- published: 15 Jun 2015
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Alaska Natives are indigenous peoples of Alaska: Inupiaq, Yupik, Aleut, Eyak, Tlingit, Haida, Tsimshian, and a number of Northern Athabaskan cultures.
Ancestors of the Alaska Natives are known to have migrated into the area thousands of years ago, and established varying indigenous, complex cultures that have succeeded each other over time. That developed sophisticated ways to deal with the challenging climate and environment. Europeans and Americans began to trade with Alaska Natives in the nineteenth century. New settlements around trading posts were started by Russians, British and Americans.
In the 1800s and In 1971 Congress passed the Alaska Native Claims Settlement Act, which settled land and financial claims for lands and resources which they had lost to European Americans. It provided for the establishment of 13 Alaska Native Regional Corporations to administer those claims. Similar to the separately defined status of the Canadian Inuit and First Nations, which are recognized as distinct peoples, Alaska Natives are in some respects treated separately from Native Americans in the United States. An example of this separate treatment is that Alaska Natives are allowed the harvesting of whales and other marine mammals under the Marine Mammal Protection Act of 1972.
Alaska (i/əˈlæskə/) is the largest state in the United States by area. It is situated in the northwest extremity of the North American continent, with Canada to the east, the Arctic Ocean to the north, and the Pacific Ocean to the west and south, with Russia further west across the Bering Strait. Alaska is the 4th least populous and the least densely populated of the 50 United States. Approximately half of Alaska's 722,718 residents live within the Anchorage metropolitan area.
Alaska was purchased from Russia on March 30, 1867, for $7.2 million ($120 million in today's[when?] dollars) at approximately two cents per acre ($4.74/km²). The land went through several administrative changes before becoming an organized (or incorporated) territory on May 11, 1912, and the 49th state of the U.S. on January 3, 1959.
The name "Alaska" (Аляска) was already introduced in the Russian colonial period, when it was used only for the peninsula and is derived from the Aleut alaxsxaq, meaning "the mainland" or, more literally, "the object towards which the action of the sea is directed". It is also known as Alyeska, the "great land", an Aleut word derived from the same root.