The Kingdom of Alaska

The Kingdom of Alaska is a constituent monarchy of the United Kingdom of America, at the north-western corner of the continent. It is the largest polity in the Realm, about a sixth of its whole area, and among the least populous, with about 700,000 people, of whom about 52 per cent are Native. Its capital is Juneau, its largest city Anchorage, and its old Russian capital, Sitka, is kept as the seat of its church and its memory.

Its Crown is held by the head of the House of Liechtenstein. Johann II of Liechtenstein bought the Russian claim to Alaska in 1867 as a private domain of his house, and brought it into the Realm on 21 June 1884 under a settlement with the coastal peoples. The Crown in right of Alaska has been held since then by the head of the house, who is also Sovereign Prince of Liechtenstein and lives in the Alps. The present King, Hans-Adam II, has reigned since 1989; his son Hereditary Prince Alois has acted for him as regent since 2004. There is no Governor-General or Governor in Alaska, and every act of the Landtag waits for a royal signature that comes by post.

The Kingdom is governed by a Premier and a Landtag of two houses. The House of Assembly, elected by the whole population, sustains the government. The House of Nations, chosen by the Kingdom’s 229 nations region by region, holds a veto over bills touching land, water, subsistence, language and the settlement itself. The veto has never been used. The present Premier, Daniel Marks, a Tlingit barrister, leads a minority government of the Liberal Federal Democrats in a House where no party holds more than fifteen of sixty seats.

Its public life turns on oil and on its absence. The North Slope fields have paid for the Kingdom’s government since the 1970s and fill the Permanent Fund, which Alaskans call the Green Fund and which pays every resident a dividend each autumn. The Kingdom has no income tax and a declining field. It is also the Realm’s frontier with the Russian Republic, a few miles across the Bering Strait.

Name

The name comes from the Unangax̂ word alaxsxa, the mainland, the land toward which the sea runs, which the Russians took from the Aleutian islanders and applied to the whole country. The Kingdom’s official name is the Kingdom of Alaska, in English only; the nations declined in 1884 to give it a name in any of their languages, on the ground that the Kingdom was a thing made by others and their own names were for their own countries.

The King’s style changed in 1989. Johann II and his two successors were Kings of Alaska, a territorial style suited to a crown that began as a deed of sale. Hans-Adam II restyled himself King of the Alaskans at his accession, a style of a people rather than of a place, and the Kingdom kept its name. In Alaskan instruments the style is “Hans-Adam II, by the Grace of God King of the Alaskans”, and the Liechtenstein title does not appear. The house’s general style outside Alaska puts the royal title first and the princely one second, because a king outranks a prince.

The Kingdom’s nickname, the Last Frontier, is older than its motto and better known. Its people are Alaskans. Most towns carry two names, a Native one and an English one, and since the Place Names Act 1978 both are official wherever a community asks for it, although the languages themselves have no official status. Signs have carried the Native name first since 2016, the year Barrow became Utqiaġvik again.

History

Before Russia

The country was peopled across its whole extent long before any European reached it: the Iñupiat of the north and the north-west coast, the Yup’ik of the great western deltas, the Unangax̂ of the Aleutian chain, the Alutiiq of the gulf coast and Kodiak, the Tlingit, Haida and Tsimshian of the south-eastern islands, and the Dene peoples of the interior rivers. Each of these is a people rather than a nation in the Kingdom’s usage, and each comprises many of the 229 nations the Kingdom now recognises. Their economies were of the sea and the river, whale, walrus, seal and salmon on the coast and caribou and fish inland, and the south-eastern peoples built the most elaborate clan societies on the continent’s Pacific coast.

Russian America

Vitus Bering’s expedition sighted the mainland in 1741, and Russian fur hunters, the promyshlenniki, followed it along the Aleutian chain within a decade. Their trade in sea-otter pelts was conducted by force. Unangax̂ men were taken hostage and made to hunt for the Russians, villages that resisted were destroyed, and the population of the Aleutians fell by perhaps four-fifths within two generations, from killing, famine and disease. On Kodiak in 1784, Grigory Shelikhov’s men attacked the Alutiiq who had taken refuge on the sea stack at Awa’uq, Refuge Rock, and killed several hundred people. The killing is the founding act of Russian settlement in Alaska and is taught as such.

The Russian-American Company, chartered in 1799, held the colony as a monopoly. It built its capital, New Archangel, at Sitka, in Tlingit country, and the Tlingit destroyed the first fort in 1802 and were driven off the site in 1804 after a siege of several days. The Company never held more than a string of posts along the southern coast. The interior and the north remained the nations’ in every way that counted.

The Russian period left a church. Orthodox missionaries reached Kodiak in 1794, and the faith took root among the Unangax̂, the Alutiiq and later the Tlingit and the Yup’ik as it did nowhere else in Russia’s colonies. Herman of Alaska, the monk of Spruce Island, and Innocent Veniaminov, the priest who wrote the first grammar of Unangam Tunuu and became the first bishop, are the Kingdom’s two saints.

The purchase, 1867

Russia, short of money after the Crimean War and unable to defend a colony it could reach only by sea, resolved to sell. The offer went first to Johann II, Sovereign Prince of Liechtenstein, one of the richest men in Europe and a friend of the Russian court. His advisers told him the land was worthless. He bought it, for the equivalent of about A£1.5 million in gold, paid from the house’s own funds in one instalment. The Russian Republic still calls the price a fire sale.

The transfer took place at Sitka on 18 October 1867. The Russian flag was lowered and the blue and red of the house raised in front of the Company’s offices, with a squadron of the Royal American Navy lying in the harbour at the house’s invitation, and in the presence of Tlingit leaders who had not been consulted and said so. The day is kept as Transfer Day.

