From Knowledge to Power: Co-management, Knowledge Co-production, and the Re-empowerment of Arctic Indigenous Peoples

A map of the U.S. Federal Subsistence Management Program Regional Advisory Council Regions and hub communities as established by ANILCA in 1980. Photo: U.S. Federal Subsistence Management Program Regional Advisory Council

The Arctic Institute Knowledge Production Series 2025

• The Arctic Institute’s Knowledge Production in the Arctic Series 2025: An Introduction
• Germany at the Poles: Exploring Legitimacy
• Who is an Expert on Greenland?
• From Knowledge to Power: Co-management, Knowledge Co-production, and the Re-empowerment of Arctic Indigenous Peoples

Since European states – initially through their colonial fur-trading proxies, the chartered companies – began to encroach upon their remote northern homelands four centuries ago, Indigenous Peoples of Arctic North America have endeavored to defend and restore their Indigenous rights. In the years, then decades, and then centuries after contact and the arrival of corporate- and then state-colonialism to their homelands, they have sought to restore the central role of traditional Indigenous knowledge in the governance of their homelands. This effort has proven remarkably successful, particularly since 1975 when Arctic land claims began to be settled in Canada, elevating co-management to a pillar of northern governance based increasingly on knowledge co-production by both Indigenous and national governments. While there have been many growing pains, as described here¹⁾Arngna’naaq K, Bourassa H, Couturier D, Kaluraq K & Panchyshyn K (2021) “Realizing Indigenous Law in Co-Management of Natural Resources.” The Arctic Institute. 6 April, https://www.thearcticinstitute.org/realizing-indigenous-law-management-natural-resources/. Accessed on 1 June 2025. in this 2021 article at The Arctic Institute, co-management has – after Canada successfully revised the land claims model introduced in Alaska in 1971 with the Alaska Native Claims Settlement Act (ANCSA) – increasingly incorporated traditional Indigenous knowledge in Arctic governance. In this article, I will describe this journey from marginalization to re-empowerment; its primary contribution is to trace the development of co-management and co-production practices as a tool of re-empowerment that emerges from the long history of Arctic colonization – whether by chartered companies of the fur empires governing on behalf of distant sovereigns, or by more modern governments over time.

In contrast with many other regions of the former colonial world, European states collided with the Indigenous polities of Arctic North America relatively late in history – with discovery of new trade routes and establishment of new trading relationships, far more than imperial conquest, motivating Arctic-exploring nations from the 16th century onward.²⁾Hartwig G (1874) The Polar and Tropical Worlds. Springfield: C.A. Nichols and Company; Bockstoce, J (2009) Furs and Frontiers in the Far North: The Contest Among Native and Foreign Nations for the Bering Strait Fur Trade. New Haven: Yale University Press. The chartered companies were established to manage these new trade territories. This was often with minimal administrative and settler workforces, which were more predisposed to embrace collaborative governance models, leaving Indigenous Peoples an expanding space for the re-empowerment of traditional Indigenous knowledge. Indigenous Peoples found multiple ways to reassert, and increasingly restore, the saliency of their knowledge systems in the management of their traditional lands. Facing instead the gradual hybridization of economic structures to integrate subsistence practices with market dynamics, Arctic Indigenous Peoples began to see state expansion more symbiotically.³⁾Keskitalo, C & Southcott, C (2014) Chapter 10: Globalization, Arctic Human Development Report: Regional Processes and Global Linkages. Copenhagen: Norden; Heaton, J (2012) Athabascan Village Stores: Subsistence Shopping in Interior Alaska, 1850–1950. Western Historical Quarterly 43:2 (Summer), 133-155.

Indigenous Marginalization: From Fur Empire ‘Corporate Colonization’ to Modern Arctic State Expansion

