Alaska Native Tribes A-Z: 229 Federally Recognized Tribes

Alaska holds 229 federally recognized tribes, which is close to 40 percent of every federally recognized tribe in the United States. The rest of the country, all 48 contiguous states combined, holds 346. That imbalance surprises most people, and it points to a history that ran on a completely different track from the one taught in lower 48 classrooms. No treaties. Almost no reservations. Land held by corporations instead of the federal government. A recognition process that took until the 1990s to settle.

This page explains how Alaska Native peoples first met Europeans, how their homelands ended up inside the United States, and why their tribal governments are built so differently. You can also browse individual tribes alphabetically on Alaskan Natives, where each entry covers one village, band, or community.

Browse Alaska Native Tribes A to Z

Each of these pages covers individual tribes, villages, and communities in alphabetical order, with history, location, population, and cultural background:

How Many Federally Recognized Tribes Are in Alaska?

As of January 1, 2026, there were 229 federally recognized Alaska Native tribal entities. That number held steady through the Bureau of Indian Affairs list published in the Federal Register on January 30, 2026, which counted 575 federally recognized tribes nationwide (91 FR 4102). The only change from the previous list was the addition of the Lumbee Tribe of North Carolina, recognized by legislation signed December 18, 2025.

Subtract Alaska's 229 and you get 346 tribes spread across the other 48 states. Alaska has roughly two-thirds the tribal governments of the entire rest of the country while holding about one two-hundredth of the country's Indian country acreage.

Size varies enormously. Some Alaska tribes govern a village of 60 people reachable only by plane or boat. The Central Council of the Tlingit and Haida Indian Tribes of Alaska, by contrast, is a single federally recognized tribe with more than 30,000 citizens spread across Southeast Alaska and beyond.

Who the Alaska Native Peoples Are

The 229 tribes belong to several distinct peoples with separate languages, territories, and traditions:

Iñupiat of the Arctic and Northwest coasts
Yup'ik and Cup'ik of the Yukon-Kuskokwim Delta and Bristol Bay region
Unangax̂ (Aleut) of the Aleutian and Pribilof Islands
Sugpiaq / Alutiiq of Kodiak, the Alaska Peninsula, and Prince William Sound
Athabascan (Dene) peoples of the Interior river drainages, including Gwich'in, Koyukon, Dena'ina, Ahtna, and others
Tlingit, Haida, Tsimshian, and Eyak of Southeast Alaska

Twenty Alaska Native languages became official state languages in 2014, sharing that status with English. Many of them have very few fluent first-language speakers left, and village schools, immersion programs, and tribal language departments are working against a hard clock. Alaska Native and American Indian people make up about 15 percent of Alaska's population counted alone, and closer to 20 percent when people who identify with more than one race are included.

First Contact With Europeans

Europeans arrived late in Alaska compared with the rest of North America. In July 1741, two Russian ships under Vitus Bering and Aleksei Chirikov reached Alaskan waters during the Second Kamchatka Expedition. Chirikov sent two boat crews ashore near what is now Southeast Alaska and never saw them again. Bering's crew landed near Kayak Island and made contact with Unangax̂ people on the return voyage. Bering himself died of scurvy that winter on the island that now carries his name.

What the survivors brought back mattered more than the maps. Sea otter pelts from that voyage sold for enormous sums in China, and within a few years independent Russian fur hunters, the promyshlenniki, were sailing east through the Aleutians.

The Unangax̂ absorbed the worst of it. Russian crews seized hostages, usually women and children, to force Unangax̂ men to hunt sea otter from their own kayaks. Villages were burned when they resisted. In 1763 Unangax̂ fighters destroyed four Russian vessels and killed most of their crews, and the reprisals that followed devastated the eastern Aleutian villages. Between the violence, forced relocation, and introduced disease, most estimates place the Unangax̂ population decline at around 80 percent within two generations of contact.

