History Book Club November 2026 | Settler Imperialism: Alaska Natives and the Myth of the Last Frontier
What is the History Book Club?
The History Book Club is a monthly event series that brings together alumni, faculty, students, and friends of the History Department to engage virtually with our faculty and graduates, and learn about their recently published books.
Do I need to read the book to attend this gathering?
You do not! Our History Book Club gatherings are designed to be enjoyed by any history-lover, whether or not you’ve read the featured book.
About the book
Settler Imperialism: Alaska Natives and the Myth of the Last Frontier
(University of Minnesota Press, October 2026)
How Alaska redefined US colonialism through Indigenous resistance and legal innovation
Long treated as the symbolic “last frontier,” Alaska was, in fact, the United States’s first experiment in overseas empire. Settler Imperialism reveals these concepts as fictitious stories promoted by government officials and offers a sweeping history of Alaska Native legal and political struggle in the face of a colonial structure that defied the norms of US expansion. Examining Alaska as both a settler and imperial space, Jess Arnett challenges familiar narratives of American growth, sovereignty, and law.
Following the 1867 Treaty of Cession when the United States purchased Alaska from Russia, the federal government refused to sign treaties with Alaska Natives, excluded them from the Bureau of Indian Affairs, and denied the region designation as Indian Country. These departures from standard Indian policy created legal ambiguity that enabled new opportunities for land dispossession and resource extraction by state and corporate interests. Focusing on history from the late nineteenth century through the 1971 Alaska Native Claims Settlement Act, Arnett uncovers how the Tlingit, Haida, Tsimshian, and other Indigenous nations navigated and contested Alaska’s peculiar legal terrain. Members of these communities forcefully petitioned for US citizenship, mobilized Indigenous legal orders, and engaged selective federal Indian law to assert land rights and political authority.
By placing Alaska at the center of US colonial history, Settler Imperialism turns a critical lens on the evolution of America. To understand US expansion, race, and legal formation, Alaska must be seen not as the last frontier but as a proving ground for empire.
About the Hosts
Jess Arnett (PhD ‘18) serves as an assistant professor of Comparative American Studies and Environmental Studies at Oberlin College, specializing in Native American and Indigenous studies, American history, environmental history, and Alaska Native studies. Their scholarship includes the award-winning article “Unsettled Rights in Territorial Alaska: Native Land, Sovereignty, and Citizenship from the Indian Reorganization Act to Termination,” which received the Bert and Janet Fireman Award upon publication in the Western Historical Quarterly (Autumn 2017). They received their PhD from the University of Minnesota in 2018, advised by Jean O'Brien and Barbara Welke.
Jean O'Brien (citizen, White Earth Ojibwe Nation) is Regents Professor and McKnight Distinguished University Professor of History at University of Minnesota. O'Brien is a scholar of American Indian and Indigenous history. Her scholarship has been especially influential regarding New England's American Indian peoples in relation to European colonial settlement. O'Brien's works include: Dispossession by Degrees: Indian Land and Identity in Natick, Massachusetts, 1650-1790, in which she demonstrates the persistence of Indians in the face of market economies that first commodified, and then slowly alienated their lands; Firsting and Lasting: Writing Indians out of Existence in New England, which investigates the local history writing of New England towns, which laid down the templates for American narratives of Indian disappearance; Monumental Mobility: The Memory Work of Massasoit (with Lisa Blee) that analyzes the memory work surrounding monuments to the Indigenous leader who encountered the Pilgrims in Plymouth, Massachusetts; and four edited volumes, most recently Allotment Stories: Indigenous Land Relations Under Settler Siege (with Daniel Heath Justice). She is a co-founder and past president of the Native American and Indigenous Studies Association. She holds a Ph.D. from University of Chicago.
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