By the nineteenth century, economic integration, enhanced by treaty negotiations to consolidate sovereignty over remote frontier lands, largely replaced conquest for the integration of Arctic territories into North America’s sovereign architecture.⁴⁾Hartwig G (1874) The Polar and Tropical Worlds. Springfield: C.A. Nichols and Company; Gerhardt H (2011) The Inuit and Sovereignty: The Case of the Inuit Circumpolar Conference and Greenland. Politik 14:1; Young O (1998) Creating Regimes: Arctic Accords and International Governance. Ithaca: Cornell University Press; Zellen B (2008) Breaking The Ice: From Land Claims to Tribal Sovereignty in the Arctic. Lanham, MD: Lexington Books. In 1867, the United States purchased Alaska from Russia, and with the purchase gained title to the Russian-American Company’s lands on which it made a broad assertion of sovereignty over Alaska’s interior tribes – even in the more remote and northern territories, where the Russians never settled.⁵⁾Boraas, A & Leggett A (2013) Dena’ina Resistance to Russian Hegemony, Late Eighteenth and Ninetenth Centuries: Cook Inlet, Alaska. Ethnohistory 60:3 (Summer 2013), 485–504. Most Americans believed Secretary of State William H. Seward, the architect of the deal, had been unwise to have spent $7 million on these frozen acres, dubbing the new territory “Seward’s Ice Box” or “Seward’s Folly.”⁶⁾Bockstoce J (2009) Furs and Frontiers in the Far North: The Contest Among Native and Foreign Nations for the Bering Strait Fur Trade. New Haven: Yale University Press; Farrow L (2016) Seward’s Folly: A New Look at the Alaska Purchase. Anchorage: University of Alaska Press.

Great Britain, and later Canada, similarly acquired their way to sovereign expansion, first through the purchase of Rupert’s Land (funded with a £300,000 loan from Britain, after Parliament’s 1868 approval of the Rupert’s Land Act, and agreed to by the newly established Dominion of Canada, which coveted its territories – providing the HBC with a variety of land and tax benefits in exchange for accepting the Deed of Surrender). Canada later entered into a series of Numbered Treaties, nation-to-nation peace accords pledging friendship and alliance with the Indigenous Peoples of Canada’s new territories (who, like their brethren in Alaska, had not been consulted by either the Crown or HBC during the negotiations that preceded Canada’s accession of Rupert’s Land).

Marginalization, Militarization, and Modernization: From Exploitation to Engagement

Thus, largely through diplomatic treaty and trade negotiation, the new territories of Arctic North America entered into southern control without recourse to war – with only rare exceptions. While the expansion of the modern state into the North did not require frontier warfare as experienced elsewhere in colonial expansion (from Asia to Africa and including most of the Americas below the tree line). Modern warfare nonetheless did have a significant impact on the evolving relationship between Indigenous Peoples and the modern state. Indigenous participation in the defense of Alaska would provide a powerful unifying force,⁷⁾Marston M (1969) Men of the Tundra: Eskimos at War. New York: October House; Chandonnet F (1995) Alaska at War, 1941-1945: The Forgotten War Remembered. Anchorage: Alaska at War Committee. stimulating the movement for Indigenous rights as the dynamic social transformation of the US Civil Rights movement flowed north into Alaska. These events culminated in the historic 1971 passage of the ANCSA, the pioneering but structurally flawed land claims treaty transferring 44 million acres of land title and $1 billion in compensation to Alaska’s Indigenous Peoples. This model was embraced by Canada with structural revisions as Inuit land claims treaties were negotiated across the entire North American Arctic, with Inuit gaining title to nearly one-tenth of their traditional land base, new corporations to manage local and regional economies, and (originally left out of ANCSA, but later introduced to Alaska through subsequent federal legislation) co-management structures enabling a joint approach to managing natural resources, land access, and economic development.⁸⁾Zellen B (2008) Breaking The Ice: From Land Claims to Tribal Sovereignty in the Arctic. Lanham, MD: Lexington Books. By the time the Inuvialuit of Canada’s Western Arctic settled their land claim in 1984, based on their Agreement-in-Principle (AiP) negotiated in 1978, they had greatly advanced the land claims model, favoring Indigenous traditions that ANCSA had, in its original form, overlooked next door to the Inuvialuit Settlement Region (ISR).

