A Matter Of Trust

A presentation of the public television network of Alaska. It's always been different in Alaska. In the 1800s, while Indians in the rest of the United States were slowly losing the right to move at will over the land. Alaskan Indians, Eskimos, Alayuts and other native groups, hundred and fished freely. They didn't have to deal with about 550 Russian fur traders spread throughout the vast state, but those intruders were more concerned with sea otters than land. When the United States bought Alaska from Russia, some say Russia never owned the land in the first place, the natives were referred to as the uncivilized native tribes and not accorded citizenship,

but they still had the land, and that was all they worried about. No reservations were formed, and in fact many of the natives in the new territory were pretty much left alone. Then, non-native settlements increased near the turn of the century, disrupting native culture, and moves began to appropriate their land, particularly by some gold miners. But again, no reservations as they were known in the rest of the nation were put into place. Instead, the federal government offered the Native Alotman Act of 1906, which gave 160 acres of land of public domain to adult natives with the exception of any track containing mineral deposits. But the land wasn't truly theirs, the government held it in trust, and for a nomadic, food gathering society, the plots of land represented little that they could actually use to survive on. Few natives took the government up on its offer. They simply continued to live as they had. Then the U.S. government tried to establish reservations, but the experiment failed due to the lack of interest on the part of natives who wanted total freedom to hunt and travel as they pleased.

But as the modern world encroached, the question of who owned the land became more difficult to answer. The native said they never gave it to anyone. The federal government said native title to the land had never been formally established. The century old question had to be answered. The plan to transalaska oil pipeline from Prudo Bay to a port in Valdez cannot be built across disputed land. Suddenly, it was time for a settlement. And as we said, they do things differently in Alaska. In general, Alaska is following a very different course of action in terms of dealing with the federal government's relations with indigenous peoples. Much different than we've done in the lower 48. And of course, the dominant evidence of that is the Alaska Native Claims Settlement Act, which really represented a fairly significant departure from the way we dealt with land settlements and relations with native people. That settlement act was an experiment unlike any agreement made between natives and the federal government.

Past by Congress in 1971, it divided up over 40 million acres among about 60,000 natives. The approach, however, was not to hand out 60,000 land titles. Instead, the act propelled natives into the position of stockholders owning a piece of one of 13 corporations that have as their major asset, the land. Deputy Undersecretary of the Department of Interior Bill Horne. Using that form is quite different, of course, than the standard draw square making reservation and put everybody on it. Frank Duchino, House Majority Counsel for Indian Affairs, Interior and Insular Affairs Committee. But for Native Americans, Alaska is a special case. The historical relationship that evolved between the United States and Indian tribes down here did not occur up there. Because it was far removed a lot of the case law and historical development that was put in place down here in the late 1800s or even in the early 1800s. But the late 1800s and early 1900s didn't occur up there, perhaps until the late 1900s.

So it's a special case. So special, in fact, that in 1985, Congress will be asking for a progress report on how well the experiment is working. Looking over their shoulders are Alaska natives, of whom many aren't convinced their best interests are in the many minds of government. I think there were a lot of areas that were overlooked. Like many, Oscar Quagli, former president of chalista, a native corporation, doesn't see the settlement act so much as something done for natives as done to them. There's so many loopholes within that that you begin to wonder as to whether what the really intent of Congress was when they wrote up that Alaska native claim settlement act. Some say the federal government's motives are suspect. Alaska native's pointed uncle Sam's closet of skeletons accumulated from past dealings with Indians and natives, and it makes them wary. This matter of trust is it something that hinders government relations with natives, does it inflame current disagreements to a point where compromise is difficult?

If that is the case, then this issue of faith is as fundamental as the relationship between the natives and their land. The suspicion centers around the settlement act, generally known by its acronym, ANKSA, and how it has effective native culture and tradition. Don Mitchell, Vice President and Council for the Alaska Federation of natives. Well, I think that it is hard to give the settlement act to review until you identify the standard against which it is to be judged. And I think if you read the text of the act, there is some confusion on the part of the Congress as to what the goals of the act were supposed to be, and therefore it's very difficult to again find out how the act is done and meeting those goals. In fact, debates on ANKSA's merits were going on long before Congress passed it. Everyone agrees it wasn't perfect, but no one agrees totally on the extent of its flaws.

