Alaska’s U.S. Senators are planning to reintroduce legislation that would allow Native Alaskans in Haines, Ketchikan, Wrangell, Petersburg and Tenakee to form urban corporations and receive land entitlements under the Alaska Native Claims Settlement Act of 1971 (ANCSA). These five tribes weren’t allowed to do so when ANCSA was originally passed.
U.S. Congressman Don Young introduced similar legislation in the U.S. House of Representatives in May.
In preparation for introduction of the bill in the Senate, representatives from Alaska’s federal delegation held a public information session in Haines to field questions and comments from the community.
“The delegation has worked on (righting the wrong from ANCSA) for decades. Originally, I think Senator Frank Murkowski introduced the first piece of legislation on this,” said state director for Sen. Lisa Murkowski Leila Kimbrell.
Last fall, Murkowski held a hearing on the bill including, for the first time, maps of the land identified for the settlements.
“We’ve had a lot of questions about what the selections would mean from various stakeholders, so we wanted to come here and give you the opportunity to have a dialog with us,” Kimbrell said at the meeting.
Staff from the federal delegation said concerns brought up in other communities had included public use cabins in areas identified for the land transfer. The cabin land has since been excluded.
Areas identified for the Haines settlement include 23,000 acres, mostly Tongass National Forest land near Excursion Inlet with additional selections near William Henry Bay and Berners Bay.
Mayor Douglas Olerud said the only area he could see as a potential concern is the mouth of the Endicott River, a popular hunting spot.
Staff said there are provisions in the legislation that would allow for public easements and continued access for subsistence users, but ultimately, if the bill passes, the land will be transferred to private ownership, so access won’t be guaranteed in the same way.
In response to concerns about continued public access, Chilkoot Indian Association (CIA) tribal administrator Harriet Brouillette said she understands the desire for access but urges people to reframe the way they’re thinking about public land.
“It’s difficult for me to listen to this being discussed as if it’s a meaningless land transfer to a corporation,” she said. “Land access is something that we talked about because we understand… people want access to what they’re calling ‘public land.’ But it wasn’t originally public land. This is Native land, but we’re willing to compromise. We’re willing to grant land access… We’re not trying to shut people out of their traditional hunting places.”
Brouillette, who began working on the issue in the 1990s as a recent college graduate, said the 23,000 acres identified for Haines was selected because of its ecotourism potential.
“Even back then, we were talking about how we wanted to choose locations that we could protect so that we could build some sort of economy with ecotourism. If you look at some of the choices we made, they are places where you could take a boat down the Lynn Canal from the CIA dock and go camping or bird watching, fishing or hunting,” she said in an interview after the Wednesday meeting.
Brouillette said the preference would have been for land closer to Haines, but land closer to town isn’t available.
“As time goes by, those pieces of property are being snapped up by the state and private ownership. We’ve been pushed out, out to the outer boundaries of our territory. It’s hard to watch what we have been groveling for, for over fifty years, disappearing,” she said
Brouillette met with representatives from Alaska’s federal delegation Tuesday night to discuss potential changes to the bill before it’s introduced in the senate. She said one change she’s advocating for is the inclusion of a financial settlement, in addition to the land.
“In ‘71, corporations weren’t given enough money to start successfully without doing logging of land to raise revenues quickly, and that was done at great expense to the land and corporations,” Brouillette said. “We need some sort of financial package so we don’t have to make drastic financial decisions that will impact our success.”
Though Brouillette has been involved with this issue for the past 30 years, she said she feels hopeful that there’s real momentum building.
“It is coming together in a way it hasn’t before. The five communities are trying to address issues people may have with the settlements, individually, and not as one big piece of legislation that doesn’t have a human element,” she said.
There are a variety of theories about why the five tribes were excluded from ANCSA in the ‘70s, but no one knows for sure.
“My personal opinion is that there were people in the community who didn’t want to see Natives get some of their lands back. They assumed that by giving the property back to the Native community, they would no longer be able to log in the Chilkat Valley,” Brouillette said.
Others have said it has to do with the makeup of the communities. Haines is predominantly non-Native, in contrast to a community like Klukwan, which did receive land through ANCSA.
In 1993, the U.S. Congress directed the University of Alaska’s Institute of Social and Economic Research to look into why the five communities were excluded from ANCSA. The institute found no difference between ‘recognized’ and ‘unrecognized’ communities in Southeast.