The Tribes of Alaska
Corporate interests, Native rights and restoring Alaskan’s traditional values
Across America, corporate interests and traditional native values are clashing. We see it in the opposition to the Dakota Access Pipeline at Standing Rock, the copper mine at Arizona’s Oak Flat and in President Trump’s divisive rhetoric and CEO cabinet appointments. That tension certainly exists in my native Alaska too.
Politicians in Washington who see Alaska native corporations supporting oil and gas drilling in Alaska certainly get a distorted view of how indigenous communities really feel about industry exploiting our natural resources. Most tribes want smart environmental stewardship, not the corporate values that have been forced on us by deals cut in D.C.
My Alaska roots run deep, drawing from generations of Eyak Athabaskan tribal ancestors connected to the Gulf of Alaska for the past 3,500 years. I have a personal, intimate connection to this state’s vast land and waters that developed as I grew up subsistence and commercial fishing with my family in Prince William Sound and the Copper River Delta.
Alaska tribes, similar to many indigenous tribes worldwide, have been intentionally stripped of their traditional way of life, values, and subsistence rights on their ancestral lands. Why? Because our ancestral lands are rich in oil, minerals, timber and other natural resources and have been used by corporate, state and federal powers to divide our tribal communities.
In 1971, President Nixon signed the Alaska Native Claims Settlement Act (ANCSA) into law, a settlement of claims to ancestral lands that gave Alaska natives (those with at least one-quarter Alaska native blood) control of about 44 million acres, or about one-tenth, of what we historically occupied.
Rather than recognize our distinct tribes or respect tribal sovereignty, as was done to some extent in the lower 48 states, ANCSA turned Alaska natives into the shareholders of 12 for-profit regional corporations and some 226 village corporations.
This social experiment changed natives from stewards of the land to corporate shareholders overnight. It eroded our intrinsic relationship to our ancestral lands, natural resources and waters because natives no longer could claim territorial or aboriginal rights to their ancestral lands. Rather, they own shares in an ANCSA corporation that holds land title.
Not surprisingly, ANCSA has led to the destruction of hundreds of thousands of acres of land and severely impacted our subsistence lifestyles and traditional ways of life.
The majority of the villages and regional corporations subsequently turned to natural resource extraction to function in a system increasingly dominated by control, greed and corporate values. Development of oil reserves on the North Slope and completion of the 800-mile Trans Alaska Pipeline (TAP) through native lands tied the interests and fate of many native corporations and native people to the oil industry.
And certainly now, the story of oil — including oil spill disasters — has become part of our recent histories.
The Exxon Valdez spill changed my life and my community forever. Our herring and crab have yet to recover, there is still oil on the beaches and Exxon ultimately paid only one-tenth of the original $5 billion judgment that we won in 1994.
After the Exxon spill, many of us grew to deeply mistrust the oil companies and their promises. Indeed that devastating experience informs my roles as a tribal leader, a fisherman, and a committed conservationist . It’s why I am so strongly against the push for new oil and gas leasing in and around Alaska.
I’m not alone. There’s a large and growing concern among Alaska natives who are standing up against more oil and gas drilling in Alaska. Native people make up approximately 17 percent of Alaska’s population — and the fact is that ANCSA corporations don’t truly represent the indigenous people of Alaska.
By law, they represent their corporate self-interests. But in reality they don’t speak for those of us coming together to save what remains of our wild lands and irreplaceable subsistence way of life. We’re determined to stand our ground — including over this rush for offshore drilling in the Arctic.
The big question is, can native corporations evolve, and stand for the lands, waters and air that we are inextricably tied to, and promote conservation, for our subsistence way of life, cultural values, and for our children?
We know the oil companies will continue to push — but they should know that we’ll be pushing back. Hard. Because this is our home and has been for thousands of years and we won’t sit idle and let it be destroyed.
