Hello and welcome to this day in esoteric political history from radiotopia.

My name is Jody Avergan.

This day, well we're a couple days early here, but it's December 18, 1971, which is the day that we are marking here,

and that is when the Alaska Native Claims Settlement Act was signed into law by President Richard Nixon.

This at the time was the largest land-claimed settlement in United States history.

This was a compromise between the U.S. government, the state of Alaska, and Native groups.

And what exactly did it mean?

Well, it settled claims on land from Native Alaskan groups, meaning all Aboriginal

land claims were now extinguished, but in return it established that millions

of acres of land and about a billion dollars in support would be distributed to

native communities, but through the establishment of local and regional corporations

these corporations would then engage in business ventures,

mining and oil and tourism and more

and distribute their profit back to their shareholders who in this case are members of their respective

indigenous groups, which is all to say, Nixon in this moment is saying

welcome to American-style capitalism and as is case, this led to some real winners

and some real losers and all sorts of interesting

cascading effects from this.

So let's talk about this system of land claims

and corporations in Alaska and how that differs in many ways from the ways that things

were settled in the so-called lower 48 and why it was Richard Nixon who was behind all of this.

So here as always, Nicole Hammer of Vanderbilt and Kelly Carter Jackson of Wellesley. Hello there.

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