From Clan to Kwaan to Corporation: The Continuing Complex Evolution of Tlingit Political Organization

Abstract

Like many Native American groups, the Tlingit of Southeast Alaska traditionally were organized into corporate descent groups, known as clans. The seventy or so Tlingit matrilineal clans composed not only the foundation of personal and social identity, but also the central units of governance, through which such vital political functions as land tenure; resource production, distribution, and trade; and war and peacemaking were managed. However, clans’ sociopolitical prerogatives were severely undermined by the forces of Western contact and colonization beginning in the eighteenth century. By the early 1900s conditions were so stressful that a syncretic revitalization movement, the Alaska Native Brotherhood, was launched by Alaska Native leaders seeking to replace fractious clan-based governance with a unified political organization that could more effectively advocate on behalf of Natives within the dominant society. This political revitalization movement from within was followed by two important institutional reform movements imposed from without by the federal government in an effort to create greater isomorphism between federal and native institutions. The first was the Indian Reorganization Act of 1936, which enabled the formation of tribal governments at the village level (or kwaan in Tlingit). The second was the landmark Alaska Native Claims Settlement Act of 1971, which laid an entirely new socioeconomic organization on Alaska Native regions and villages in the form of for-profit corporations. While the imposition of these new governing entities might have spelled doom for the clans as political organs, in fact it has not. Indeed, at the dawn of the new millennium, the clan system remains a vital component of political