Indeed, the early years of ANCSA implementation were famously described by former B.C. Supreme Court justice and prominent land rights advocate Thomas R. Berger as dragging Alaska Natives kicking and screaming into the twentieth century. Many Indigenous corporations approached the brink of bankruptcy, forced to monetize their net operating losses in a last desperate bid to stay in business.⁹⁾Berger T (1985) Village Journey: The Report of the Alaska Native Review Commission. New York: Hill and Wang; Zellen B (2008) Breaking The Ice: From Land Claims to Tribal Sovereignty in the Arctic. Lanham, MD: Lexington Books; Sillanpaa L (1988) Alaska Native Claims Settlement Act: A Living Settlement? Ottawa: Indigenous Affairs and Northern Canada (INAC), Circumpolar Affairs Section, R32-334-1987-eng, December, https://publications.gc.ca/collections/collection_2018/aanc-inac/R32-334-1987-eng.pdf. Accessed on 1 June 2025. In addition to the corporatization of village Alaska, ANCSA’s original design also had major structural flaws that nearly proved fatal to the land claims experience, including a 20-year moratorium on transferring shares in Alaska Native Corporations (ANCs) to non-Indigenous people, Many feared this flaw would inevitably result in the dilution of Indigenous ownership (known as the “1991 time bomb”), and the lack of automatic enrollment of newborn Alaska Natives as shareholders of the ANCs, which necessitated amending ANCSA’s original legislation in the years that followed.¹⁰⁾Sykes J (Producer), Dubay, B (Writer), Burrus S. (Writer and Editor) & Burrus, F (Researcher) (1985) Holding Our Ground: A Radio Documentary. Anchorage: Western Media Concepts, Inc., particularly Part 10: The Newborns—Left Out of ANCSA and Part 11: From Hunter, Fisher, Gatherer to Corporate Director; Worl (1988) The 1991 Time Bomb Defused. Alaska Native Magazine 1 (June), 1.

The Rise of Co-Management and the Reform of Indigenous Land Claims

Critics of the land claims process are correct to note the original structural flaws and the assimilating pressures introduced by the ANCs. Yet the land claims model would prove resilient and adaptive, as Indigenous corporations matured and their boards, managers and shareholders found ways to better balance traditional knowledge with modern values. Today the Indigenous corporations represent a huge economic force not only in the state of Alaska but across all of Arctic North America. Rather than forcibly assimilating a reluctant Indigenous community into a new market culture, Indigenous Peoples instead re-imagined the land claims model as their own, infusing it with a deep commitment to the preservation and revitalization of traditional knowledge and values in balance with economic modernization, pushing back against ANCSA at the local, regional, state, and circumpolar level.

This structural evolution in the land claims model appeared in the very first of Canada’s land claim treaties that followed ANCSA, the 1975 James Bay and Northern Quebec Agreement (JBNQA). The JBNQA introduced land and resource co-management as well as self-government at the regional municipality level as vehicles for Indigenous re-empowerment, and as mechanisms for the interplay of traditional Indigenous knowledge, in both the Cree communities of the James Bay Lowlands and the Inuit communities of Nunavik. These mechanisms were reaffirmed when the JBNQA was extended to the Naskapi territories of Northeastern Quebec in 1978 with the Northeastern Quebec Agreement (NEQA).

The Inuvialuit land claim in the Western Arctic which followed (with its Agreement-in-Principle (AiP) negotiated in 1978, and the Inuvialuit Final Agreement (IFA) signed six years later in 1984), would like the JBNQA/NEQA similarly transcend ANCSA’s corporate model by institutionalizing co-management of land, water, natural resources, wildlife harvesting and resources, in addition to a comparable scale of financial compensation for those lands ceded to Canada. It also included a share of government royalties for oil, gas, and mineral development on federal land; government commitment to meaningful economic participation in any development inside the settlement area; and the formation of new national parks in the settlement area that further protected the Inuvialuit land base from development, while (also a departure from ANCSA) allowing unhindered subsistence activities.

In turn, this inspired the U.S. federal government to finally address subsistence in Alaska in the 1980 Alaska National Interest Lands Conservation Act (ANILCA) after its omission from ANCSA, in essence retrofitting Alaska’s 1971 land claim with subsistence protections under separate federal legislation nine years later, in contrast with the fully integrated solution developed by Canada with its benefit of ANCSA hindsight.¹¹⁾Zellen B (2008) Breaking The Ice: From Land Claims to Tribal Sovereignty in the Arctic. Lanham, MD: Lexington Books.

From Co-Management to Knowledge Co-Production: Increasingly Collaborative (and Complex) Arctic Governance

The reintroduction of traditional subsistence, with a more inclusive role of traditional knowledge in managing subsistence, reflects the positive feedback loop generated by the Canadian approach to land claims. Its embrace of traditional knowledge, from ANCSA’s more assimilative and “western” approach, has transformed Arctic North America’s governance, yielding a complex patchwork of co-management systems at the local and regional level. Co-management experts Thierry Rodon and Aude Therrien view the institutional development of co-management boards for jointly governing Indigenous homelands as a complex governance arrangement necessitated by the demands for multilevel governance across the Arctic.¹²⁾Rodon T & Therrien A (2015) Resource Development and Land Claims Settlement in the Canadian Arctic: Multilevel Governance, Subsidiarity and Streamlining. 2015 Arctic Yearbook: Arctic Governance and Governing, Heininen L, Exner-Pirot H, and Plouffe, J, eds. Akureyri: Northern Research Forum, 119-131.