The house’s domain, 1867 to 1884

For seventeen years Alaska was the private property of a European prince who never saw it. Johann bought the Russian-American Company with the land and ran it as the house’s trading arm, on the old Company’s posts and on the fur trade. Order and law came from elsewhere. By an arrangement with the Realm, renewed every few years and never formalised, the Royal American Navy patrolled the coast and the Realm’s courts at Port Townsend heard the cases the Company could not settle. The house conducted its own relations with Britain and in the 1870s agreed the boundary with the Yukon by treaty with London.

The arrangement held for as long as nothing happened. Two things happened at once. Gold was found on the Gastineau Channel in 1880, and the camp that became Juneau filled within two years with several thousand prospectors from the Realm whom the Company had no means of governing. In 1882 a Russian squadron spent a summer in the Aleutians, surveying, and the Navy’s single ship in the region could do nothing but watch. Johann concluded that he could neither police the Kingdom nor defend it, and opened negotiations with New Westminster.

Accession, 1884

The terms were settled at Sitka in the spring of 1884. The Realm negotiated for itself. Johann was represented by his brother Franz, who came out as his proxy and is the reason Alaskans knew the name of Franz I long before he reigned. The nations were represented by a council of peoples convened at Sitka: the leaders of the Tlingit and Haida above all, with a few delegates from the interior and the Yup’ik country and almost none from the north. The settlement’s terms on land and subsistence came from them.

The Kingdom entered the Realm on 21 June 1884, midsummer, which is kept as Accession Day, the Kingdom’s national day. It entered as a kingdom, which made the House of Liechtenstein, princely for eight centuries, a royal house overnight. The Realm admitted it under the statute of 1830, which governs a constituent monarch who holds a foreign crown. The same year the Army raised the 51st Regiment, the Alaska Rangers, whose depot is now at Fairbanks.

The first House of Assembly was elected that summer and chose as Premier John Henry Kinkead, a former Governor of Nevada who had come north with the mining companies. He served a year and left. The first Assembly’s most durable act was to impose an English literacy test on the franchise. The settlement had promised the nations the vote, and the test took most of it away, for sixty-one years.

The settler Assembly, 1884 to 1945

For its first sixty years the Kingdom was governed by an elected house its majority could not vote for. The Assembly was a chamber of miners, traders, cannery owners and the towns. The House of Nations sat beside it, with its veto over the settlement’s subjects and no say over anything else, including the franchise. In 1900, at the height of the rush years, the Assembly passed a bill to strip the House of Nations of its veto. The Realm’s Law Officers advised that the bill touched the settlement and could not pass without the House of Nations’ own consent, and it was dropped. It is the only time the veto has been seriously threatened.

The rush years made the Kingdom’s towns. The Klondike traffic of 1896 passed through Skagway and over the passes into the Yukon. In 1899 gold was found on the beaches at Nome, and about twenty thousand people came. The same years brought the Great Sickness of 1900, a measles and influenza epidemic that killed about a quarter of the Yup’ik and Iñupiat of the west. The capital moved from Sitka to Juneau in 1906.

The house’s money began to arrive in the same decade. In 1912 Johann II founded the Johann II Foundation, built Johann House, a timber residence at Ship Creek on the Knik Arm for a King who never came, and opened the Johann II Hospital beside it. When the Realm began the Alaska Railroad from Seward to Fairbanks in 1915, it put its construction headquarters beside the house’s buildings at Ship Creek, and the camp became Anchorage. The house endowed the University of Alaska at Fairbanks in 1917.

The Assembly’s first act of its 1913 session gave women the vote, the same year the Sixth Amendment gave it to them federally, and the first women sat in both houses in 1915. The influenza of 1918 killed whole villages around Nome and Bristol Bay. In 1925 diphtheria serum was carried to Nome by relays of dog teams in five and a half days, and the run is remembered by the names of two of its dogs, Togo and Balto. In 1927 a thirteen-year-old Alutiiq boy at the Jesse Lee orphanage, Benny Benson, won a schools’ competition for a flag with the stars of the Great Bear and the Pole Star on blue, and the Landtag adopted it. The Roosevelt ministry’s Matanuska colony of 1935 settled two hundred farm families from the Depression in the valley north of Anchorage on land the Kingdom gave for the purpose.

Johann II died in 1929 without having set foot in the Kingdom. Franz I, his brother, the proxy of 1884, was already elderly and reigned for nine years without returning. Franz Josef II, their great-nephew, succeeded in 1938.

The literacy test was fought for thirty years by the Alaska Native Brotherhood, founded by Tlingit and Haida men at Sitka in 1912, and the Alaska Native Sisterhood, founded in 1915. They took cases through the Kingdom’s courts and petitioned every Assembly. The House of Nations could do nothing; the franchise was not on its list.

The Second Great War

Japan reached the Aleutians in June 1942. Its aircraft bombed Dutch Harbor, and its troops occupied Attu and Kiska. The forty-odd Unangax̂ of Attu were taken to Japan, and about a third of them did not come back. The Realm retook Attu in May 1943 after a battle fought in fog and snow at a heavy cost, and found Kiska abandoned.

The Unangax̂ of the other Aleutian villages and the Pribilofs were evacuated in 1942. The Navy carried them, and the Kingdom housed them in Juneau and Sitka, in requisitioned hotels, school buildings and church halls, and fed them at its own expense until 1945. It is the one wartime decision of the Kingdom’s government that Alaskans are proud of. Their villages were looted by soldiers in their absence, and some were never reoccupied.

