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Arctic Yearbook 2015
United States and Canada (as self-government did not make its way into the federal rights framework
until the 1990s). Modern land claims put forward a new regional model of political and organizational
development through the creation of geographically bounded native regional corporations (NRCs),
which hold and manage collective Indigenous lands. As northern political development evolved, new
institutions have been layered on top of the regional template provided through the NRCs. Though
there has been a general progressive trend towards the development of regional Indigenous
governance in the north, the actual outcomes operate on a continuum:
Figure 1: Regional Governance in the North American Arctic
Where federal recognition of local tribal self-government at the village/hamlet level has occurred, the
regional model has been diluted. Broadly speaking, most of Alaska falls into this category. Though the
Alaska Native Claims Settlement Act (ANCSA) of 1971 introduced the beginnings of a regional
template with the development of twelve regional corporations, the simultaneous creation of over 200
village corporations tempered the regional model (McBeath & Morehouse 1980). Moreover, when the
United States federal government reinforced nation-to-nation relationships with Indigenous
populations in 1994, it did so by reaffirming the rights to Indigenous self-government through the
recognition of village tribal governments (Case 2005).3 There has also been some limited movement
in this direction—towards the combination of regional institutions and local self-government—in
northern Canada: in the Sahtu land claim region of the Northwest Territories, self-government is being
negotiated on a community-by-community basis.4
By comparison, cases of strong regionalization generally evolved from layering of regional
Regional Governance Without Self-Government