State Expansion and Indigenous Response in the Arctic: A Globally Integrated Northern Borderland Emerges from the Historical Synthesis of Northern Frontier and Northern Homeland

Abstract

Since the state and its colonial proxies first encroached upon their homeland three centuries ago, natives of the North have continued to assert and defend their Aboriginal rights and cultural traditions and have sought to preserve as much of the autonomy of their independent polities now threatened by state expansion as they could. As natives learned more about the many systems and structures of governance that were exported from Eurasia, from the commercial trading posts and early global networks they were part of, to the representative constitutional democracies that took root in their homelands, they found many new ways to reassert and, increasingly, restore their autonomy—through innovative domestic diplomacy, protracted (sometimes multi-decade) negotiations, and various forms of political protest and engagement. The northern tranquility long observed to define the Arctic region as a whole, and which is particularly salient in the Western Arctic, owes much then to the domestic reconciliation of tribe and state that has taken place during this historic and exemplary northward state expansion.