Alaska’s U.S. senators introduced legislation on Monday that would grant land to the five “landless” indigenous communities in Southeast Alaska, including Haines.
Amending the 1971 Alaska Native Claims Settlement Act (ANCSA), the bill would establish a native urban corporation in Haines and would entitle it to 23,040 acres of federal land.
The legislation follows decades of advocacy by and on behalf of tribal members in Haines, Petersburg, Wrangell, Ketchikan and Tenakee—all left out of the 50-year-old landmark settlement act that divided nearly a billion dollars and 44 million acres of land among Alaska Native regional and village corporations.
With the proposed bill, a native corporation established in Haines would be entitled to 12 parcels of federal land, mostly in the Tongass National Forest south of Excursion Inlet, at the mouth of the Endicott River and near William Henry Bay.
Harriet Brouillette, Chilkoot Indian Association tribal administrator and local representative of the regional advocacy group Alaska Natives Without Land, told the CVN earlier this year that Haines’ land selections were made with an eye on developing ecotourism. (Brouillette could not be reached before press time.)
ANCSA didn’t allow tribal communities that were “modern and urban in character” to form village corporations, but did permit four—Juneau, Sitka, Kodiak and Kenai—to create urban corporations. So why were tribal members in Haines and four other Southeast towns omitted from the settlement?
“Nobody really knows. Nobody can explain it,” said Randy Williams, president of Natives Without Land in Ketchikan. “I think it was just a matter of who lobbied the hardest.”
In a 1968 settlement, U.S. Congress granted $7.5 million to Tlingit and Haida tribal members in Southeast as compensation for the loss of traditional land. As a result, the 10 Southeast village corporations established by ANCSA were granted less land than corporations in the rest of the state, according to a 1994 study of the issue conducted by the Institute of Social and Economic Research at the University of Alaska.
But the 1968 case didn’t fully settle land claims in Southeast. Ten communities in the region, including Klukwan, were included in ANCSA, and the legislation allowed tribal members in the five “landless” communities to enroll as shareholders of Sealaska, the regional corporation.
The movement to amend ANCSA to include the landless tribes has spanned decades. In 2006, the five communities formed an umbrella non-profit called Southeast Alaska Landless Corporation to advocate for the sort of legislation that was just proposed. In May, Alaska’s congressman Don Young introduced a similar bill in the U.S. House of Representatives. This year is not the first time a bill has been introduced in Congress, but Williams said it’s the first time proposed legislation has included specific land selection maps.
Unlike ANCSA, the proposed senate bill would permit non-commercial public access to the land conveyed to the corporations, Williams said.
There are 4,749 landless shareholders across all five “landless” communities, according to Alaska Natives Without Land.