this harkens back to a dark period in the lower 48, and the treatment of the earlier immigrant peoples in those territories, by the subsequent immigrants. not a pretty example to follow.

1.  As the other commenters have noted, there is a strong favoritism to commercial and sport hunting and fishing interests.  In Alaska, commercial hunting and fishing includes (to me at least) the rather substantial industry of sportsmen and women from the lower 48 and the rest of the world coming up there to hunt and fish.  Go look at how much a week there costs - it ain't cheap.

2.  There is also a core level of disdain for the federal government, which is of a piece with the secessionist ideas the Alaska Independence Party (and similar loose parts rattling around) of which her husband was a long-time member and she allegedly so.  In office, she is putting those ideas and principles into practice;  a slow-motion revolt.

3.  There is a level of racism/ethnocentrism involved, though I'm not quite sure how much.  But, more telling (to my eye, anyway) is that her approach is of a piece with her hardcore fundamentalist religiosity.  

Taking away subsistence hunting and fishing rights from the unChristianized, unsaved Alaskan natives is philosophically no different than having commercial hunters and the cavalry slaughter all the buffalo to force the Plains Indians onto reservations, where they could be saved for Christ by outlawing their native languages, custons, religions and - coincidentally - made a profit center for the indian agents who would feed them the white man's food and sell them the white man's clothes.  Similarly, taking away self-governance from the native "savages" would not only deprive them of their ability to say "no" to the indian agents, but would also facilitate commercial exploitation of the lands to which they were entitled.

Think back, too, to the welcoming in Palin's Wasilla church for the Jews for Jesus, which we heard about early in this debacle.  The fundamental tenet of their practice was to make the message of "Convert, Accept Jesus" "inescapable" to the unconverted/unsaved.  In other words, they will ram it down your throat until you say "yes".  No different, in philosophy, from the way missionaries to the Indians practiced their evangelism, though they were able to use the positive method of starving out the unsaved rather than the negative of mobbing them.

Moreover, this adherence to fundamentalist religiosity is a coherent theme in her governance.  You will all remember the brief uproar about charging Wasilla's rape victims for their rape kits, which was justified on the basis of the lie that "many" other towns were doing the same when in fact none were.  Palin's objection, it seems (and I read this on another responsible blog - IIRC FDL - but cannot place it just yet), was based not on the taking of investigative material from the victim, but on the presence in the rape kit of emergency contraception.  Palin's fundamentalism decries emergency contraception as a killing, since they believe it destroys a fertilized ovum which, in their belief system, is a human life.

Alaska Women Reject Sarah Palin

The biggest political rally in Alaska's history just took place in Anchorage - protesting Alaskan Governor and now candidate for U.S. Vice President Sarah Palin.

The Alaska Women Reject Palin rally was to be held outside on the lawn in front of the Loussac Library in midtown Anchorage. Home made signs were encouraged, and the idea was to make a statement that Sarah Palin does not speak for all Alaska women, or men.

There are among Native Americans all sorts of internal issues (which I am ignoring for this comment), but the general hostility to the recognition of any 'rights' in Native Americans has been more or less constant in many states for a very long time. As a result of the 1971 statute and land settlements, the Native American and Inuit populations (not quite the same are the two) have recognized and occasionally enforceable rights to all sorts of lands including the ones in the way of her gas pipeline and which she left to Transcanada to work out, which were originally not of great interest to the white population. Now that they are, the white population in general is asserting its primacy. And that is the population which elected her and her predecessors. Until recently, as in other places with other groups, there was so little social dissent about this that statutory defense of the most recent invaders was not even necessary. After 1971, that changed. Part of the theory seems to be that they and the NA/Is are Alaskans in exactly the same way, and that therefore there is nothing a NA/I should have which her white constituents should not share equally. Nothing which may be withheld on ethnic grounds from her kind of Alaskans. Although the converse is not true.

Hunting is a sportsman's issue, but fishing is a very large commercial deal, as it was the principal industry in Alaska which earned currency after the gold ran out in the Yukon Gold Rush of 1898 and before oil and gas were discovered. European-origin Alaskans survived that way. My grandfather fished there for decades, out of the Port of Seattle, and Ketchikan. My uncle Conrad died in Ketchikan one awful night while on one of the fishing trips. What this is about is that for decades, white folk up there assumed that it didn't matter what Native Americans/Inuits needed because they didn't run the place and had essentially no enforceable rights against abuses. No more.