Despite industry concerns with the resulting Balkanization of decision-making, Indigenous Peoples have enthusiastically defended their gains and effectively and pro-actively utilized their co-management structures. This complexity is highlighted in Mark Nuttall’s research on the co-management of Arctic oil and gas resources in Alaska and the Canadian Arctic,¹³⁾Nuttall M (2008) Aboriginal Participation, Consultation, and Canada’s Mackenzie Gas Project. Energy & Environment, 19:5, 617-634. including his detailed study of two generations of oil and gas co-management in the Mackenzie River Valley, as well as Claudia Notzke’s earlier pioneering research on resource co-management across Canada,¹⁴⁾Notzke C (1995) A New Perspective in Aboriginal Natural Resource Management: Co-management. Geoforum 26:2 (May), 187-209 which chronicles both the proliferation and increasing saliency of co-management as a governing principle for natural resource management, even in regions without settled land claims.

Derek Armitage et al.’s 2011 study of co-management in the Canadian Arctic demonstrates how co-management provides a mechanism for both Indigenous Peoples and governments to learn how to be adaptive amidst “uncertainty and environmental change.”¹⁵⁾Armitage D, Berkes, F, Dalea A, Kocho-Schellenberg E & Patton E (2011) Co-Management and the Co-Production of Knowledge: Learning to Adapt in Canada’s Arctic. Global Environmental Change 21:3 (August), 995-1004. In short, social learning and developing the adaptive capacity for resolving complex challenges collaboratively has resulted in new levels of knowledge co-production that successfully synthesize Indigenous and western approaches. Such an approach introduces a “collaborative process to bring together a plurality of knowledge sources” that both reconciles asymmetries in power and overcomes the many complexities of multilevel governance.¹⁶⁾Armitage D, Berkes, F, Dalea A, Kocho-Schellenberg E & Patton E (2011) Co-Management and the Co-Production of Knowledge: Learning to Adapt in Canada’s Arctic. Global Environmental Change 21:3 (August), 995-1004. Adaptive co-management aligns with evolving decision-making networks that increasingly incorporates tribal participation as governments at all levels learn to collaborate with a wider ecosystem of stakeholders and to embrace both western scientific and traditional ecological knowledge.

Co-management As the Foundation of Arctic Indigenous Re-empowerment

Canada’s revised land claim model, with its elevation of traditional knowledge as a foundation of co-management as central to the governance of settlement areas, has remained largely intact from JBNQA/NEQA (1975/78) to the Inuvialuit AiP/IFA (1978/84) to the Nunavut Land Claim Agreement (NLCA) and subsequent formation of the Nunavut Territory (1993/99) to the arrival of the Nunatsiavut Constitution and Labrador Inuit (Nunatsiavut) Land Claims Agreement (2002/05). This illustrates its great endurance as a model for northern development from which there has been no retreat, and which has yielded a strengthening of Indigenous interests with each revision – fostering a dialectical synthesis of traditional Indigenous knowledge and western scientific knowledge that increasingly converges over time, endeavoring to balance the inherent tensions between traditional subsistence and market economics.

Indeed, this model has expanded to include most Dene/Metis and Yukon First Nation homelands adjacent to the Inuit homeland, covering the vast majority of mainland Arctic North America, and providing an example for the rest of the world on how to balance modernity and tradition, indigeneity and sovereignty, and the increasingly convergent knowledge systems of the Indigenous and Westphalian worlds.

Barry Zellen, PhD, is a Research Scholar in the Department of Geography at the University of Connecticut (UConn) and a Senior Fellow (Arctic Security) at the Institute of the North (IoN). He is the author, most recently, of Arctic Exceptionalism: Cooperation in a Contested World (Lynne Rienner Books, 2024) He has lived in Inuvik, NWT (1990-93), Yellowknife, NWT (1994-98), Whitehorse, Yukon (1988-89 and 1998-99), and Akureyri, Iceland (2020), and has worked for the Inuvialuit, Dene, Metis and Yukon First Nations.