Alaska Senators, Ted Stevens. I think there have been some downsides as well as some good sides, but I think on balance that Alaska native community is much better situated, much better able to represent itself, to present its views, to secure funding. And the Alaska Native people individually, I think, are much better off than they were in 1971. Hey, I view the settlement act as not having been that great victory for the Alaskans because of some of the long-range impacts that I feel it's going to have. And some of the policies that have established with respect to Alaska Native, for instance, in one sense, in one legal sense, the only Alaska Native's left are those who own stock in profit corporations. Alaska Senator, Frank Murkowski.

It's the land. We originally called it the land claims settlement act. We asked for the magical figure 40 million. I've often wondered if we asked for enough. So have some natives. They see the land as the most important aspect of their culture, and while the arguments over Anksa press have complicated issues, it can be simplified to one major point. That is, native retention of the land.

As Martin Ivan, President of the Association of Village Council Presidents, puts it, the land is tied with their culture and traditions. The desire of the villages is to still keep their way of life. You can call it culture, you can call it whatever you want. It's a life that they were born into, bred into, taught, and it will still continue for a long time. But Anksa puts a roadblock to perpetual native land ownership. It includes a provision that stocks in the corporation can't be sold before 1991. After that date, stockholders are allowed to sell their shares, which are of course also shares in the native land, little by little ownership of the land that could transfer through these sales to non-native hands. The native community is composed of six to your 70,000 individuals, and I think that it is reasonably predictable that some of those individuals will in fact want to disassociate themselves from the group and try to get some personal economic benefit if such benefit is available in the market from selling their stock. There's fear, even in my own village of what's going to happen in 1991, when the control of land of the whole land goes into somebody's hands in California and anywhere in the world.

I'm trying to prevent that and trying to retain the control to it because the basic life of the villagers. All the shareholders' shares and the corporations are inextricably tied to the land, so once we lose that, we have lost the thing that is important to us. Because we thrive, we work, we understand nature, and when we lose our land, what do we have left? With such a clause in Anksa, some natives are inclined to view the 1991 date with suspicion. Charlie Kai, Guyuok shares an opinion that's becoming more and more common that Anksa was simply a way of hoodwinking natives out of their land. I feel that that it is true that the land claims is designed to give the land to the natives and take it back.

Bill Horn disagrees. He says the 1991 clause is there to benefit natives. The objective is to leave the recipients with the options. It's their choice. If they want to sell their stock and sell their shares and derive an immediate monetary benefit, that's their choice. If they want to take collective action and ask corporations to hold and secure their land base, that's their choice and any sort of range of options in between. I don't see it as a flaw. I see it as one of the real pillars of strength of the claims act. Really, it's sort of the essence of self-determination. It's up to them to make the selection of how to proceed. In a practical demonstration of self-determination, natives are attacking the 1991 issue from a variety of angles, all designed to rewrite the law and eliminate the potential land sale. At the 1983 Alaska Federation of Native Convention, delegates approved a number of resolutions that would give them perpetual land title.

Some are up to a congressman pass. Some are dependent on shareholder action. They range from a continuation of stock sale prohibition to permitting only sale to other natives or the corporation, and also limiting the amount of stock sold by any one shareholder. It would be a further result that the AFN Convention recommends that all villages immediately begin to consider the possibility of re-tribalizing ankle lands as a method for protecting the future use and disposition of their lands, including reviewing the efforts of regional villages who have already considered such a transfer. All those in favor of the motion as amended adopting resolution 83-7 signify by saying I oppose convention resolution 83-7 as adopted. This resolution to re-tribalize the land could be the stickiest to put into action. Retribalization means transferring title of the land from the corporations to the village tribal governments and ensuring no future sales will take place, but some interpret re-tribalization as another way to form reservations.

Jake Lestenkoff is the regional director of the Bureau of Indian Affairs in Alaska. I think in order to restrict that land under that basis and whatnot, may tend to violate the spirit of the act itself or as spoke about not creating restricted enclaves within the state. You come down to one of the really fundamental philosophic questions in this about the nature of the claims settlement act and the corporations. Are these native corporations or are they corporations owned by natives? I don't know if anybody has answered that question. I'm not sure that there's a unanimity in the native community in Alaska. It's been said that a pretty good law career could be made just from handling angsa legal matters. Like many government documents, this one has people unable to agree on how to interpret the various clauses within it.

