Che Jim: This is a map of the 574 federally recognized tribal nations in what's now known as the United States. 

And there's something weird about it. 

Well, there's a lot of things weird about it, but let's look at this one. 

A full 40% of those tribes are in Alaska alone. 

And hold on, none of them are in Hawaii. What's going on here?

Hi, I'm Che Jim, and welcome to Crash Course: Native American History. 

[Theme music]

In many ways, Alaska and Hawaii are exceptions. They're the only two US states that are non-contiguous, or not connected to the mainland. 

And the relationships between their Native populations and the US government are pretty unique, both in comparison to the other 48 states and to each other. 

Let's start with Alaska, which is huge. It's bigger than Texas, California and Montana combined. 

If its not the-50⁰ winters that'll get you, it'll be the mosquito-filled summers when the sun never goes down. 

But Alaskan Natives have thrived here for at least 10,000 years, living not just on these lands, but with them. 

Traditionally, they've oriented their lives around a subsistence lifestyle of hunting, fishing, and gathering with the seasons. 

The Native nations of Alaska fall into five major cultural groups, each with their own distinct languages, customs, art forms, and histories. And they're divided pretty evenly across the state. 

You've got the Athabascan, or the Den'a, in the interior, the Inupiat and St Lawrence Island Yup'ik in the north, the Yup'ik and Cup'ik in the Southwest, the Aleut and Alutiiq in the southern stretch of islands, and the Haida, Tlingit, Tsimshihan, and Eyak peoples along the south-eastern coast. 

Alaskan Natives assemble. 

In some ways, these tribes' experiences of colonisation mirror what happened to Native people down south. They've dealt with disease, forced conversion to Christianity, and a devastating loss of land, culture, and lives. 

But in other ways, what happened to Alaska is its own unique story. 

For starters, their first colonisers were Russians. Alaskan Natives relationship with Uncle Sam didn't begin until 1867, when the US purchased Alaska from Russia for $7.2 million, which comes out to about... [checks notes] 2 cents an acre. 

That'd be a pretty good deal if the land wasn't, you know, stolen. 

Over the next few decades, Alaska became a military district, then a mining district, then in 1912, a US territory. 

But all the while, Alaskans were like, "H-hello? This land is still ours."

They never had actually ceded the land on a treaty or lost it in a war. Russia just kind of... moved in.

So Alaskan Natives claimed what the US had purchased wasn’t actually the land itself, but the right to negotiate for it with them. 

Throughout the 19th and early 20th centuries, Alaskan Natives declared their right to the land as its original occupants through legal assertions called land claims. 

But these were never fully resolved.

For the most part, the US didn't force Alaskan Natives off the land like they had done to so many Native people in the lower 48. But that doesn’t mean they were treated any better. 

For 3 years during World War II, the US forced over 800 Aleut into squalid internment camps, where many died. 

I'm going to pause for a moment and let that sink in. 

All over, Alaskan Natives faced overt discrimination from settlers. 

Businesses commonly posted signs like no Natives allowed, and Natives need not apply. A practice that wasn't banned until Tlingit activist Elizabeth Peratrovich campaigned the state to pass an anti-discrimination law in 1945. 

When Alaska finally became the 49th state in 1959, the Alaska State Act recognised the Native claim to land titles they already held. 

So that's good. 

But the act also said the state could claim any 104 million acres of public land it wanted so long as it was vacant, inappropriated, and unreserved. 

But since Alaskan Natives never ceded their lands, to say that any land was inappropriated and unreserved was a stretch. Often the lands the state called dibs on were traditional hunting and fishing areas near Native villages. 

Understandably, many Alaskan Natives felt downright disrespected by these actions. 

So, in 1966, more than 400 representatives from 17 Native organisations formed the Alaska Federation of Natives with the goal of filing land claims all over the state.

They pushed for a land freeze, demanding no new clients by the state until Native land claims were settled, and the US government agreed. 

Then, in 1971, a groundbreaking settlement was reached. The Alaskan Native Claim Settlement Act, or the ANCSA, Alaskan Natives agreed to give up their claim of the whole state, all 360 acres. In return, they receive a smaller slice, 43.7 million acres and 962.5 million. 

That land and money would be split among a bunch of newly formed corporations, which Alaskan Natives could use to benefit Native communities. 

No Native nation in the lower 48 had done anything like this. It was powerful, but the tribes still weren't fed recognized nations, which matters a lot for issues of sovereignty, or the ability to self-govern.

There's much more on tribal sovereignty in episode 2.

Throughout the 1980s, Native Alaskan communities advocated for this recognition in state courts until finally in 1993, the US government recognised all Alaskan Native entities, meaning all those corporations as officially sovereign governments with the same protections, powers, and limitations as any other federally recognised Native nation. 