Farther south, the Tlingit fought the Russians to a standstill. In 1802 Tlingit warriors destroyed the Russian post at Redoubt Saint Michael near present-day Sitka. Aleksandr Baranov returned in 1804 with ships and cannon, and the Battle of Sitka that October ended with the Kiks.ádi clan slipping out of their fort at night in what is remembered as the Sitka Kiks.ádi Survival March. The Russians occupied the site, but the battle was the last major armed conflict between Russians and Alaska Natives, and Tlingit control of the interior trade routes continued for decades.

Russian America was never a large colony, peaking at only a few hundred Russians. The Russian Orthodox Church, which arrived in 1794, left the deepest mark, and Orthodox parishes remain active in Unangax̂, Sugpiaq, and Yup'ik communities today. Church clergy also produced some of the first written forms of Alaska Native languages. None of that offset the epidemics. A smallpox outbreak between 1835 and 1840 killed thousands of people across southern and southwestern Alaska.

How Alaska Became Part of the United States

Russia sold its claim to Alaska on March 30, 1867, for $7.2 million. The formal transfer ceremony took place at Sitka on October 18, 1867. No Alaska Native person was consulted, and Russia was selling a claim it had never made good on across most of the territory.

Article III of the Treaty of Cession is where the trouble started. It granted citizenship rights to Russian subjects who stayed, then excluded what it called the "uncivilized tribes," who would be subject to whatever laws the United States chose to adopt. That clause set the pattern. The federal government never signed a single treaty with an Alaska Native tribe. Everything that followed came through statutes, court decisions, and administrative action instead.

The 1884 Organic Act extended a skeleton government to the district and said Native people would not be disturbed in the possession of lands they used or occupied, but left the question of legal title to a future Congress. That future Congress took 87 years to answer.

In the meantime, Alaska Native people organized on their own. The Alaska Native Brotherhood formed in 1912, followed by the Alaska Native Sisterhood in 1915, and they pushed on voting rights, school segregation, and land claims. On February 16, 1945, after Tlingit civil rights leader Elizabeth Peratrovich testified before the territorial Senate, Alaska enacted the first anti-discrimination law in the United States, nearly 20 years before the federal Civil Rights Act.

Congress extended the Indian Reorganization Act to Alaska by amendment on May 1, 1936. That let Alaska Native villages adopt constitutions and organize IRA councils, and it authorized the Interior Secretary to create reservations. About seven were established, including Venetie, Karluk, Akutan, Diomede, Unalakleet, St. Lawrence Island, and Wales. Nearly all of them were later revoked. The Annette Islands Reserve at Metlakatla, set aside by Congress in 1891 for Tsimshian people who had moved north from British Columbia, is the only Indian reservation in Alaska today.

Statehood came in 1959, and it lit the fuse. The Statehood Act let the new state select roughly 104 million acres of federal land, and the state began choosing parcels that Native villages had used for generations. Village protests piled up at the Interior Department. Interior Secretary Stewart Udall froze all land transfers in 1966, the Alaska Federation of Natives formed the same year, and then oil was discovered at Prudhoe Bay in 1968. Nobody could build a pipeline across land with unresolved Native claims, so Congress finally had a reason to act.

ANCSA: The Law That Made Alaska Different

President Nixon signed the Alaska Native Claims Settlement Act on December 18, 1971. It remains the largest Indigenous land settlement in United States history, and it is the single biggest reason Alaska tribal organization looks nothing like tribal organization in the lower 48.

The terms: Alaska Native people received title to about 44 million acres, roughly 10 percent of the state, plus $962.5 million in cash. In exchange, ANCSA extinguished aboriginal land title and aboriginal hunting and fishing rights across Alaska, and it revoked nearly every existing reserve.