Some say this is another example of suspicious motives, the proverbial sneaky fine print hidden within the paper work, and if lawyers have trouble figuring out the document, how some natives ask, can a person whose first language is in English understand the document? This so-called the land settlement or the claims act is one of the most complicated piece of legislation that ever came out that had affected the Alaska natives. The lawyers themselves are still trying to determine what the act is supposed to do. Imagine how the villages are reacting to it. If they don't have doctors, lawyers, engineers and those people that can translate what it all means. It's like even two married couples. If there's no communications, if there is communications, but they don't talk in the same language, or one talks above the other, there's going to be some problems.

And so it's the same way with the legal lease, the technical language that they use is very difficult to understand. My village was kind of sitting, standing in a situation where they really didn't know what to say, what to do, what to think. And it has taken them this long, for example, this long to understand the concept of the cooperation and profit business where they made a turner, and they're making money. But the test taken a lot out of them. Bill Horne agrees that the act is indeed complicated and subject to misinterpretation. But for some at the village level, he says it can be a simple matter.

I think at the bottom line, at the end result of the establishment of village corporations, regional corporations who shall own land, I don't see that once we get to that stage of the game, that it is that complex. Because what we're talking about is a village incorporates itself, under state law, and they receive a significant share of land. They have their relationship with the region corporation based on the subsurface ownership. And from that point on, they are basically land managers of a significant parcel of land. And right now, in most villages, they're probably holding a board meeting right at this point in time. They're trying to decipher what the financial reports are, or what the legal results are going to be. A lot has been made out of the corporate ownership of native land as a unique solution to the settlement question, but there are some who accuse Anxa of trying to blend natives in with western culture.

They want to maintain their traditions, and so see the sudden immersion in the business world as the antithesis to native culture, and the means of gradually eliminating it all together. The thing that has probably made us quite angry in the past is because of the attempts at the simulation into the dominant society and the melting pot theory. And that's been one of the things that has really required a lot of deep programming, unlearning, and really relearning that our culture and ourselves as a people are just as good, maybe even our culture is a little better than what America has today. And to us, that is very important. The settlement act itself, I think unfortunately, sought to, through implication, eliminate the special status of natives in Alaska to kind of mail the men to the society over a period of time.

And I think if you read the preamble of the settlement act, it talks about not to establish a long-term trust relationship as kind of thing. But I don't think that's going to be able to work. I believe that the identification of the Alaska natives to their own cultural ask is much stronger now than it was before the claims act passed. And I believe that Alaska natives are more proud of their heritage now than they were before the claims act. Well, since Central Stevens has not been in our village, and I don't know where he basically states Muslim. But if he has been to our village and has seen what kind of effects he had with our village, I think that he would make a restatement. At the same time that natives work to hold on to their traditions and culture, they admit it's necessary to move into the 20th century.

And it's Martin Ivan's contention that in order to make that jump successful, they need continued government support for housing, education, and other assistance. My feelings that the villages and the people need help took to compete in this very, very complex world that was supposed to get into. So we're cutting the situation where we've got to have the appropriations in order to carry on. And yet we don't like a lot of things that are happening to us on the other hand, because there's too much interference in a lot of questions that arise as a result of the actions of Congress. Faced with catching up to Western culture in a short time, natives fear that the money won't always be there.

But Senator Ted Stevens believes that because of the act, natives are actually in a better position for funding. Well, they all have much better legal advice than they did before the Lands Act. And we have had a series of act bills come through the Congress, revenue sharing, the whole question of hard assistance and various other programs for governmental assistance. And every one of those, we've worked out a situation that, last, natives are recognized as entities to receive that funding without regard to this legal status question. And that comes about primarily because of the organization under the Land Claims Act. But natives aren't convinced. They point to the BIA pulling out from native education in Alaska as an example. They contended under the BIA, they had more control of the schools, but with education transferred to the state, that local control is diminished. Right now, the federal government is making an effort to cut off all the funding that is going to state of Alaska, federal funding.