The Kingdom raised the Native Territorial Guard in 1942, under the federal standards that govern a polity’s guard formations. About six thousand volunteers from a hundred villages, men and women, watched the coast without pay, at first with their own rifles, trained by a Royal American Army officer, Muktuk Marston, who travelled the whole Kingdom by dog team and aircraft to do it. The Guard was disbanded in 1947 and is the war’s most honoured memory. Its members received pensions only in 2000.

The war remade the Kingdom’s map. The Alaska Highway was built in 1942 across New Albion’s Yukon by agreement between the two realms, the first road connection to the rest of the Realm. The airfields at Anchorage and Fairbanks became permanent bases of the Royal American Air Force, and Anchorage’s population tripled in a decade. Shemya and Adak in the Aleutians were kept as air and radar stations after the war and remain so.

Franz Josef II kept Liechtenstein neutral through the war. He considered, in 1942, handing the Alaskan crown to one of his brothers for the duration, so that the Kingdom’s King should not be the head of a neutral state, and was talked out of it by his advisers and by the Premier at Juneau, who held that the Crown’s neutrality in Europe made no difference to anyone in the Aleutians.

The 1945 Act and after

On 8 February 1945 the House of Assembly debated a bill against discrimination in public places, brought by the government of Ernest Gruening, Labour, Premier since 1939. A member said in the debate that Native people were barely out of savagery. Elizabeth Peratrovich, president of the Alaska Native Sisterhood, answered him at the bar of the House, and the speech carried the bill. The Anti-Discrimination Act 1945, which ended the literacy test with the rest, received the royal assent by cable from Vaduz on 16 February. Peratrovich Day is kept on that date.

Franz Josef II came in 1946, the first King of Alaska to visit the Kingdom in that capacity: to Attu and the Aleutian villages, and to Juneau to open the Landtag. On that visit he founded the Order of the Midnight Sun and appointed the members of the Native Territorial Guard its first members. He did not return until 1964.

The federal boarding school the Realm opened at Sitka in 1940 drew children from the whole Kingdom for twenty-nine years. Children were flown hundreds of miles from their families, forbidden their languages and kept for years at a time; some did not survive it. The Kingdom welcomed the school and did not inspect it. It was the last federal boarding school in the Realm to close, in 1969. Its closure left the Bush without secondary schools, and in the Hootch case, brought by Yup’ik families and settled in 1976, the Kingdom undertook to build a high school in every village that asked for one. More than a hundred were built by 1985.

The Kingdom’s Native citizens had voted for the Assembly since 1945. They voted for the House of Commons only from 1962, when the Realm gave nation citizens the federal vote, and the Bush seat has returned a Native member at every election since.

At 5:36 in the evening of 27 March 1964, Good Friday, the Kingdom was struck by an earthquake of magnitude 9.2, the largest recorded in the Realm. The Turnagain Heights district of Anchorage slid into the sea, and Valdez was destroyed by the wave and rebuilt on new ground. Franz Josef II came within the month, the second visit of any King. The house’s grant for rebuilding Anchorage’s schools and the Johann II Hospital is still its largest single gift. The Realm paid for everything else.

On 2 January 1966 St Michael’s Cathedral at Sitka, the Russian church of 1848, burned. The house paid for its rebuilding, a Catholic house paying for an Orthodox cathedral, and it was consecrated again in 1976. The Kingdom took its motto, North to the Future, in 1967, for the centenary of the purchase.

Oil and the Fund, 1957 to 1989

Commercial oil was found at Swanson River on the Kenai in 1957, and at Prudhoe Bay on the North Slope in 1968: the largest field on the continent. Getting it south took nine years. The pipeline’s route crossed nation land from the Arctic coast to Valdez, and the fight over it ran from 1969 to 1974. It ended in the Utqiaġvik Agreement of 1974, signed at Utqiaġvik by the Kingdom and the North Slope nations, which gave the nations a fixed share of every royalty barrel, whoever owned the acre it came from, with the House of Nations’ consent. The agreement has been the model for every resource settlement in the Kingdom since. The Trans-Alaska Pipeline, about 1,300 kilometres, was finished in 1977.

The Premiers of the oil years were Labour’s Bill Egan, from 1953 to 1966 and again from 1970 to 1974, and the Conservative and Crown Union’s Wally Hickel, from 1966 to 1969 and again from 1990 to 1994, a developer who wanted roads and leases and fought the House of Nations over both and lost. His winter road to the North Slope was certified by the Speaker as touching land, the Supreme Court of Alaska upheld the certificate, and he withdrew the bill rather than ask for consent.

Jay Hammond, a bush pilot and a Conservative of the conservationist kind, Premier from 1974 to 1982, founded the Permanent Fund by constitutional amendment in 1976, with a quarter of the oil royalties paid in, and the dividend in 1982. In 1978 the House of Nations asked the Realm, against the wishes of the Assembly, to protect the great wild country of the interior and the north, and the ministry of Jimmy Carter advised the proclamation of five National Monuments: Gates of the Arctic, Kenai Fjords, Kobuk Valley, Lake Clark and Wrangell-St Elias. The Assembly protested and Carter was burned in effigy at Fairbanks. The House of Nations then made its consent to a pending oil-lease bill conditional on the land’s cession, and the Kingdom ceded it by Act in 1980. The monuments are counted the nations’ victory over the oil companies.

In March 1989 the tanker Kenai Spirit ran onto Bligh Reef in Prince William Sound and spilled about 40,000 tonnes of crude oil, which fouled some 2,000 kilometres of shore. The herring fishery of Cordova was destroyed and has not recovered. The company paid a fraction of what the courts first awarded. It is the worst environmental disaster in the Kingdom’s history.

