In 1919, the Territory of Alaska enacted a tax to finance its school system, in which Native children could attend public schools alongside non-Native children only if they were “of mixed blood” and led “a civilized life.” As originally enacted, the scope of the tax included every man within a certain age bracket, meaning that all Native men would have been required to pay a tax designed to finance a racist and discriminatory policy. However, the Alaska governor and his attorney general quickly decided to narrow the scope of the tax to Natives who were either “civilized” settler colonial subjects or “uncivilized” workers in settler spaces. But what did this revised scope reflect? This article uses the history of the 1919 Alaska school tax to unpack the role of tax law in shaping subaltern political and sociocultural identities. It argues that the tax provided two of the territory’s most powerful men an opportunity to express and reinforce their ideological views on indigeneity. The tax also helped them advance settler colonialism, both by ensuring that segregated territorial schools would thrive and by crafting a legal instrument that allowed them to decide who was “civilized” enough to be a taxpayer.

This article explores the relationship between tax law and settler colonialism by looking at the ways in which taxes can be part of the “civilizing” process of Indigenous peoples. In 1921, the Territory of Alaska enacted a “license tax on the business of fur-farming, trapping and trading in pelts and skins of fur-bearing animals.” Since most trappers were Natives, the “fur tax” de facto targeted them. This article unpacks the sociocultural and political dimensions of the fur tax against the backdrop of Alaska’s settler colonial history. Despite what the Alaska attorney general claimed was its “strict” revenue-raising function, the tax was part of a much broader settler colonial agenda. That agenda sought to turn semi-nomadic, “uncivilized” Native hunters into spatially grounded, “civilized” farmers, gardeners, reindeer herders, or wage workers. Ultimately, I suggest, within many if not most settler colonial spaces political and sociocultural ideologies alter the initial revenue-raising function of taxes.