that are powered or undermined by the environment in which the individual grows up.

Thus any guarantee on outcomes becomes impossible. I was, for example, one of the many high school running backs who was never going to be a McCaffrey no matter what kind of additional training was provided by high school, university or professional coaches.

And additional training is the point at which equal opportunities confront the issue of equal outcomes with some in this country believing certain identifiable minorities should get promised training aimed at helping them be whatever they want to be even if that is not meant to be.

This sort of thinking has caused some to lose sight of the fact that we are all very, very different while being very, very much alike.

The melting pot

Against this backdrop, too, the term “melting pot,” has fallen into disfavor amid the search for some sort of victim status with which to leverage government assistance in obtaining that extra training. This is a shame given the fact the melting pot is imbedded in the genes of the Americans here today.

As Henry Louis Gates Jr., a black man and the host of “Finding Your Roots,” a television show that should be mandatory viewing for all Americans, observed on Tuesday night, there are few African Americans who don’t have a white ancestor somewhere in their bloodline.

Just as there are many white Americans who unknowingly have people of color in theirs. I admit to being among them. A genetics test revealed Asian ancestors from India/Pakistan and that part of the Middle East once known as Mesopotamia.

How this came to be I don’t know. My parents, like many parents of the 1950s, never talked much about their lives growing up during the Great Depression and World War II or at all about the lives of their parents.

As defined by my genes, along with that splash of Asian blood, the rest of my family tree looked like a classic American cross between a stray dog and a mongrel with genes traceable to Norway, Sweden, Britain, Scotland, Italy and Croatia along with a hodgepodge of Northwestern and Eastern European genes, most likely Polish and Hungarian, and a notable absence of any of the German blood claimed by my father’s family.

And then there was Mal’ta boy, a 24,000-year-old relative who was found buried in Siberia decades ago and whose skeletal remains in 2009 provided genetic material linking him to “14 to 38 percent of Native American ancestry,” according to a peer-reviewed study published in Nature.

My genes point to two realities here:  the over-arching and ancient reality that all homo sapiens eventually trace back to the same roots, and the more recent fact that the largest racial group in America is surely the group now labeled “mixed race.”

Gates’ comment as to how common white ancestors in the lineages of black Americans came after he revealed to LeVar Burton, the actor who became famous for starring as the black slave Kunta Kinte in the 1977 ABC miniseries Roots, that one of Burton’s great-great-grandfathers was white.

Burton was shocked to learn of this discovery, but it should not have come as a great surprise to viewers of Finding Your Roots where just about the only people with “pure” bloodlines of any sort have turned out to be few Ashkenazi Jews.

America is a melting pot and possibly only more so Alaska. Here it is hard to find an Alaska Native who is purely a Native.

Carl Huntington, the first Native to win the Iditarod Trail Sled Dog Race, was, for instance, the son of legendary Native elder Sidney Huntington, whose New York-born father came to Alaska in 1897 near the start of the historic Klondike Gold Rush.

Emmitt Peters, the second Native to win the Iditarod Trail Sled Dog Race, was, the son of Mary Peters, a member of the Pitka family descended, according to her history, from “Ivan Pavalof, the Russian-Athabascan, who was the last official manager of the Russian American Company in Nulato.”

John Baker, the fourth Alaska Native to win the Iditarod, could have been heralded as the first Jew to win the race, given that his grandmother, Clara Rotman, was of mixed Alaska Native and Jewish ancestry and a practicing Jew her entire life. John’s father, Bob, meanwhile,e was a white man who grew up in Colorado and came to Alaska after World War II.

The father of Pete Kaiser, the fifth Alaska Native to win the Iditarod, is Ron Kaiser, a white man from Kansas. But the mixed-race nature of these Iditarod icons is seldom mentioned in a world that has become fixated on highlighting minority representation in all things no matter how minor it might be.

The Museum playing to these divisions of Americans along racial lines is problematic, and yet that is not the biggest problem linked to its new policy.

Distorting history

The truly biggest problem here is the Museum’s subtlety reinforcing the myth that some sort of peaceful, Alaska Native nation existed in the far north before white occupiers arrived, and thus the Caucasian population ought to apologize for 239 years of occupation of the northern land and the subjugation of its people.

That some people want to believe this myth is fine. The United States is a free country and anyone is entitled to believe whatever he or she wants to believe.

But the Museum is supposed to be a scientifically oriented entity, or at the very least a quasi-scientifically oriented entity, which ought to know better than to declare, as it did along with announcing its Native-free policy, that it “sits on the traditional lands of the Eklutna Dena’ina.”

That statement ignores the reality of the peopling of North America which has involved a 15,000- to 30,000-year flood of differing peoples moving east from Siberia into the state’s northern reaches before dispersing to the south, east and west in the years before the last flood of migration arrived from the south.