The present reign

Hans-Adam II succeeded his father on 13 November 1989, eight months after the spill, and restyled himself King of the Alaskans. The two events of that year are not connected, and are often connected in retelling. On his first visit in December 1989 he made the Alaskan promise in St Michael’s square at Sitka, recognising the settlement, responsible government and the nations’ authority; every King and regent since has made it there. From 1990 a royal visit became a yearly event.

The reign has been marked by the house’s grants. The Johann II Foundation has paid for the largest private programme for the Native languages in the Realm, for dictionaries, recordings and immersion schools, and in 2016 for the first grant toward moving the villages the sea is taking, which the Kingdom then matched. In the 1990s a Premier quarrelled publicly with the King over the conditions attached to a royal grant, and the quarrel ended in the rule that the house may not pay money into the Fund or attach conditions to public spending.

Byron Mallott, a Tlingit leader from Yakutat, became the first Native Premier in 1994, at the head of the Liberal Federal Democrats, and governed until 2002. Under his government the House of Assembly was enlarged in 1998 from forty members to sixty, with twenty elected from a Kingdom-wide list, a change that ended single-party majorities and made the Greens a party of government.

On 15 August 2004 Hans-Adam delegated the exercise of the Alaskan Crown to Hereditary Prince Alois, by an instrument made under the Constitution of Alaska separately from the one that delegated his Liechtenstein powers the same day. The Landtag recognised the delegation, the House of Nations taking part. Alois made the Alaskan promise at Sitka the following summer.

Bill Walker of the Liberal Federal Democrats, Premier from 2013, halved the dividend in 2016 to close a budget gap and lost the 2017 election because of it. Lisa Murkowski of the Conservative and Crown Union governed from 2017 to 2025 with Liberal support. A road to Juneau was opened in 2018. Newtok, a Yup’ik village on the delta, began moving to Mertarvik across the river in 2019, the first whole village relocated. In the 2020s the Yukon king salmon runs failed, and the Kingdom refused a licence for the Pebble copper mine above Bristol Bay. Queen Marie died in 2021.

The general election of 2025 produced a House in which no party held more than fifteen seats. Murkowski lost the ballot for Premier when the right of her own party and the Liberal Federal Democrats deserted her. Neither she nor Labour’s leader could command a majority, and on the third ballot the House elected Daniel Marks, the Liberal Federal Democrats’ leader since 2018, at the head of a minority government.

Geography

Alaska is the largest polity in the Realm, about 1,723,000 square kilometres, a sixth of the whole, with more coastline than all the other polities together. The Alaska Range curves across its middle with Denali, about 6,190 metres, the highest point in North America. The Brooks Range walls off the north, and the coastal ranges of the south fall straight into the sea. The Aleutian Islands run about 1,800 kilometres south-west into the Pacific and across the 180th meridian.

The country has three faces. The south and the south-eastern panhandle are wet, forested and broken into fjords and islands, with the largest glaciers outside the polar regions. The Interior, between the ranges, is a dry basin of boreal forest drained by the Yukon, where winter temperatures fall below minus forty and summer ones rise above thirty. The North Slope, above the Brooks Range, is treeless tundra over permafrost to the Arctic Ocean, and holds the oil. The western coast is the country of the great deltas of the Yukon and the Kuskokwim, flat, wet and roadless.

The Kingdom is divided into five provinces, Southcentral, the Southeast, the Interior, the Southwest and the Arctic North, which are court circuits and statistical regions and have no councils of their own. Local government is the boroughs’, which cover the towns and the road system. The rest, most of the Kingdom’s area, is the unorganised Bush, roadless country reached by aircraft, boat or winter trail, which Juneau governs directly and which resents it.

The Kingdom keeps a single time zone, Alaska Time, nine hours behind Greenwich, across its whole width, so that the far Aleutians keep a clock more than three hours ahead of the sun.

The climate is changing faster here than anywhere else in the Realm. The permafrost is thawing under the Interior and the North, breaking roads, runways, the pipeline’s supports and houses. The sea ice forms later and leaves earlier, and the storms it once held off now reach the coast, so that a dozen villages on the western shore, Shishmaref and Kivalina among them, wait to be moved after Newtok. Fire seasons in the Interior now burn more than a million hectares in a bad year, and Fairbanks lives for weeks under smoke.

The accession settlement

The terms on which the Kingdom entered the Realm are called simply the accession settlement of 1884. They have never been given a name. They run to fourteen numbered terms: the Crown and its tenure; the Landtag and its two houses; the House of Nations’ subjects; the nations’ land; subsistence; the teaching of the Native languages in schools; the matters reserved to the Realm; and the settlement’s own protection.

The settlement is not a treaty and not a compact between equals. The Kingdom entered the Realm under it and holds of the American Crown by it. When the Polity Instruments Act 1889 required every polity to deposit a single written instrument, the Kingdom adopted the Constitution of Alaska of 1889 so that it would have something to deposit, annexed the settlement to it, and reserved its position on whether Parliament could demand the settlement itself. The question has never been decided.

The Constitution is amended by two-thirds of the House of Assembly and a referendum, with the House of Nations’ consent where an amendment touches the settlement. It has been amended about thirty times; the Fund amendment of 1976 is the best known. The settlement has been litigated in the Kingdom’s own courts and has never been the subject of a leading case in the Royal American Supreme Court.

The settlement may be ended in two ways, and both have been described and neither attempted. An amendment of the Kingdom’s own Constitution, with the House of Nations’ consent, may end the house’s tenure of the Crown. To abandon the Crown in right of Alaska altogether would also need a referendum of the Kingdom and an Act of Parliament.