And that's why today a whopping 229 of the 574 federally recognised Native nations in the US are in Alaska. 

Weird, but true. 

Now, let's fly over to Hawaii. 

The story here is kind of the opposite. There are no fairly recognised Native nations, and it might surprise you to learn that many Native Hawaiians don't want there to be. 

But to understand why, we've got to wrap our heads around their unique relationship with the United States. 

Native Hawaiians, who call themselves Kānaka Maoli, are the descendants of Polynesian navigators who arrived on the islands more than 2,000 years ago. 

They developed specialised ways of thriving there like slashing, burning, and rotating patches of jungle as gardens and building canals and terraces that directed water towards their crops. 

The Kānaka Maoli have nurtured a profound connection to these islands. To this day, many keep relationships with ancestral spirits or omokua, thought to sometimes take the form of plants, rocks, and animals. 

And they recite the kumu liipo, a creation chant that describes how the universe began from an enormous burst of heat, giving rise to day and night, earth and sky, male and female, and a whole family tree of life. 

But as soon as the first Europeans set foot on the islands in 1778, more and more Western settlers swept in, and in an all too familiar story, they brought diseases that wiped out over 80% of the Native population. 

Yes, unfortunately you heard that right, 80%.

Throughout the 19th century, those settlers and their descendants accumulated more influence, land, and wealth, growing rich off of sugar plantations. 

And as the turn of the century approached, they took it to the next level.

See, in 1891, Lili'uokalani became the kingdom of Hawaii's first and last Queen. 

Her power was limited, though, because a few years prior, a militia of white businessmen had forced her brother, literally at gunpoint, to sign away much of it, including Native voting rights, while simultaneously giving voting rights to white landowning non-citizens.

Their ultimate goal, to make Hawaii a US territory and reap the profit. 

Lili'oukalani, though, refused to recognise these limitations and worked to restore power to the Kānaka Maoli 

But then in 1893, members of his secret society invaded the palace, backed by over 160 US troops. 

Lili'oukalani, fearing war if she didn't comply with their demands, gave up her authority.

While all that was happening, white elites had been working to Americanise Hawaii, turning the palace into their government's central headquarters, requiring English in schools, and generally trying to cover up any evidence that the Kānaka Maoli were ever sovereign at all. 

In 1898, the US officially annexed Hawaii, claiming it as a US territory. Congress claimed the Hawaiian government was 100% on board with ceding sovereignty, even though over 21,000 Kānaka Maoli citizens had petitioned against it. 

Over the next 60 years, US citizens from the mainland moved in droves to Hawaii, eventually outnumbering Natives. And in 1959, when the US popped the big "do you want to become a state" question, 93% of voters said yes. 

But remember, many of those voters were US citizens from the mainland, not Natives.

And some Native scholars and activists argue that the vote didn't follow international rules laid out by the United Nations, like offering independence as a third option on the ballot. 

Fast forward to 1993, 100 years after a secret club took over a kingdom. The US Congress apologized for how it all went down. They acknowledged that the Americans had conspired illegally to take over a lawful government and that the Kānaka Maoli never directly gave up their sovereignty. 

Symbolically, apologising was a huge step, but legally it didn’t change anything.

In 2009, the Supreme Court ruled that acknowledging the state of Hawaii's crooked origin story hadn’t created any new rights for the Kānaka Maoli or restored any claims over their lands. 

Today, they still don't have formal federal recognition as a sovereign nation. It was all sizzle, no steak. And the Kānaka Maoli are divided on if they even want federal recognition. 

Those in favour say it would make it easier to address inequality and advocate for Native interests. 

But those opposed often argue that the Kingdom of Hawaii still exists. It was and is illegally occupied.

Many say that accepting federal recognition would mean giving up the goal of becoming a truly independent nation once more. 

So, it's a complicated situation.

Like other native people in the lower 48, both the Kānaka Maoli and Alaskan Natives have faced political marginalisation and discrimination.

They've weathered systematic efforts to get rid of their language and culture.

And compared to white Americans, they face higher rates of poverty and preventable illness, and have more trouble accessing healthcare and education.

The Kānaka Maoli and Alaskan Native relationship with the US have taken very different courses from those of many other Native nations and that's given rise to totally unique legal situations. 

The more we learn about them, the better we can understand the diversity of Native American history and Native life today. 

In our next episode, we're going to talk about indigenous women's history. And I will see you then. 

Thanks for watching this episode of Crash Course: Native American History, which was filmed at our studio in Indianapolis, Indiana, and was made with the help of all these nice people. If you want to help keep Crash Course free for everyone forever, you can join our community on Patreon.