A lawsuit from Alaska’s only Native reservation will proceed over the objections of other Southeast Alaska tribes. A federal judge last week declined a request from a coalition of tribes, including the largest in Southeast, to throw out Metlakatla Indian Community’s lawsuit challenging the state’s authority to regulate its fishermen.
Metlakatla Indian Community asserts in its five-year-old lawsuit that the state has no right to regulate the tribe’s fishermen. Its attorneys say that’s because when Congress created Metlakatla’s reservation in 1891, Congress implicitly included a federally guaranteed right to fish in nearby waters.
The state disagreed, saying Metlakatla members should be subject to the same rules governing the rest of Alaska’s fishermen. A panel of the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals, though, sided with Metlakatla and sent the case back to U.S. District Court to determine where exactly Metlakatla's members have the right to fish.
The case was headed for trial when a coalition of tribes, including the Central Council of Tlingit and Haida Indian Tribes of Alaska, weighed in, arguing it should be dismissed outright.
"They felt this was something that should be resolved between the tribes and not by a federal judge," attorney Richard Monkman said in an interview.
The tribes argued granting Metlakatla’s members the right to fish in waters near Ketchikan and Prince of Wales Island would violate their rights to their cultural property.
"We would analogize this to other cultural rights, like dances, stories, carvings, other types of rights that all sort of fall under the general category of at.oow, in the Lingít language, or cultural rights, which belong to the clans and belong to the houses within clans," Monkman said.
Metlakatla’s attorneys, however, argued that the right to fish in those areas wasn’t legally protected — in part because of the Alaska Native Claims Settlement Act. Chris Lundberg is an attorney representing Metlakatla.
"With the exception of Metlakatla, all Alaska Natives participated in that act," Lundberg said. "In exchange for releasing all claims to aboriginal rights-type claims and claims to land and fishing areas, the tribes received compensation."
There’s still a long way to go, and it's unclear when it might go to trial — for one thing, the state has filed a motion to end the case without a trial — but Lundberg said the decision from Judge Sharon Gleason puts the case back on track.
Metlakatla Indian Community Mayor Albert Smith said in an interview he was pleased with the decision and is optimistic about the road ahead.
"Now we are excited about getting back to the main issue: restoring the community's reserved fishing rights," he said.