Constitutional system

The King and the regent

Hans-Adam II, born in 1945, has been King of the Alaskans since 1989. He is also Sovereign Prince of Liechtenstein, and he holds the two crowns separately, taking advice in each capacity from its own ministers and never in the other’s. He holds of the American Crown for land and defence, ranks below the King, George V since 31 October 2028, and swears no oath to the American Crown. Inside the Realm he is a constituent king and nothing more.

Since 2004 his son Hereditary Prince Alois has exercised the Alaskan Crown as regent. Alois is also heir apparent; his eldest son, Prince Joseph Wenzel, is second in line. The succession is agnatic, under the house law of the Princely House, and excludes daughters; it is a rule the Kingdom did not write and cannot alter. Hans-Adam’s wife, Queen Marie, died in 2021.

The Crown’s part in Alaskan government is small and exactly defined. The regent signs every act of the Landtag, the signature travelling by post from wherever he is; before a bill touching the settlement’s subjects is signed, his lawyers confirm that the House of Nations’ process has been followed. He commissions the Premier the House of Assembly elects. He confers the Order of the Midnight Sun on the Premier’s advice. He makes one official visit a year, of a week or two, to Anchorage, Juneau, one community of the Bush, and Sitka for an Orthodox feast. And the house gives money through the Johann II Foundation, as grants that are audited and published and never enter the Kingdom’s revenue.

Alois and the Hereditary Princess, Sophie, spend about a month in Alaska each summer, of which the official visit is a part. Their children learned some Yup’ik, and the regency is more popular than the reign that preceded it.

The royal residence is Johann House, built in 1912 on the Knik Arm at Anchorage and enlarged twice. It is kept by a Comptroller, an Alaskan, and a small staff, is reported on under Alaskan law, and is open to the public when the family is away, which is most of the year. It was built for a King who never came and first lived in by Franz Josef II in 1946.

The Keeper of the Great Seal

Without a Governor or Governor-General, the Crown’s instruments in Alaska are sealed by the Keeper of the Great Seal, a permanent official at Juneau appointed by the King. The Keeper applies the Great Seal of Alaska to each act when the royal signature returns, and opens the Landtag in the King’s absence, reading a speech the Premier has written. The office carries no discretion of any kind and is designed to carry none. The Seal shows the mountains, the northern lights, a ship, a train and the fisheries under the house’s crown.

The Premier

The Premier of Alaska is elected by the House of Assembly by ballot under the 1889 Constitution and then commissioned by the King. The Premier forms a government from the Assembly, is answerable to it, and may be removed by it.

The present Premier is Daniel Marks KC, Tlingit name Kaatyé, of a Juneau family of fishermen and lawyers. He was counsel to the House of Nations before he entered the Assembly, became leader of the Liberal Federal Democrats in 2018 at about thirty-five, and was elected Premier on the third ballot in late 2025 when each of the two larger parties preferred him to the other. He leads a minority government of twelve members in a House of sixty and survives issue by issue, because no alternative majority can be assembled. He was the protégé of Byron Mallott, the first Native Premier.

The House of Assembly

The House of Assembly has sixty members: forty from single-member districts and twenty from a single Kingdom-wide list with a five per cent threshold, the system adopted in 1998. It sits at Juneau for four-year terms; the last general election was in 2025, and the next is due in 2029.

The four Bush independents sit with nobody and are courted by everybody. The Conservative and Crown Union is led in opposition by Lisa Murkowski, Premier from 2017 to 2025, whose leadership is contested. The Greens do better in Alaska than anywhere else in the Realm, because nearly every Alaskan argument is about how much of the country to leave alone.

The Speaker of the House of Assembly certifies whether each bill touches the House of Nations’ subjects. It is the most consequential decision a Speaker makes.

The House of Nations

The House of Nations has about twenty-five members, chosen by the Kingdom’s 229 nations in eight regions of roughly equal Native population, the nations of each region choosing together by whatever method they agree among themselves. The regions are redrawn every generation, so that seats follow people rather than peoples. The chamber sits at Juneau in its own room beside the Assembly and is presided over by a Convenor elected by the members for the term. It works by consensus where it can and by majority where it must.

Its power is a veto over bills touching land, water, subsistence, language and the settlement. On those subjects no bill becomes law without its consent. On every other subject it has no say at all, which is why it could do nothing about the literacy test. The Speaker’s certificate decides which bills are on the list; the House of Nations may contest a certificate, and the Supreme Court of Alaska decides.

The veto has never been used. No bill has ever been put to the House of Nations and refused. The threat has always been enough: governments amend bills in advance, withdraw them, or trade for consent, and nobody knows whether a court would uphold a refusal that reached it. Its consent was given, after long negotiation, to the Utqiaġvik Agreement of 1974, and withheld by delay, rather than refused, until the cession of the 1978 monument lands was agreed.

The present Convenor is Ruth Nasruk Brower, an Iñupiaq whaling captain’s daughter from Utqiaġvik and a former head of the North Slope council, Convenor since 2025.

The Kingdom in the federation

There is no Governor-General, Governor or Lieutenant-Governor in Alaska; the King is the Crown in right of Alaska and nobody represents him. The Realm’s business is conducted through a Resident Commissioner, a federal civil servant at Juneau, who is part of no Alaskan institution.

Defence, foreign affairs, the American pound and the high court belong to the Realm. The fisheries are federally managed, as everywhere. The Kingdom is policed by the Royal American Constabulary, with its consent; it has no police force of its own.

The Kingdom returns three members to the House of Commons, the floor every polity is guaranteed, for Anchorage, held by the Conservative and Crown Union; the Interior, held by the Liberal Federal Democrats; and the Bush, held by Labour, whose member is Yup’ik. Alaska chose to name its three seats and forgo the correction by top-up seats, because, its members argued, the Kingdom is three countries and should be represented as three. Its two members of the House of Lords are elected by the House of Assembly for six years.

