Originally written for David Noon’s Violence in US History class at the University of Alaska Southeast, December, 2015.

On March 30, 1867, the United States of America and Russia signed the Treaty of Cession, effectively ending the Russian occupation and beginning one with the United States, which made Alaska one of its territories, then finally the 49th state in 1959. In 2017, Alaska will celebrate its 150th year anniversary for the Treaty of Cession. Among the festivities, there will be renewed attention to the history of the “Alaskan purchase”, potentially cementing commonplace assumptions about how the US government acquired the land, such as the misconception that Alaska was outright “sold” by the Russians to the United States. The United States simply did not purchase the legal title to the land of Alaska. As the Tlingit lawyer and civil rights leader William Paul and his son Fred Paul, also a lawyer, articulated, the Treaty of Cession was an agreement where, according to Fred, “Russia sold the right to rule Alaska, the right of suzeraignty, not the land itself. The only trouble with these reasonable provisions was that few persons were aware of them and, during the next hundred years, little or no effort was made to enforce them. A great gulf often exists between the law and the observance of law…” (Paul, 2003) Russia recognized that they didn’t own all of Alaska. Not having the resources or political will to control the entire territory, they settled in a few small fortes in strategically-located areas across the southeastern and southwestern coasts of Alaska, mainly for hunting and trading for furs, particularly the sea otter. These boundaries and rights were largely resolved miltarily, particularly with the Battles of Sitka in 1802 and 1804 (see Dauenhauer and Dauenhauer, 2008), and through regular diplomacy, though, of course, there were skirmishes and cross-cultural relations were often complicated and difficult. It was only a few years after the Treaty of Cession where the conception of a government-to-government relation was challenged, often with devastating consequences.