Praise the Gardeners, Dun the Hunters: Alaska Natives, Taxation, and Settler Colonialism

Abstract

This article explores the relationship between tax law and settler colonialism by looking at the ways in which taxes can be part of the “civilizing” process of Indigenous peoples. In 1921, the Territory of Alaska enacted a “license tax on the business of fur-farming, trapping and trading in pelts and skins of fur-bearing animals.” Since most trappers were Natives, the “fur tax” de facto targeted them. This article unpacks the sociocultural and political dimensions of the fur tax against the backdrop of Alaska’s settler colonial history. Despite what the Alaska attorney general claimed was its “strict” revenue-raising function, the tax was part of a much broader settler colonial agenda. That agenda sought to turn semi-nomadic, “uncivilized” Native hunters into spatially grounded, “civilized” farmers, gardeners, reindeer herders, or wage workers. Ultimately, I suggest, within many if not most settler colonial spaces political and sociocultural ideologies alter the initial revenue-raising function of taxes.