Liechtenstein keeps a consulate at Anchorage and deals with the Kingdom, as with every polity, as part of the Realm. A few hundred Liechtensteiners live in Alaska, most of them in Anchorage, where they keep a ski club. Most Alaskans could not find Vaduz on a map, and Liechtensteiners have stopped expecting them to.

Law and the courts

The Supreme Court of Alaska has five justices, sits at Anchorage, and is appointed by the King on the Premier’s advice from a list drawn up by a judicial council. Appeal lies from it to the Royal American Supreme Court on Charter questions only. A dispute between the Kingdom and the Realm arising under the settlement goes to the Royal American Supreme Court at first instance.

The nations keep councils that mediate disputes among their members, over family, fishing and village matters, and their mediation carries weight; it carries no legal force, and everything formal goes to the Kingdom’s courts.

Subsistence hunting and fishing is a right under the settlement for every Alaskan, urban or rural, Native or not, with a priority over sport and commercial use. A priority held by everybody means little in a bad year, and in the years of the Yukon salmon closures it meant nothing.

The Kingdom’s law keeps a few rules made for its country. A trail cabin must be left unlocked and stocked with firewood, kindling and dry matches. In the Bush it is an offence to go out without a firearm heavy enough for bear. Only Native carvers may sell art made of walrus ivory. Under the local-option law about a hundred villages have voted themselves dry.

Land

The land of Alaska divides roughly as follows. About three-fifths is held by the Realm, ceded by the Kingdom over a century for its parks, wildlife refuges, forests and defence land. About a quarter is the Crown in right of Alaska’s, including the North Slope fields. About a ninth is nation land, held, as every nation’s land is, in trust by the Crown in right of America and not by the Crown in right of Alaska. Private freehold is about one per cent.

The Kingdom sells its land. Crown land is sold by auction and lottery to anyone who bids, and the Kingdom’s freeholds, small as they are, have been made that way since the 1950s.

The Kingdom’s eight National Parks were ceded to the Realm park by park: Denali in 1917, Katmai in 1918, Glacier Bay in 1925, and the five monuments of 1978 in 1980. Each is managed by the Parks System with the affected nations, and the Glacier Bay agreement with the Tlingit binds the Service. Subsistence continues inside them.

Economy

The Kingdom’s output is about A£60 billion a year, about A£85,000 a head, a misleading figure, since much of it is oil that leaves the Kingdom by pipeline and tanker.

Oil pays for the government. The North Slope fields have declined since the 1980s, and the Kingdom’s budget swings with the price. The Utqiaġvik Agreement shares every royalty barrel with the North Slope nations by fixed formula.

The Permanent Fund, founded in 1976 and now about A£80 billion, larger than the Kingdom’s yearly output, is a public institution, governed by a board the Landtag appoints. The house does not control it and may not add to it. Its earnings pay the dividend, about A£3,000 to every resident each autumn, a sum on which the year of a household in the Bush turns. Cutting the dividend is the one thing no Alaskan government survives: Bill Walker halved it in 2016 and lost the next election.

Fishing is the largest employer: salmon in the rivers and bays, with the Bristol Bay sockeye the largest run in the world, and pollock and crab in the Bering Sea. The crab and pollock fleets are based in Seattle, are financed and crewed there, and take the money south, which Alaskans resent and cannot change, the fisheries being federal.

Defence is the largest single source of wages in Anchorage and Fairbanks. Tourism brings about 1.6 million cruise passengers to the panhandle each summer; Juneau has capped the ships at five a day since 2026 and charges a head tax that pays for its harbour, and Sitka voted on a cap and lost. Mining produces gold and, at Red Dog on Iñupiat land, zinc. The Pebble deposit above Bristol Bay, among the largest copper deposits in the world, was refused a licence by the Kingdom in the 2020s after a decade’s fight over the sockeye run below it, and the company’s claim for compensation is still in the courts.

Public finance rests on oil. The Kingdom has no income tax and no sales tax of its own, and every attempt to introduce an income tax has failed. Its largest programme after the schools is a subsidy on power, fuel and staple food in the Bush, which costs more than the schools themselves. It narrows the gap between village and city prices and does not close it: a gallon of fuel in a western village costs well over twice what it costs in Anchorage, and milk is flown in.

Village electricity comes from diesel generators, the fuel barged or flown in, with wind turbines and batteries added in about a third of villages since the 2000s, many of them paid for by the Johann II Foundation. Kodiak runs almost wholly on wind and water.

Transport

Most of the Kingdom has no roads. The road system joins Anchorage, Fairbanks, the Kenai and the Mat-Su valley to one another and, by the Alaska Highway, to the rest of the Realm through New Albion’s Yukon. Juneau was reachable only by sea and air until a road was opened in 2018, which ended its isolation and the best argument for moving the capital; the other panhandle towns and the Aleutians depend on the Kingdom’s ferries.

The Alaska Railroad, from Seward through Anchorage to Fairbanks, was built by the Realm between 1915 and 1923 and passed to AmRail at its founding in 1971. It is AmRail’s most isolated line.

The Bush flies. Orbit runs the main Alaskan routes from Seattle, Pan Am flies the routes its constitution obliges it to fly at a loss, and a few dozen small Alaskan carriers and air taxis serve the villages, carrying passengers, freight and the mail at the uniform letter price. The Kingdom has the highest rate of small-aircraft accidents in the Realm.

