Forty-Four Million Acres
Alaska Native Peoples and the United States: Treaties That Never Happened, a Trust That Endures, and the Settlement That Changed Everything

This audiobook is narrated by an AI Voice.
Every other Indigenous people in the United States has a foundational document — a treaty. Alaska Native peoples have something stranger: a real estate contract between two empires, signed in 1867, in which the people who had lived on the land for more than ten thousand years were never consulted.

Forty-Four Million Acres tells the story of Alaska's Indigenous peoples and the United States as one continuous argument: the 1867 Treaty of Cession, a century of governing without consent, the federal trust responsibility that endured without a treaty, statehood and the land freeze, and the Alaska Native Claims Settlement Act of 1971 — which settled land claims through corporations instead of reservations. It follows what that choice built: Native corporations that became giants of federal contracting under the SBA 8(a) program, tribal governments running one of the most sophisticated rural health systems on earth through Indian Health Service self-governance, and the Medicaid financing structure that quietly became that system's fiscal backbone.

Whether the transformation from treaties to statutes, and from land in trust to shares in a corporation, honored the federal obligation or diluted it is the central question of modern Alaska Native politics — and of this book.

This written text was created using AI. This audiobook is narrated by an AI voice.