The delivery mechanism is what makes ANCSA unusual. Instead of putting land in federal trust for tribal governments, Congress created for-profit corporations under state law. Twelve regional corporations were established along cultural and geographic lines, with a 13th added in 1975 for Alaska Natives living outside the state. More than 200 village corporations were created alongside them. Every Alaska Native alive on December 18, 1971 received 100 shares of stock in a regional corporation and usually a village corporation as well. Those shares cannot be sold on an open market, though they can be gifted or inherited, and 1988 amendments let corporations issue new shares to people born after the 1971 cutoff.

So Alaska ended up with two parallel systems that most states do not have. Corporations own the land as a business asset. Tribal governments hold the sovereign authority. They are separate legal entities with separate members, separate boards or councils, and separate purposes, and they sometimes disagree.

How Alaska Tribes Are Organized Differently From Lower 48 Tribes

Here are the practical differences that matter most:

No treaties. Lower 48 tribal rights often trace to specific treaty language on hunting, fishing, water, or boundaries. Alaska tribes have no treaties at all. Their rights rest on federal statutes and the federal trust relationship, which Congress can adjust more easily than it can rewrite a treaty.

Almost no reservations. There are roughly 326 federal Indian reservations in the lower 48. Alaska has one, Metlakatla. Tribal governments elsewhere exercise authority over defined reservation boundaries. Most Alaska tribes do not have that territorial base.

Corporate land, not trust land. ANCSA land is owned in fee simple by corporations, which means it can be taxed, mortgaged, developed, and in some circumstances lost. Trust land in the lower 48 is held by the United States for the tribe and cannot be sold or taxed by a state.

Very little Indian country. In Alaska v. Native Village of Venetie (1998), a unanimous Supreme Court held that ANCSA lands are not Indian country. That decision limits tribal taxing power, complicates law enforcement and court jurisdiction, and is why the state of Alaska and tribal governments have argued over authority for decades. Village public safety in rural Alaska still suffers from the gaps.

Village-scale governments. Most Alaska tribes govern a single village. Some serve fewer than 100 people. Tribal councils in these communities handle enrollment, child welfare under ICWA, courts, housing, and social services with small staffs and long distances between them and any regional hub.

Two council traditions. About a third of Alaska tribes are organized under IRA constitutions adopted through federal elections. The rest operate as traditional councils under their own governing documents. Both have identical federal recognition and identical governmental powers, so the difference is historical rather than legal.

Services delivered through consortia. Because individual villages are small, Alaska tribes pooled their authority. Regional nonprofits such as Tanana Chiefs Conference, Kawerak, Bristol Bay Native Association, and the Association of Village Council Presidents run health and social programs under contracts and compacts authorized by the Indian Self-Determination and Education Assistance Act of 1975. The Alaska Tribal Health Compact and the Alaska Native Tribal Health Consortium operate one of the most fully tribally managed health systems in the country, including the Alaska Native Medical Center in Anchorage.

Subsistence works differently. Instead of treaty-reserved hunting and fishing rights, rural Alaska subsistence is governed by Title VIII of the Alaska National Interest Lands Conservation Act of 1980, which gives a subsistence priority to rural residents on federal land. That is a residency-based standard rather than a tribal one, and the mismatch between federal and state management has produced constant litigation. If you want the fuller picture, see Alaska Native subsistence rights.