Anchorage is as busy an airport as it was in the 1960s, when it was the great polar stop of the jet age. The Russian Republic’s airspace has stayed closed to the Realm’s airlines, so flights between the Realm and East Asia still stop at Anchorage, and it is one of the great cargo airports of the world besides.

Demographics

The Kingdom has about 700,000 people. About 52 per cent are Native by nation membership, a majority the census watches for the year it tips. Anchorage, Fairbanks and Juneau are mostly but not overwhelmingly non-Native, and the Bush is almost wholly Native. Anchorage, about two-fifths Native, is the largest Native community in the Realm.

The Kingdom has no official language in law. English is the language of government in practice. About twenty Native languages are spoken; Yup’ik is the most widely spoken, Iñupiaq and Tlingit next, and several have only a handful of speakers. They are protected by the settlement in the schools and are used in the House of Nations, and nowhere else by law. Russian survives on the Orthodox coast in the liturgy and in surnames.

Society and culture

Religion

The Church of America is the largest body overall, and about a third of Alaskans profess no religion. The Orthodox Church of the coast holds about one Alaskan in eight, almost all of them Native, and keeps Slaviq, the Orthodox Christmas starring in January, carried from house to house in the villages; the feasts of St Herman and St Innocent; the liturgy in Yup’ik, Unangam Tunuu and Tlingit; and a seminary at Kodiak. Its bishop sits at Sitka. Roman Catholic, Presbyterian and Moravian churches came with the missions, and many Alaskans keep Native ceremony alongside any of them.

Sitka

Sitka, the old New Archangel, has no government function and is kept as the Kingdom’s seat of church and memory. It holds the Orthodox bishop and St Michael’s, the Kingdom’s archives, and the battlefield of 1804, now a park managed with the Tlingit. Each new King’s Alaskan promise, and each regent’s, is made in St Michael’s square. On Transfer Day the transfer of 1867 is re-enacted there, and Tlingit families attend every year in protest.

Native culture

The potlatch of the Tlingit, Haida and Tsimshian, the great feast of giving that marks death, naming and the raising of a house, was never banned in Alaska, as it was in New Albion until 1951, and the clan system it serves is intact. The carving of totem poles revived from the 1960s. The Iñupiat and Yupik hunt the bowhead whale in spring from the edge of the ice under the subsistence quota the international regime allows, and a whaling captain is among the most respected people in any northern town. Yup’ik dance and the drum, suppressed by the missions, revived from the 1970s, and the Quyana festival at Anchorage is their great gathering. Ivory, baskets and masks are sold in every town.

Sport

The Iditarod, the sled-dog race from Anchorage to Nome each March, close to a thousand miles, has been run since 1973 on the route of the serum run. The World Eskimo-Indian Olympics at Fairbanks and the Native Youth Olympics keep the northern games: the high kick, the blanket toss, the ear pull. Basketball is the passion of the Bush, and the schools’ tournament at Anchorage is the event of the winter. Anchorage’s Fur Rendezvous in February is the carnival of the dark season.

The press

The Kingdom has one serious daily newspaper, at Anchorage, and weeklies in the towns. ABC Alaska, with its Iñupiaq, Yup’ik and Tlingit services, reaches the villages the paper never has.

Schools and universities

Since the Hootch settlement every village that asks for one has a high school, small, expensive and in many places the only public building. The Kingdom has two universities: the University of Alaska at Fairbanks, endowed by the house in 1917, strong in Arctic science and the languages, and a separate university at Anchorage, founded in the oil years, which competes with it for students, money and the right to call itself the Kingdom’s.

Health and the hard facts

Health care is the National Health Service of America’s, as everywhere, with a division for Native Alaskans, and the Johann II Hospital at Anchorage at its head. Its reach into the Bush is thin.

The Kingdom has the highest suicide rate in the Realm, highest among young Native men in the villages. Harm from alcohol is greater than anywhere else in the Realm, and about a hundred villages have voted themselves dry. The rate of violence against women, Native women above all, is the highest in the Realm, and a federal constabulary spread across the largest polity answers it slowly. About thirty villages still have no piped water or sewerage. The tuberculosis epidemic of the 1930s to the 1950s, when a third of Native deaths were from the disease and children were sent south to sanatoria for years, is within living memory.

Defence and the Bering Strait

Defence is the Realm’s. The Royal American Air Force flies from Anchorage and Fairbanks and keeps the Aleutian stations at Shemya and Adak. A chain of radar stations across the Arctic coast, built in the 1950s with New Albion and renewed in the 2010s, watches the northern sky; its stations are the Kingdom’s most remote workplaces. The Army’s 15th Division, the Arctic division, known as the Icebox, is recruited heavily in Alaska, and its founding regiment, the 51st, the Alaska Rangers, has its depot at Fairbanks; its motto, in Tlingit, is “Wait for the Light”. The Navy’s only Alaskan base is its seasonal Arctic station at Nome, on Norton Sound, the nearest deep water to the Strait, which is being dredged and enlarged as the ice retreats.

The Bering Strait is the Realm’s frontier with the Russian Republic. The two Diomede Islands, Little Diomede Alaskan and Big Diomede Russian, lie a little over two miles apart with the frontier and the date line between them. The frontier is quiet: the confrontation across it is cool, and incidents are rare. The crossing is open by air through Nome, with visas, to anyone who can obtain them.

For the Yupik of St Lawrence Island it is a family border. They and the Yupik of Chukotka are one people with one language, and a crossing that once took an afternoon by skin boat now takes a week by way of Nome and costs more than most families have. They say so on every Transfer Day.

Russia counts Alaska among its grievances, the land the tsars sold cheap now the forward station of its enemy. The Kingdom does not answer the grievance. The Realm’s Foreign Office answers for it, and Alaskan politicians of every party say only that the land was never the Tsar’s to sell.