Let’s accept before the discussion to follow that the United States has engaged in “colonialism” as have most of the successful nations of the world. Colonialism is little more than a reflection of the natural ebb and flow of humanity as it shifts around the globe.

The white Americans who moved into Dena’ina territory were little different than the Denai’na who moved into what was the Kachemak territory or the Kachemak who moved into a territory occupied by Clovis predecessors not yet fully identified in the archaeological record.

“The Kachemak tradition (a group related to the coastal Eskimos who came into the region from the west) spread through Cook Inlet from 3000 to 1000 years before present (BP),” archeologists Brian Wygal and Kathryn Krasinski have written in describing what they and other researchers have learned about the post-glacial, human colonization of Southcentral Alaska coming from the east.

“A Riverine Kachemak population dating to 2000 BP was reported…at Hewitt Lake near the confluence of the Yentna and Skwentna rivers (northeast of Anchorage). Throughout Cook
Inlet, Riverine Kachemak relied on salmon fishing but also hunted moose and caribou. Small notched net sinkers (a Kachemak identifying technology) are prevalent in Kachemak fishing sites along large rivers, as well as a range of artifacts and debris associated with seasonal salmon harvests including subterranean caches containing salmon remains found
inside house features,” they wrote.

The Riverine Kachemak, who are related to the Alutiq of Kodiak Island rather than the Athabascans of the Aalska Interior, were not the the first to arrive in the Anchorage area, either. Others, apparenlty Clovis, came before only to be displaced by the subsequent wave of Alutiqs destined to be replaced by the Dena’ina.

The archeological record shows the first indication of the Athabascan technologies of the Dena’ina and the Ahtna of the Copper River arriving from the north and east “in upper Cook Inlet between 1500 and 1000 years ago.”

When exactly these relatives of the Navajo and Apache of the American Southwest gained control of the region is unknown, but “Athabascan sites dated within the last 1,000 years include fish camps, large-scale salmon storage, and villages with large multiroom houses…. While lithic (stone tool) technology continued, its use and sophistication diminished in favor of wood and bone technology. Copper artifacts appear as prestige tools and were traded to Dena’ina from the Ahtna in the Copper River Basin.”

In other words, the Dena’ina were setting up shop in the region at about the same time the Vikings were building a colony in Newfoundland, Canada, on the opposite coast of North America.

As for the Kachemak, they retreated west down Cook Inlet back toward Kodiak Island.

This population shift might have happened peacefully, but the late Allan Boraas, an anthropologist at Kenai Community College has observed that there exists “a significant genre of war stories between Dena’ina and Yup’iit Eskimos centering in the Iliamna Lake and Mulchatna River areas suggesting that this borderlands was contested territory,” and there are later tales of Alutiq raiding parties venturing back into Cook Inlet after the Dena’ina occupation.

“….Maritime Alutiiq territory contained few resources the Dena’ina needed,” he theorized, “but the Dena’ina controlled subarctic resources mostly in the form of furs the Alutiiq needed. Consequently, the Alutiiq desired to trade with the Dena’ina, but the Dena’ina did not need to trade with the Alutiiq.

“To attempt to coerce bilateral trade, Alutiiq raided Dena’ina villages taking women hostages who were then held in ransom to force trade. Sometimes the Dena’ina would repel the attackers, sometimes they would acquiesce to the trade, and sometimes they would counter-attack in retaliation.”

Or maybe, as with so many other human societal groups past and present, warfare was just part of their nature.

We are animals

The best, modern-day models of what Alaska might have looked like before whitey arrived can now be found in places like Somalia or Afghanistan where bands of people led by chiefs or warlords regularly engage in armed conflict in competition for resources and territory.

Much of the world, including what we now call the Western World, was once like this.

Europe in medieval times was little different from Somali today with the most successful warlords “those who welded small groups of peoples into kingdoms, eventually resulting in the larger ‘Anglian’ realms of Northumbria, Mercia and East Anglia, and the ‘Saxon’ kingdoms of Wessex, Essex and Sussex,” according to the English Heritage history of Early Medieval period. 

“Particularly powerful rulers were remembered for achieving overlordship, reflecting the supremacy of their kingdom over others. The names of many of their subsumed peoples are recorded in the ‘Tribal Hideage’, probably compiled before the Viking wars of the later Ninth century.”

The Viking wars eventually helped unite the English warlords and transform the island from a land of fiefdoms into something similar to the nation-state of today, according to the BBC history of the times, although modern England is far more civilized than the nation that formed about 1,100 years ago. For one thing, it’s been a while since an English king had a queen executed because she failed to produce a male heir.

