Notes on Alaskan Native electoral politics

• Published in: Polar Record
• Main Author: Harrison, Gordon Scott
• Format: Article in Journal/Newspaper
• Language: English
• Published: Cambridge University Press (CUP) 1973
• Subjects: General Earth and Planetary Sciences; Ecology; Geography, Planning and Development; Polar Record; Alaska
• Online Access: http://dx.doi.org/10.1017/s0032247400063634; https://www.cambridge.org/core/services/aop-cambridge-core/content/view/S0032247400063634

Electoral politics is to politics as university education is to education; a highly visible, formal, and ritualistic process, the function of which is as much symbolic as it is substantial. In Alaska as elsewhere, and for Natives as for other groups, electoral politics is only one dimension of an elaborate wideranging political process. The matter of aboriginal land claims, for example, dominated Alaskan Native politics through the 1960's, but this issue was only peripherally one of electoral politics. However, because Alaskan Natives have not traditionally had access to many political advantages, such as money, property, communication facilities, education, health, and organization, that are available to other groups, voting has been an important means of political influence for them. For these reasons and because electoral behaviour indirectly reflects many non-electoral phenomena, electoral politics is a good point of departure for the study of Native politics in Alaska. This article surveys selected factors that have conditioned Native electoral participation generally, the evolution of Native representation in Alaska's territorial and state legislatures, and collective voting patterns. Two earlier papers (Rogers,1969; Harrison, 1970) have dealt even more selectively with this subject. Together they offer a general introduction to it.