Now, there's another issue that they're going to give up education to the state of Alaska. Whether they're saying it out straight and straight out to people or not, they're doing that. I think that we'd much prefer to have the school system run in Alaska by Alaska. And why do you have less characters five thousand miles away involved in the education of children? No, so that there are going to be questions like that coming up. But I sincerely doubt that the federal government is going to 101% cut and run and say, buy folks, we're out of here. I don't see that in the cards. Still, the natives aren't so sure. They point to the 1985 study of Anxowist suspicion. Sam George, tribal operations chief of ADCP. I guess if there's some documentation made that we are better off,

or better off than we were, say, like 10 years ago, then they probably use that to determine whether or not some services are necessary for the people. But if you look at how much benefit do we have seen from the settlement there to individual people, we have not seen anything? I'm afraid that they might not spell out the truth in that report. There might be a lot of lies, there might be a lot of misrepresentation of the actual impacts of Anxow. And might also be designed to be used by the federal government to say, hey, the native people don't need that special relationship with the government anymore. Because they got everything made. They don't have to worry about it.

The federal government doesn't have to worry about natives anymore. But the government officials say those suspicions are unfounded. The study's purpose, according to Bill Horne, is to learn of needed improvements. We hope that by doing the study that if we identify significant problems, we're going to be able to come up with prescriptions to solve the problems that we identify. Members has anything to say. At the 1983, Inuit Circumpolar Conference in Provisher Bay, Canada, the delegates decided the 1985 report wasn't enough and the group commissioned their own study. Oscar Quagley was a representative at the conference. Our feeling was that there should be something undertaken on our own report because we're a little bit fearful that there will be a lot of things that will be put under the rug, so to speak, and will be completely overlooked. How has Anxow helped us? What have we lost as a result of that? And those types of questions are very important. The delegates chose a Canadian, Thomas Berger, to do the report.

His approach will be to hold hearings in the villages over a two-year period. Native issues, the topic of discussion. Everybody's looking to see what's happening here. And I think the ICC felt, well, why don't we get somebody from out of the state to come in and being as objective as anybody can to see how the people who live in the villages, the people who everyone is most concerned about, feel about all this. The BIA study is being conducted by a non-alaskan firm, management concepts of Virginia. Using such an outside firm, however, fuels native mistrust. Because many feel the only ones that understand their situation are other natives. For example, they look to Congress for changes in Anxow, while never sure they say if the lawmakers are truly aware of a Alaska native issue. Sam Jordan. We have seen, you know, Congress making decisions that are for the best interests of the people.

And during the last day, they're way down there and who knows how many people know our situation. We need a lot of support from understanding from other senators who are representative from other little 40. But not all native leaders are convinced they are getting support. That Anxow, in fact, did them little good. And what's possibly a means to dissolve, once and for all, they're right to the land. It can be debated whether these suspicions are true. Certainly, government officials deny such accusations. But perhaps what is true is not so important is the fact that natives distrust government. And that, in the end, could make relations between natives and the government much more difficult than any number of disagreements over issues. And that, in the end, there's a lot of support from the United States.

And that, in the end, there's a lot of support from the United States. A presentation of the public television network of Alaska. Okay. Three, two, one.

Besides survey camps, fish and wildlife biologists are also tagging a small number of geese with neck collars and leg bands. With formulas using ratios of marked birds to unmarked birds, they are able to determine survival rates. Burn bird biologist for the Fish and Wildlife Service. Is that okay? I hardly said it at all. Three, two, one. All this says John Paul Jones isn't as necessary as the Fish and Wildlife Service thinks. Natives, he believes, are more familiar with waterfall biology than the researchers. Three, two, one. No one faults that statement, but as we've seen, the problem has been to agree on a cooperative. Three, two, one. No one faults that statement, but as we've seen, the problem has been to agree on a cooperative program.

Misunderstandings over lifestyle have partially slowed down that process, as well as a lack of clear information on bird mortality throughout the Pacific flyway. Everyone is concerned enough to realize that if the goose populations continue to drop, as Jan Reif of the Fish and Wildlife Service says, they could be placed on the endangered species list, which would prohibit hunting of them for everyone. And that comes back to the basic, why am I doing this? I'm editing it, I'm putting in worse than changing it. I'm getting really into this. Shoot. Okay. Three, two, one. And that comes back to the question of who will reduce their hunting. Yeah. Yeah.

Okay.