Anne Boleyn, who was put to the sword 488 years ago this year, was the last of those. She was accused of adultery and plotting against the life of King Henry VIII, convicted after a sham trial and, according to a history of the royal places, granted “the ‘small mercy’ of dying at the hands of a skilled swordsman rather than an executioner’s axe.”

Not long after her execution or around about the same time what have come to be called the “Bow and Arrow Wars” erupted among the Native peoples of Western Alaska and raged on for centuries.

Near what is today the village of Quinhagak in Southwest Alaska, Rick Knecht, an archaeologist from the University of Aberdeen in Scotland, and colleagues have uncovered what Archeology magazine called the “scene of a terrible massacre in which attackers set a qasgiq (a men’s community house) on fire with people and dogs still inside.”

“‘We found this burned floor with all this burned stuff on it, riddled with arrow point -absolutely riddled,” Knech told the magazine. “We also found the bodies of people who were dragged out of the house, along with the long grass ropes that were used to do so. Their skeletons are burned and kind of dismembered.”

“Another human skeleton was found inside the house, with an arm outstretched, apparently attempting to dig out from under a sod wall,” it was reported. “The displaced skull of a young woman was found with an arrow tip embedded in the back of it.”

The Bow and Arrow Wars are now believed to have gone on for 300 to 500 years with this sort of brutality common. Knecht believes resource shortages driven by an ancient climate change might have started it all.

“We think that the Bow and Arrow Wars might be related to stresses on their subsistence menu due to the Little Ice Age, which hit pretty hard in Alaska,” he told the magazine. “Some foods may have been harder to get, and the normal hunting areas may not have yielded enough meat, creating pressure to attack other areas and move into them.”

The arrival of the Russians, who’ve long been vilified for their brutality in Alaska, is credited with putting an end to the Bow and Arrow Wars, though there are no indications life for Alaska Natives got any easier after that. 

Both before and after the Russians arrived, those struggling to survive in Alaska struggled on their own, and a lot of them died in the struggle. The situation today is much different.

The U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA) in 2017 announced that it had “since 2009… invested $2.16 billion in 236 rural Alaskan communities.  These investments include project funding for housing, community facilities, business, energy, water and sewer, telecom and electric.  This funding has helped to grow rural Alaska’s economy and enhance the quality of life for its rural residents.”

There has, however, been no return on that “investment” because there is no economy in much of rural Alaska where many depend to a significant extent on government support to survive.

So great is this support that researchers who interviewed elders in 12 “rural, remote Western Alaska Native communities” in 2018 found people telling them the government might be overdoing the help.

“Additionally, the adoption of non-Native ways has changed lifestyles,” the researcher wrote in a paper published in the International Journal of Circumpolar Health in 2022. “Alaska Native people no longer have to worry about working to survive because, ‘Their main food is the store, also from the food bank or Quest card’, which helps them to avoid ‘the starvation.’

“While some Elders expressed that this was good, others worried about the new generation not being motivated to hunt and gather as previous generations used to: ‘Unfortunately, with the younger parents, it’s hard because they depend on the help that they get from the state, food stamps.’ As another shared, ‘As I observe it, the Food Stamp Program has hurt the Yup’ik people. With food stamps, people don’t have to get food from the wilderness, and it has significantly hindered the process of learning how to prepare subsistence food.”’

The Quest card is a debit card that provides for grocery purchases of $581 to $3,487 per month in Rural II households depending on the number of household members.

That Native elders still talk about avoiding “the starvation” is a testament to how hard things were in rural Alaska not that long ago. But this changed for the better at the same time that it has changed for the worse.

Some have become shackled to welfare because it can be in its own way addictive, and some have left the villages looking for a better life in Anchorage only to find themselves living on the streets of the state’s largest city.

Alaska Natives make up 7.4 percent of the Anchorage population, according to the U.S. Census, but represent an estimated 43 percent of the Anchorage of the estimated 3,000 people homeless in the city, according to the Associated Press. 

Those numbers could be read to indicate that if the Anchorage Museum had really wanted to do something for Alaska Natives other than engage in virtue signaling, it would have set up a Natives-only campground on its extensive plaza for the winter, offered to feed the residents there from its cafeteria, provided access to toilets and showers, and helped some Alaska Natives work their way toward employment that would enable them to get off the street.

And it’s hard to believe anyone in the city would have been able to object to that because helping those in need – instead of pandering to racial groups whether they need help or not – is a principle with which almost all Americans agree.

The U.S. is a country far from perfect, but when it comes to this one thing, it is a lot better than the various ruling/governing entities that existed in the far north for thousands of years before the Alaska Purchase. 

CORRECTION: This story was updated and corrected to include Iditarod mushers of Native descent mistakenly left out of the original version and to clarify that the Anchorage Daily News blocked comments on all news stories in 2020.