Settlement Colonialism: ANCSA, the Willow Project, and Colonial-Capitalism in Alaska’s North Slope

Abstract

I. Introduction The Willow Oil project is a recently-approved oil development project on the North Slope of Alaska. The project exists on a large piece of land settlers refer to as “the National Petroleum Reserve,” which is for-now owned by the federal government, after the US unrightfully dispossessed the land that we now understand to be Alaska from Alaska Native peoples who have occupied that land for thousands years.

President Joe Biden’s approval of the Willow Oil Project in March of 2023 drew the concern and outrage of settler environmental and Indigenous activists, both in the Lower 48 and in Alaska. Notably, criticism of the project has gone viral on social media, with the most popular posts under the hashtag “#StopWillow” drawing millions of likes and views. In late March of 2023, I picked up my phone and scrolled through the #StopWillow hashtag on the short form video social media app, TikTok. As I briefly surveyed the top videos, two things were striking: the high level of engagement these videos generated, and the distinct lack of Native voices and analysis of Native issues. In materials that did address Native issues, settler environmentalists rightfully highlighted concerns about how Willow will cause pollution and disrupt subsistence practices that the members of the Native tribal government of Nuiqsut, and Inupiat environmental activists have raised. However, there is hardly any acknowledgment that many Inupiat support the development, and why they do. The absence of Native voices in settler climate discourses about the Willow Project indicate that settler environmental activists are concerned about the harm that the climate crisis can cause Indigenous people, but are ignorant of the ways that environmental regulation and energy transition by the colonial state can harm Indigenous people as well. Moreover, absent in these discussions are the realities that Indigenous peoples and livelihoods can also be caught up in extractive economies. This observation raises a number of questions: In what ways do American settler environmentalist discourses selectively invoke Native people and their struggles? What do these selective invocations achieve, and what is the potential for these discourses to reproduce harm or bad relations with Indigenous peoples? How have historical and ongoing forms of coloniality shaped a complicated scenario like the Willow Project? How do the forms and structure of the Alaska Native Claims Settlement Act drive controversy between Alaska Natives?

In this paper, I argue that popular settler environmentalist discourses criticizing the recent approval of the Willow Project in Northern Alaska by the Biden administration reproduce colonial relations by leaving Alaska Native voices out of their materials, and by failing to address the forces of colonial-capitalism that have put many Iñupiat in the position to support oil development on their ancestral lands. I will demonstrate that, to criticize the Willow Project with good relations, one must understand it within the greater context of Alaska Native land and resource issues since the Alaska Native Claims Settlement Act.