True Co-Management: Critical Approaches to Indigenous Food Sovereignty

This Note examines the Inuit Circumpolar Council Alaska’s project to achieve Inuit food sovereignty through cooperative agreements between tribal, state, and federal agencies for the co-management of Arctic food resources. The Note employs approaches from political ecology and critical race theory to evaluate risks of Native participation in co-management and identify means to mitigate the colonial tendencies of American law and environmental policy. Ultimately, it offers power sharing and ontological hybridity as criteria for “true co-management,” the form of cooperative resource management that affirms tribal sovereignty. The Notes locates both criteria within the Inuit Circumpolar Council’s framework.

Alexandra Fay is the inaugural Richard M. Milanovich Fellow at the Native Nations Law & Policy Center of UCLA School of Law. She wrote this Note as a student at Yale Law School.

Alexandra Fay