The State of Alaska wants the United States Supreme Court to decide whether rural Alaskans – which includes many Alaska Native people – should maintain subsistence fishing preference in the waterways of federal lands.
Last month, a panel of federal appeals court judges sided with the federal government in its lawsuit against the state over salmon management on the Kuskokwim River. The feds sued the state after clashes over fish management on the lower river in 2021 and 2022.
Indigenous groups throughout the state, including the Kuskokwim River Inter-Tribal Fish Commission and the Alaska Federation of Natives, signed onto the case in support of the federal government, which is advocating for a rural Alaska preference.
But on Sept. 15 the state asked the U.S. Supreme Court to take up the case, arguing that federal law shows that the state has the authority over its own waterways, even on federal land.
The case (U.S. v Alaska) highlights the tension between federal and state law and a decades-long battle over a rural subsistence priority.
Under federal law, rural residents are given preference when the federal government is managing hunting and fishing in the state. But Alaska’s constitution prohibits that kind of preference and opens subsistence hunting and fishing to all Alaskans.
Fisheries management on the Kuskokwim River is shared between the state of Alaska upriver and federal managers downriver, where it passes through a federal wildlife refuge.
Legal battles over conflicting state and federal management go back decades, since Congress passed the Alaska National Interest Lands Conservation Act (ANILCA) in 1980 to protect the hunting and fishing rights of rural Alaskans.
The Supreme Court hasn’t publicized a timeline for when it might consider the state’s request to take up the case. The court will deliberate the state’s petition behind closed doors.
