Donlin Gold and the Politics of Extraction: Navigating Indigenous Sovereignty, Native Corporations, and Subsistence in Southwestern Alaska

This article examines the Donlin Gold mining project in Alaska’s Central Kuskokwim region—one of North America's largest proposed gold mines—where Indigenous self-determination intersects with large-scale resource extraction and subsistence lifeways. Located on lands owned by Alaska Native corporations under the Alaska Native Claims Settlement Act, Donlin illustrates the complex roles community members navigate as both shareholders in for-profit corporations and stewards of ancestral territories. Drawing on two decades of ethnographic research, the article traces the region’s transformation from a boundary between Central Yup’ik and Northern Dene territories to a landscape shaped by demographic change, infrastructure expansion, and corporate governance. Rather than framing local responses as support or opposition, the article foregrounds the nuanced ways residents engage with the environmental, cultural, and economic dimensions of development. The Donlin case contributes to broader debates on Indigenous sovereignty, responsibility, and the moral economies of extraction in settler-colonial contexts.