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Decline Of Alaskan Society Essay

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With its direct connection with the land removed, Native Alaskan society began to fragment alarmingly quickly. The regional corporations’ failure to provide dividends that were adequate enough to allow people to remain comfortably in their local villages, coupled with the influx of Western Capitalistic Culture brought by the new corporations, led an increasing number of Native Alaskans to begin moving from their traditional subsistence lifestyles in rural villages to the comparatively urban cities of Alaska. Native populations in Anchorage alone doubled between 1970 and 1980. There, the newly urban Alaska Natives were forced to seek out work in a comparatively individualistic society. The western corporate values of competition eroded …show more content…

Thus, they had but two choices: partially assimilate with the hope that they’d retain some aspects of their culture, or resist until the bitter end and fade into obscurity, being remembered only in textbooks.
Therefore, taken all-in-all, the ANCSA was not a success; rather, it was a resounding failure. In all but a few cases, it failed to economically provide for the Alaska Natives, and failed to protect their vibrant cultures from quietly fading and assimilating into mainstream society, while the rest of America celebrated the “The ‘Me’ Decade.” That’s not to say that it didn’t accomplish anything—the ASRC and a few other corporations have continued to thrive, and the younger AFN leaders that negotiated the ANCSA were right in believing that in order to keep their culture alive at all, they had to partially assimilate, or be lost completely. But what makes the ANCSA such a disappointment is not that it was, as some people would claim, simply a repackaged Dawes Act meant to paternalistically decide the fate of Native Tribes, but rather that its very achievable goals were crippled for years by failure in but a few key junctures. In comparison with previous Federal interactions

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