In the early 1940s, a boom in white migration to Southeast Alaska brought questions of land and resource rights to courts of law, where neither precedence nor evidence was sufficient to settle claims. In 1946, the Commissioner of Indian Affairs assigned a team of researchers--anthropologist Walter Goldschmidt, lawyer Theodore Haas, and Tlingit schoolteacher and interpreter Joseph Kahklen--to go from village to village to interview old and young alike to discover who owned and used the lands and waters and under what rules. Their mimeographed report, "The Possessory Rights of the Natives of...
In the early 1940s, a boom in white migration to Southeast Alaska brought questions of land and resource rights to courts of law, where neither pre...
