The claim that the Alaska Permanent Fund Dividend (PFD) is every Alaskan’s rightful share of resource wealth is often dismissed as rhetorical. There is, after all, no contemporaneous legal text declaring the dividend a constitutional right. Yet law is not only written; it is lived, and in the lived experience of Alaskans, the dividend has functioned as something far more durable than a budgetary preference. It has become a de facto right. An established right earned, exercised, and sustained through decades of unbroken use and state acknowledgment.

In that sense, the people’s relationship to the PFD resembles a concept far older than Alaska itself: adverse possession. The doctrine by which long, open and continuous use ripens into ownership. It is among humanity’s oldest instruments for reconciling law with reality, recognizing that possession, if honest and enduring, creates its own title.

Historical Legacy of Possession as Ownership

The idea that possession becomes right reaches back to Roman law, which held that uninterrupted use of land, usucapion, perfects ownership where formal title is uncertain. English common law preserved that principle, not as theft but as justice. A lord who abandoned his land and allowed another to farm, fence, and steward it for generations could not later reclaim it. Remember, “possession is nine points of the law,” as documented in English law. The law, favoring peace and fairness, sided with the possessor. America’s frontier republics carried that moral logic westward, recognizing that use and stewardship, not dormant title, confer legitimacy.

Adverse possession was never a loophole; it was the law’s acknowledgment of reality over abstraction. When a claim is exercised openly, peaceably and with reliance, it ceases to be intrusion and becomes institution.

By distributing a portion of oil wealth directly to citizens, the PFD translated the abstract principle of common ownership into a tangible act of civic possession.

In Alaska, that same logic unfolded not on a private homestead but within a social compact between the state and its people, between sovereignty and ownership.

When Alaska Was the Possessor and Washington the Landlord

Alaska’s own history with the federal government reveals a recurring pattern of possession and usurpation that mirrors today’s struggle over the PFD.

After statehood, Alaska managed its fish and wildlife as a sovereign right until ANILCA and the Katie John rulings reasserted federal control. The Supreme Court’s United States v. Alaska decisions likewise stripped the state of submerged lands it long presumed to own. The Tongass Roadless Rule, Arctic lease withdrawals, and RS 2477 access disputes followed the same arc – decades of open, lawful use overturned by a superior authority.

It wasn’t until the John Sturgeon case (unanimous decision) when Alaska’s continuous, open, and acknowledged exercise of authority over its navigable waters affirmed the State’s sovereign ownership against federal encroachment.

Each case shows how reliance, practice, and stewardship can be erased when negative power redraws the map. The state’s recent treatment of the PFD repeats that pattern inwardly: after forty years of open, peaceful “possession” by the people, the state now reclaims what it once conceded to them. In this sense, Alaskans stand to their government as Alaska once stood to Washington. Alaskans are the possessors by practice, suddenly dispossessed by decree.

To now call the dividend discretionary, or worse, an entitlement, is like a landlord returning after generations to cast out the family that built the house, fenced the field, and paid the taxes.

Constitutional Foundation of Popular Sovereignty

Article I, Section 2, of Alaska’s Constitution begins not with government but with its limitations:

“All political power is inherent in the people. All government originates with the people, is founded upon their will only, and is instituted solely for the good of the people as a whole.”

This clause was not ornamental. The Framers, men and women shaped by colonial extraction, military dependency, and absentee corporate control, drafted it to ensure Alaska would never again be ruled as a resource colony. They paired it with Article VIII, the public-trust mandate declaring that the state’s resources “belong to the people for their common use.”

The Permanent Fund was the institutional child of that vision – the Dividend its moral fulfillment. By distributing a portion of oil wealth directly to citizens, the PFD translated the abstract principle of common ownership into a tangible act of civic possession. Each payment affirmed that government serves the people and that the wealth of the land belongs to the people.

The Dividend as Civic Adverse Possession

For more than forty years, Alaskans possessed their dividend openly, continuously, and without interruption. They have relied upon it in family budgets, woven it into civic identity, and built institutions around its regularity. The state not only acquiesced but celebrated the practice by funding it annually, embedding it in law, and proclaiming it as proof that Alaska’s wealth served its people.

This is how usage matures into ownership under Article VIII’s principle of common benefit: through peaceful, continuous enjoyment unopposed by the sovereign trustee. In this case, the State, holding title in trust for the people, stood for four decades while Alaskans exercised beneficial use. Over time, that beneficial use ripened from a moral claim into a constitutional reality, embodying the people’s rightful possession of what was always held for their common good.

To now call the dividend discretionary, or worse, an entitlement, is like a landlord returning after generations to cast out the family that built the house, fenced the field, and paid the taxes.

When lawmakers repeatedly affirm a right and citizens rely upon it for generations, that practice gains the weight of customary law and breaking it becomes a breach of trust.

The Breach: When Stewardship Becomes Proprietorship

When the Legislature replaced the statutory dividend formula with the Percent-of-Market-Value draw in 2018, it did more than adjust a budget. It overturned forty years of settled expectation; a covenant between the people and their government. The POMV blurred the line between trustee and owner, letting the state treat common and generational wealth as its own and decide unilaterally what share, if any, reached its rightful beneficiaries.

In moral and constitutional terms, this was a trespass against the people’s possession. The state, once steward, became proprietor. The dividend, once a symbol of equality, became a tool of fiscal convenience.

Such reversal is not merely political; it violates the equitable logic of Article I, where power and benefit flow from the people upward, not downward. When lawmakers repeatedly affirm a right and citizens rely upon it for generations, that practice gains the weight of customary law and breaking it becomes a breach of trust.

De Facto Constitution

Constitutions live not only in text but in practice. The written Alaska Constitution sets principles; the lived constitution, the one practiced in homes, communities, and yearly deposits, gives them life.

By this lived constitution, the dividend has become a form of civic title, earned by use, confirmed by time, and protected by expectation. To diminish it without consent is to alter Alaska’s social contract without amending its constitution.

The genius of the PFD was that it turned wealth into citizenship. Each payment was a signature reaffirming who owns the state. After more than forty years, that ritual is part of Alaska’s constitutional DNA; its de facto law of possession. If Article I declares all political power inherent in the people, the dividend is the continuous exercise of that power. It is not charity, and it is not debt. It is ownership in motion.

Conclusion

Adverse possession exists so that the law will not ignore reality. Alaska’s reality is plain: its people have, for nearly half a century, possessed and exercised their share of the common wealth openly, continuously, and with the state’s full acknowledgment.

To now call that possession a privilege is to deny the very sovereignty the constitution was written to protect. The PFD may lack statutory guarantee, but it has gained something stronger – the quiet title of custom, equity, and faith.

The real question before Alaska is not whether the dividend is owed, but whether the State will honor the right it once recognized and the possession it long affirmed; the people’s continuous, rightful, and lived claim to what has always been theirs by creation, by covenant, and by use.

The views expressed here are those of the author.

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