It is facially more dramatic in Alaska because there the land settlement was so recently done, while the various reservations in the lower 48 have existed for awhile, often whittled away at as whites found things on the reservations they wanted for themselves, water in dry areas for example, but the big battles here were before the Second World War, and are mostly forgotten by city people. Until the Native American Rights movement began to be heard in the seventies, and somebody discovered that NAs could make money on those reservations with casinos, there were only a few economically successful tribes, many in the Southeast.

Between the land settlements and the sovreignty movement, they now literally own a large porportion of the state of Alaska, and are permitted to run it as they see fit, not just as the Republicans in Juneau decide for their own constituents. They are about 15% of the entire population, but because of racial issues, are treated as not really part of it and almost as the enemy.

In some places like Arizona (Navaho, Hopi and others), and Colorado, there is a measure of mutual understanding and grudging respect, but in a lot of other places, no.

I do reject one poster's comment that all humans in Alaska are immigrants, as a way of diminishing what the immigrants of 1898 and thereafter are trying to keep doing. If you have been in possession of the land and working and using it for ten thousand years before the first European showed up, probably a Russian by the way, you do have rights and it is not a 'relative' issue. If the 'relative' issue was pushed, there would be no place in the world other than a few spots in East African where any rights other than those of Europeans would be entitled to any priority at all. There are analogs here to lots of diverse culture issues within one set of borders created by empire in prior centuries, including good old Georgia, China with Uighurs and Tibetans, which are appropriate to consider.

And this is partially also a game of numbers. If all the NA/Is who were in American in 1607 had their descendants standing here rather than being repeatedly decimated by diseases brought by Europeans, the last one of which I remember was what nearly wiped out Washington tribes and many others about 1910, owing to different immunity patterns, we would not be looking at the state with most NA/Is being Alaska at 15%, and would be dealing differently with all of this.

It does seem to me (Full Disclosure, my father was half Interior Salish, and grew up with that language and not English as his first, although he died too young to teach much of that to me) that Palin's record on this is relevant since the US is a vastly multicultural country and she would have to have a rational record of good relations and working habits with her  non-European based residents to demonstrate she could do it for the larger number in the nation generally, which will be majority minority by 2050, and she doesn't have that. We would not tolerate a candidate caught using as to AAs or other lower 48 ethnically distinct groups the kind of terminology reportedly used by her about the NA/I residents of Alaska. This should be taken into account in evaluating her.

As to McCain, if those here believe he has a great NA issues record, would such people kindly describe or post same.

I am not defending Palin.  If there are real issues that can be proven without a doubt, then they should be revealed.  If there are just a bunch of "this could be a real issue" without a lot of background and proof, then I think, as Democrats, we are better than that.

Many governors and attorney generals have disagreements over certain issues and sometimes clash with Native American interests.

I don't know anything about the specifics of these items in Alaska. However, while interesting, my guess is that this writing was done by someone who supports Native interests. Often, it's important to read the "answer", and not just assume the "complaint" is the final word on the subject.

The document, titled "Sarah Palin's Record on Alaska Native and Tribal Issues," was partially written by Heather Kendall-Miller, an informal adviser to the Obama campaign in Alaska.

She has personally known the senator from Illinois since their days attending Harvard Law School together. Her husband, lawyer Lloyd Miller, co-authored the report, which is based largely on many of the legal cases Kendall-Miller has argued against Palin and the Alaska state government.

"It's really important to pop [Palin's] balloon," Kendall-Miller, a tribal member of the Native Village of Dillingham, told Indian Country Today.

She said she is "very concerned" that Natives who might have voted for Obama could now be swayed by Palin's entrance into the race.

"That's exactly why it was so important for us to get the document out. There was such an initial positive response [to Palin], even from Native people in Alaska."[...]

Before Palin became McCain's running mate, many political observers had expected that Obama would do well with Indian voters, especially
considering his strong outreach to tribes during the election thus far.