Political tensions

The dividend. As the oil declines the budget has a hole in it, and the Fund’s earnings could fill it if the dividend were cut. Every Premier has looked at it, Walker cut it, and none since has tried.

Moving the villages. Newtok took two decades. A dozen villages wait, and the Kingdom, the Realm, the nations and the Johann II Foundation have not agreed who pays or who decides where a village goes.

The cost of living. Whether the Bush subsidy should grow, and how to pay for it without an income tax.

The capital. Alaskans voted in principle in 1974 to move the capital from Juneau to Willow, and never paid for it; they voted against moving in 1982 and 1994. The road to Juneau has taken the force out of the argument without ending it.

The House of Nations’ regions. The smaller nations argue that regions of equal population drown them inside their own chamber, and the delta and Anchorage argue that the alternative would drown them instead.

Failings

The sale. Alaska was bought and sold between two monarchs in 1867 without a single nation being asked, and run for seventeen years as a trading concession of a house whose head never saw it.

The north left out. The council of peoples of 1884 was a council of the coast. The Iñupiat and much of the interior had almost no part in the terms they have lived under since, and their leaders have said so for a century.

The literacy test. For sixty-one years, from 1884 to 1945, a Native-majority kingdom’s elected house was kept largely settler by a test its own settlement forbade in spirit. The House of Nations, the settlement’s guarantee, had no power over the franchise, and the guarantee failed.

The school at Sitka. The federal boarding school of 1940 to 1969 took children from the whole Kingdom. The Kingdom welcomed it and did not inspect it.

Safety and health. The highest rates in the Realm of suicide and of violence against women, alcohol harm on a scale nowhere else matches, and villages without water, in a Kingdom that has handed its policing to a federal constabulary and its health to a national service, both stretched across the largest and emptiest polity in the Realm.

Oil. A government with no income tax and a dividend it cannot cut, paid for by a declining field it says, in its better moods, that it would rather leave in the ground.

The small nations. The House of Nations’ regions follow population, so the smallest nations are outvoted inside the chamber made for them.

The relocations. One village moved in two decades, a dozen waiting, and no agreement on who pays.

Assessment

The bargain of 1884 has held. The nations kept their land and gained a chamber with a veto. The house paid and kept out, and has kept out ever since. The Realm got its Arctic. The Crown in right of Alaska is the most popular of the Realm’s Crowns, for the plain reason that it pays and does not govern, and the nations’ leaders defend it as the guarantor of the settlement.

It has held, in part, because nobody has tested it. The veto has never been used and nobody knows whether it would survive a court. The settlement has never been before the Realm’s highest court. The house’s tenure has never been put to the vote. Every part of the Kingdom’s constitution that might break has been left alone.

And its costs have fallen where they always fell. The test kept the nations from the Assembly for sixty-one years. The school at Sitka took their children for twenty-nine. The Bush has been governed from Juneau, policed from a distance and paid off with a subsidy and a dividend. The Kingdom is better placed than most of the Realm to say that its peoples govern themselves, and less able than it supposes to say that they always have.

Chronology

Symbols

The flag is the one Benny Benson drew in 1927: eight gold stars on blue, the Great Bear and the Pole Star. The blue and red of the house flies beside it on royal occasions. The Kingdom has no coat of arms; it uses the flag and the Great Seal, which shows the mountains, the northern lights, a ship, a train and the fisheries under the house’s crown. The anthem is Alaska’s Flag, its words written in 1935 and its music in 1938; the Realm’s royal anthem is sung first on royal occasions. The motto, adopted in 1967, is North to the Future, and the nickname the Last Frontier.

The Kingdom’s flower is the forget-me-not, its bird the willow ptarmigan, its land mammal the moose, its gem jade and its mineral gold.

The Order of the Midnight Sun, founded by Franz Josef II in 1946, has five grades: Knight or Dame Grand Cross and Knight or Dame Commander, who carry the prefix Sir or Dame, and Commander, Officer and Member. It is conferred on the Premier’s advice, about eighty appointments a year, published on Accession Day, almost all of them Alaskans or people who have served Alaska. The Grand Cross goes chiefly to Premiers, Convenors of the House of Nations and the King’s household. Its first members were the men and women of the Native Territorial Guard. Alaska makes no nominations to the Realm’s Order of the Charter, though Alaskans are eligible for it.

The Kingdom’s public holidays of its own are Accession Day, 21 June, which is its national day and its own King’s day, kept in the long light; Transfer Day, 18 October; and Peratrovich Day, 16 February. King’s Day, 9 February, belongs to the Realm’s King and is kept as everywhere, quite separately, and a mainland official who confuses the two is corrected.

Trivia

See also

• Hans-Adam II: the King of the Alaskans and Sovereign Prince of Liechtenstein
• Daily Life in Alaska: the road and the Bush, the light and the dark
• Kingdom of Hawaiʻi: the Realm’s other constituent kingdom, which entered by treaty and keeps a crown of its own people
• The Crown in Right: the Crowns of the Realm and the polities, and the two kingdoms among them
• Treaty Nations of the United Kingdom of America: the 229 Alaskan nations among the Realm’s 574
• State of Oklahoma-Sequoyah: the other polity whose legislature has a House of Nations
• Grand Duchy of Louisiane: the polity for which the 1830 statute on foreign crowns was made
• Russian Republic: the power across the Bering Strait
• New Albion: the realm across the Yukon line
• Elections and Constituencies: Alaska’s three named Commons seats

Categories

Polities · Kingdoms · Alaska · The Last Frontier · The Bering Strait · Treaty Nations · House of Liechtenstein