"SUBSISTENCE" AND THE MYTH OF SETTLER BELONGING: ALASKA NATIVE TRADITIONAL FOODS AS A SITE OF COMPETING SOVEREIGNTIES.

While for most non-Native Alaska residents, the "subsistence issue," so heavily debated in the 1970s, '80s, and '90s may seem settled, for many Alaska Natives the fighting has not ceased. Contemporary battles are not just about access to traditional foods but our capacity to protect them. This article begins with a focus on organized efforts by Alaska Native peoples to protect traditional food resources, in order to draw attention to the inadequacies of state management regimes. I then discuss the rhetorical strategies employed by settler urban hunters and fishers in the 1970s and '80s to successfully transform Native traditional food practices into "subsistence," effectively working to extend those rights to all Alaskans. These rhetorical strategies and logics enacted contemporary legal regimes, shaping how "subsistence" is currently managed, regulated, and understood. Contemporary ethnographic research with fisheries management officials and commercial industry lobbyists demonstrates how those same rhetorical strategies continue to be mobilized by White settlers today in public debates over subsistence management concerns. Drawing out this connection highlights how many Alaska settlers continuously work to delegitimize Native claims to subsistence-and thus to sovereignty-by appealing to multiculturalist ideologies, using frameworks of White settler loss, and employing rhetoric that conflates Alaska Native and settler belonging. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]