When This Structure Became Law: A Timeline

1867 Treaty of Cession transfers Russia's claim to the United States. No Alaska Native consent, no treaties ever signed.
1884 Organic Act protects Native use and occupancy but leaves title unsettled.
1891 Congress sets aside the Annette Islands Reserve for Metlakatla.
May 1, 1936 Congress extends the Indian Reorganization Act to Alaska, allowing IRA councils and constitutions.
1959 Statehood, and 104 million acres of state land selections collide with Native claims.
1966 Interior Secretary Udall freezes land transfers. The Alaska Federation of Natives forms.
December 18, 1971 ANCSA creates the regional and village corporation system and extinguishes aboriginal title.
1975 The Indian Self-Determination and Education Assistance Act lets tribes contract and compact to run federal programs themselves. Alaska tribes used it more aggressively than almost anyone.
1980 ANILCA establishes the rural subsistence priority.
October 21, 1993 Assistant Secretary Ada Deer publishes a list confirming 226 Alaska Native villages and entities as tribes with the same status, immunities, and privileges as tribes in the lower 48. This ended decades of federal ambiguity about whether Alaska villages were really tribes.
November 2, 1994 The Federally Recognized Indian Tribe List Act requires the Interior Secretary to publish the list annually and bars any agency from stripping recognition. Only Congress can do that now. This is the law that locks in the 229 figure.
1998 Venetie holds that ANCSA lands are not Indian country.
December 2014 Interior finalizes a rule removing the Alaska exception, so Alaska tribes can apply to place land into federal trust.
July 28, 2022 Alaska House Bill 123 gives all federally recognized Alaska tribes formal state recognition, ending a long back and forth between governors' administrative orders.
2024 A federal court upholds the government's authority to take Alaska land into trust, opening a slow path toward restoring Indian country in Alaska.
January 30, 2026 The current BIA list confirms 575 federally recognized tribes, 229 of them in Alaska.

Alaska Native Cultures Today

Subsistence is the daily reality behind all of the legal argument. Whaling crews in Utqiaġvik and Point Hope, salmon fishing on the Yukon and Kuskokwim, seal and walrus hunting, berry picking, and moose and caribou harvests still feed rural households where store food arrives by plane and costs several times what it does in Anchorage.

Cultural practice stayed alive through the worst of the boarding school era. Southeast Alaska clans still hold Tlingit potlatch ceremonies, and Celebration in Juneau has drawn thousands of dancers every other year since 1982. The World Eskimo-Indian Olympics in Fairbanks tests traditional athletic skills tied to hunting and survival. The Alaska Federation of Natives convention each fall is the largest yearly gathering of Native people in the United States.

Alaska Native art remains one of the strongest continuous traditions in North America. Yup'ik and Iñupiat carvers still work in ivory, baleen, and bone. Tlingit and Haida artists carve totem poles and bentwood boxes and weave Chilkat and Ravenstail robes. Unangax̂ weavers make rye grass baskets fine enough to hold water. Athabascan beadwork on moose hide continues in Interior villages, and skin sewing keeps people warm where no factory parka is good enough.

Frequently Asked Questions

How many federally recognized tribes are in Alaska?

There are 229 federally recognized Alaska Native tribal entities as of January 1, 2026. The Bureau of Indian Affairs list published January 30, 2026 confirms that count out of 575 federally recognized tribes nationwide.

Are there Indian reservations in Alaska?

Only one. The Annette Islands Reserve at Metlakatla, home of the Metlakatla Indian Community, is the sole federal Indian reservation in Alaska. ANCSA revoked the others in 1971.

Did the United States sign treaties with Alaska Native tribes?

No. Not a single treaty was ever signed with an Alaska Native tribe. Alaska Native rights rest on federal statutes, court rulings, and administrative decisions rather than treaty language.

What is the difference between an Alaska Native corporation and a tribe?

A tribe is a sovereign government with authority over its citizens, child welfare cases, courts, and programs. An ANCSA corporation is a state-chartered business owned by Native shareholders that holds land and pays dividends. They are separate organizations with separate leadership, and a person can belong to both.

When were Alaska Native villages officially recognized as tribes?

The Interior Department published a clarifying list on October 21, 1993 confirming 226 Alaska villages and entities as tribes with the same status as tribes in the lower 48. Congress locked that in with the Federally Recognized Indian Tribe List Act of November 2, 1994.

Why does Alaska have so many tribes compared with other states?

Alaska tribes are organized at the village level rather than consolidated into larger nations. Communities were separated by enormous distances with no roads, and federal policy never forced them onto shared reservations, so each village kept its own government.

To read about specific peoples, villages, and communities, start with the alphabetical directories above or visit the Alaskan Natives homepage.