After pulling the Chilkoot Indian Association out of debt and completing a backlog of audits, tribal administrator Harriet Brouillette was recognized as the 2025 Tribal Administrator of the year. She was presented with the award during the annual Alaska Tribal Administrators Association symposium in April.

Looking back at her time with the Chilkoot Indian Association, Brouillette said that she was the first and only employee in 1995 before she went back to school and took a different position working for the Central Council of Tlingit and Haida Indian Tribes of Alaska. 

Then she got a call from an elder telling her it was “time to come home,” Brouillette said, noting that this call came at a time when the tribe was going through a rough time managing Bureau of Indian Affairs funding. Brouillette left the CIA again to work for Klukwan Inc. after a friend of hers told her she had to “jump off this sinking ship” after they had looked at the accounting system.

The struggles came after the federal government offered funding to tribes, which allows them to self-govern programs instead of relying on the Bureau of Indian Affairs to assist them.

“There was a huge learning curve,” Brouillette said. When Brouillette started in 2013, she said that the CIA was about $2.5 million dollars in the red.

“We were on the verge of losing all our federal funding and we were years behind on our audits.” The association is required to conduct federal audits each year, and had not done one in a few years, according to Brouillette. A consultant said that it was a “tangled mess” and that it would take years to get out of, time that Brouillette said they didn’t have. “We need to get out of it now.”

Brouillette said she and staff figured out how to operate federal grants and got audits completed with the goal of getting out of debt. They filed three audits in one year and then the following year filed two audits and “got them all out of the way.” 

With the audit and debt worries resolved and core funding back in place, Brouillette said that CIA started developing new projects including the environmental science, transportation and housing programs. Brouillette estimated that the current budget for the environmental department is in the millions while the transportation department’s budget is “more along the lines of about $3 million.” 

In recent years, Brouillette said the association leveraged funds to purchase the CIA dock as well as open the Taste of Deishu restaurant. Brouillette said the businesses will bring in unencumbered funding that won’t be restricted by the federal government.

“The idea now is for the tribe to become more self-sustaining, instead of relying on grants,” Brouillette said.

Brouillette said it was nice to be recognized for something because Haines is predominantly non-native and not a lot of people “think of this as a native community.” She said CIA has offered language classes and currently teaches subsistence hunting and gathering, and regalia-making. She referred to these activities as “luxuries” because the tribe is at a point where it is stable enough to host these cultural programs.

“They’re like a treat,” she said. 

Brouillette said she mainly looks at big-picture projects and issues, one of those being the ongoing push to include Haines, Tenakee, Petersburg, Wrangell and Ketchikan into the Alaska Native Claims Settlement Act. A federal amendment to the 1971 Act would include the five communities. By joining ANCSA, these communities would receive recognition from the federal government “so that we could have our own village corporation.”

Brouillette said she hopes the effort to get the five landless tribes added to the ANCSA settlement would help CIA get a “very small portion of our lands” returned. “The Tongass forest is over 17 million acres and we’re just asking for a very tiny portion of that to be returned to us,” she said. 

With this land, “we can subsist and hunt and gather, and maybe find an old growth tree to cut, so that we can build a canoe or carve a totem,”she said. 

Looking towards the future, Brouillett said there are ideas to turn a building on Main Street into a cultural and language center that provides a daycare and childcare setting in addition to after school programming. Additionally, CIA is currently developing a new nonprofit arm to bring in more unencumbered funding to fund cultural education classes. Brouillette said CIA is close to launching the nonprofit.  

“I think that we’ve come a long way,” Brouillette said. “They [ancestors] are holding me up, and I’m holding up my kids and my grandkids. With each generation we become stronger.”