Alaska Natives Sharply Divided Over How to Administer Lands

They service oil rigs, log old-growth forests, manage hotels and build subdivisions in Anchorage and Alexandria, Va. They are Alaska’s native corporations, created by Congress in the image of Wall Street and entrusted with nearly $1 billion and 44 million acres of Indian, Aleut and Eskimo homelands.

December marked the 20th anniversary of federal legislation that created the corporations in the nation’s largest land settlement.

Today 75,000 Alaskan native shareholders remain sharply divided about what the settlement has wrought, and whether the land should remain under corporate control.

The corporations have created wealth for a generation of native business people, who are veterans of boardroom, courtroom and proxy battles. But the corporations generally have not created many jobs in rural areas, where most shareholders live, and only a few have consistently paid substantial cash dividends.

The Alaska Native Claims Settlement Act of 1971 represented a unique chapter in federal Indian policy, an alternative to what some Alaskan native leaders and members of Congress perceived as a failed reservation system for Indians and bungled trustee efforts by the federal Bureau of Indian Affairs.

The act extinguished all aboriginal claims to the state’s fish and game and turned natives into shareholders in a labyrinth of 13 regional and more than 200 village corporations. The 13th corporation, formed after the settlement, is based in Washington state and represents Alaskan natives in the Lower 48.

The corporations face the greatest opposition in interior and western Alaska, where Eskimos and Athabascan Indians are trying to retain traditional hunting and fishing lifestyles even as a modern cash economy sweeps over their villages.

In these regions, a potent sovereignty movement has taken hold and seeks to reclaim hunting and fishing rights lost in the settlement, to gain the political power of tribal government and to transfer corporate land to traditional village councils.

“Get the land back to tribal hands,” Don Wright, an Athabascan leader who aided several tribal councils in taking control of settlement acreage, said to loud applause at a native convention in October. “Get the land back into the hands of the people, or you’ll lose it.”

Others see the corporations as a success, enabling natives to wield unparalleled economic and political clout. They want the corporations to keep the land. They are seeking new federal protection to repel hostile takeover bids and are trying to find ways to pass stock to native youths largely excluded from the settlement.

“Our responsibility is to pass on the land, so that they (children) have an identity and a culture that comes with it,” said Morris Thompson, president of Doyon Inc., a corporation based in Fairbanks.

But other natives said they see a day when they might sell stock and cash in their stake in the settlement.

“It’s time to put the beads and feathers away and integrate our people into the 20th Century,” said Frank Pagano, president of Koniag Inc., a corporation representing the Kodiak Island area.

During the next year, the Alaska Federation of Natives, a statewide association of Indian, Aleuts and Eskimos, will meet in attempts to reach a consensus on how the act should be reformed.