SOLD AMERICAN: THE STORY OF ALASKA NATIVES AND THEIR LAND, 1867-1959. By DONALD CRAIG MITCHELL. Fairbanks: University of Alaska Press, 2003. ISBN 1-889963-36-4. Rev. ed. (Originally published by University Press of New England, 1997.) 544 p., map, b & w illus., bib., index. Softbound. US$29.95.

For decades one of the most famous advertising slogans in the world was the auctioneers' cry of "Sold....... American," a phrase that the American Tobacco Company popularized in its commercials for Lucky Strike cigarettes. However the title of Don Mitchell's masterful history of the early years of the Alaska Native land-claim issue was more immediately inspired by a mournful and ironic 1970s song by Kinky Friedman, novelist, humorist, philosopher, and one-time band leader of "Kinky Friedman and His Texas Jew Boys." Friedman's ballad Sold American (slightly misquoted in Mitchell's introduction) is a sad song about a drunken, down-and-out country singer on the streets of Nashville, who has "no place to go ... no place to stay" because everyone and everything has been "Sold American."

The story that Mitchell tells is about the struggle of Alaska's Native peoples, between 1867 and 1959, to find a place to go and a place to stay in a land to which they officially had no rights. The book was originally published by the University Press of New England at Dartmouth in 1997. This newly revised and reformatted edition from the University of Alaska Press is the first half of a two-volume work; the second volume, also from the UA Press, picks up the story where this one leaves off, with Alaska Statehood in 1959, and continues on through the actual passage of the Alaska Native Claims Settlement Act (ANCSA) in 1971.

Unfortunately, many readers will find the sheer physical dimensions of these books overwhelming and intimidating: together, the two phonebook-thick volumes total more than a thousand densely packed, oversized pages. Mitchell, a former vice president and general counsel of the Alaska Federation of Natives, appears to have the Bill Clinton approach to editing. (An incautious editor of Clinton's memoirs reportedly asked the former president if he planned to run for office again, and if not, whether it was really necessary for him to name every single person he had ever met in Arkansas.) Mitchell is hardly one to kiss up to potential voters, but like the ex-president, he is a windy attorney with a large vocabulary and is prone to being an exhausting companion. Words such as lethiferous, facinorous, concupiscent, marmoreal, and peculations (p. 18, 31, 158, 254, 284) are not the stuff of casual conversation or easy reading.

But those with the stamina to make it all the way through Sold American will be richly rewarded. Mitchell's volume is an invaluable reference work to anyone curious about Alaskan history, and no one who has not read it closely can pretend to be educated about the issues behind the Alaska Native land-claim movement and the modernday sovereignty movement. Don Mitchell is without question the most knowledgeable person in the world about the long history of Native land claims in Alaska since 1867. Like Lance Armstrong, Mitchell is alone in the field; no one comes close to him in regard to the thoroughness of his original research and the depth of his understanding.

One of Mitchell's core themes is that in much of Alaska, Native Alaskans had been intimately involved with the Western economy since the 18th and 19th centuries. He demonstrates convincingly that the conventional wisdom in Alaska today--that most Natives were somehow not economically part of the wider world until the passage of ANCSA in 1971--is a myth that masks the complex history of the past 250 years. The assimilation of Alaska Natives began, he argues, as soon as early explorers and trading ships appeared anywhere along the coast, stocked like floating Wal-Marts full of tools, utensils, weapons, and manufactured trade goods. Once these treasures were introduced, no one was willing do without them. The basic cause of this economic assimilation was not any overt policy of the federal government, but rather "the desire to modernity that lurks in every human's nature" (p. 111).

While Mitchell clearly recognizes that the historic collision of Alaska Native cultures and the Euro-American world caused much harm and readily points the finger at deplorable racist practices, he is realistic enough to warn that the "rhetoric of victimization" has had disastrous consequences, trapping Native Alaskans "by the tens of thousands in a cycle of poverty and dependence on white institutions over which they have little control and from which there is no realistic expectation of escape" (p. 8).

Mitchell profiles many interesting individuals, but much of the book revolves around the biography of William Paul, the early leader of the Alaska Native Brotherhood, loved by some as an inspiring leader and detested by others as a crooked lawyer, extortionist, rogue, and scoundrel. Undeniably Paul was one of the fathers of the Alaska Native Land Claims movement, but when he died in 1977 at age 91, most Alaska Natives "paid little mind to the passing of the man who was their most important link to their historic past" (p. 439).

To Mitchell, the neglect of William Paul symbolizes another central argument in Sold American: that lack of knowledge in the current generation about the true nature of Alaska Native history has encouraged a distorted and bitter view of the past, in which ANCSA is mistakenly seen as a gigantic swindle of the Native people rather than a grant of "unprecedented compensation" that was "a logical consequence of the Alaska Native historical experience" (p. 10, 12).

While not everyone may agree with all of Mitchell's interpretations, it is outrageous that some of those who glibly disparage his views--such as his belief that the modern sovereignty movement is based on a mistaken interpretation of Alaska Native history--have taken to personal attacks. (He was recently accused, in another context, of being "anti-Native" and no better than a member of the Ku Klux Klan [Fairbanks Daily NewsMiner, 2/10/05]). Anyone who does his or her homework, as Don Mitchell has done, or at the minimum actually reads Sold American, will know better.

Terrence Cole

Professor of History

Director, Office of Public History

University of Alaska Fairbanks

Fairbanks, Alaska, U.S.A.

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