Flexibility in the Federal System? Institutional Innovation and Indigenous Nations’ Self-Determination in the US and Canadian Far North

Since the early 1970s, Indigenous nations in northern Canada and the United States have secured a heightened level of governing autonomy through the creation of new institutions of self- and shared-rule. While much attention has been devoted to the political factors that allowed for development of these institutions, and their operation within the federal governance framework, this thesis argues that these new institutions have important political implications that have, as yet, been largely unexplored. The settlement of modern land claim agreements, beginning in the 1970s, was a response by the United States and Canadian federal governments to Indigenous demands for self-determination. The decision to settle modern land claim agreements marked a move away from the dominant policy paradigm of assimilation, and into a new paradigm that recognized Indigenous goals for economic self-determination, and which is increasingly responsive to Indigenous demands for political self-determination through self-government. This ideational shift enabled the development of new sites of Indigenous authority within the federal political system. By building a comparative analysis of the political dynamics across four cases—the Northwest Arctic and North Slope regions in Alaska, and the Inuvialuit and Gwich’in regions in the Northwest Territories—this thesis argues that early decisions by the state have had significant, and reinforcing, effects on the development of the institutional spaces for Indigenous minority nations. How these institutions were designed and implemented has had important implications for the degree to which they reinforce or reconstitute conceptions of national or cultural identity. It also has important implications for the degree to which these new institutions are successful at reducing conflicts between the minority nation and the state. By developing a novel framework of minority national conflict, I am able to illustrate how these decisions influence contemporary political dynamics.Ph.D