Akiakchak, Alaska, one of the communities that sued to put Natives lands into a federal trust/Alaska DEC photo
News analysis
Just in time for the political season in Alaska, the administration of President Donald Trump has withdrawn and is reviewing a Department of the Interior decision on lands-into-trust that would have made possible defacto Indian nations similar to reservations in the 49th state.
Putting Native lands-into-trust is a complicated and divisive issue in a land where the Alaska Native Claims Settlement Act of 1971 (ANCSA) was once thought to have settled aboriginal land claims in a better and more equitable way than the reservation system.
Some in the Native community, however, view the Claims Act as a sell-out to Western capitalism and want their own sovereign nations within the state as reservations are now viewed elsewhere. The administration of President Barack Obama moved to grant that wish in 2014.
The decision split Alaskans left and right, rural and urban, and then quietly faded away. What the revisit will mean remains to be seen.
The Interior letter spelling out the grounds for the review cites a 1978 conclusion by the “Associate Solicitor for Indian Affairs…that it would ‘be an abuse of the Secretary’s discretion’ to acquire land in trust in Alaska based on the language and apparent intent of ANCSA.”
Alaska Republican governors and Republican candidates for governor have in the past held to that view, but that was then and this is now.
Not a peep was heard from Republican leaders in-state after Rep. Don Young, R-Alaska, earlier this year tried to amend federal tax standards to give ANCSA corporations an unprecedented 3 percent share of royalty revenues from any new oil development in the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge. The funds would have come out of the state’s share of what was supposed to be a new, 50-50 split with the feds in spite of a seeming Statehood Act promise entitling the state to 90 percent under the terms of the Mineral Leasing Act of 1920, although there are those who argue the statehood promise on revenue sharing is not as clear as it might seem.
Murkowski was the one who first argued for the new 50-50 split, saying it was vital to get the votes in the Senate to pass the legislation to open ANWR to drilling. She; Sen. Dan Sullivan, R-Alaska, and Gov. Bill Walker later agreed privately with Young on the plan to give 3 percent to the ANCSA corporations, but Murkowksi eventually balked at attaching the tax rider to a Senate spending bill, saying she was bowing to a Senate agreement to avoid all such moves this year.
The corporations were uniformly lined up behind the ANWR legislation. Where they stand on lands-into-trust is more complicated. When the Obama administration rule was under review, Interior records reflect that several of the regional corporations “expressed concern that their ability to develop” mines or oil and gas prospects could be put in jeopardy by trust lands.
The agency dismissed those concerns with the observation that “it is well-settled under the law that a mineral estate remains dominant, and a subsurface owner has a right of reasonable access to the minerals below.”
The law settles legal issues, but it doesn’t resolve political issues, and that can make for difficulties in the north. Tribes and Native corporations in Alaska have sometimes found themselves uncomfortably at odds over development.
Alaska’s Native people are no different from non-Native Alaskans in their wide diversity of opinions on the path forward into the future.
The real fight
But the big debate over lands into trust has largely settled on the transfer of legal authority from the state to tribes. Walker, a Republican turned independent, was roundly criticized for sacrificing state sovereignty in rolling over to the feds on lands-into-trust in 2016.
How that will play out for the incumbent governor and running mate Lt. Gov. Byron Mallott, the former president of the Sealaska regional corporation, in the runup to the fall election is another thing that remains to be seen.
Though the latest action by Trump’s Interior to review the decision of Obama’s Interior has so far attracted little mainstream media attention, it’s hard to imagine that lands-into-trust won’t again become a political football.
It has in the past fostered a politically contentious split along Republican-Democrat party lines and urban-rural geographic lines.
Rural Alaska represents the strongest Democrat voting block in the state, and much – if not most – of the largely Native population there favors land into trust for villages that so desire.
Local control free of the oversight of seemingly faraway state officials sounds to good to some in small, isolated villages. But other Alaskans fear a proliferation of tribal governments could lead to an Indian-country patchwork of differing laws, taxes and regulations across the state making life difficult for everyone, including villagers traveling between villages.
Most of the villages in Alaska are concentrated in river corridors that form water roads in the summer and ice roads in the winter. Different laws in every village would make Alaska like driving the back roads of the Lower 48 with every small town set up with a different, independent government reporting only to Washington, D.C.
The newspaper’s editorial generally reflected what has been the Republican view on the issue. A string of Republican governors fought efforts to tribalize the state and when that failed tried to block moves to put lands-into-trust to help tribes strengthen control over tribal members and extend control to non-tribal members.
Federal officials for years agreed with the state’s view that Uncle Sam lacked the legal authority to take Alaska lands into trust. But in 2006, four of the state’s 229 federally recognize tribes sued the feds in an effort to overturn an Interior ruling that prohibited the agency from establishing Native trusts in the 49th state.
The Akiachak Native Community, the Chalkyitsik Village Council, and the Tuluksak Native Community IRA in Western Alaska and the Chilkoot Indian Association in Southeast argued the agency erred in deciding ANCSA barred it from taking Alaska lands-into-trust.
Six years later, a federal district court judge ruled in their favor. Two years after that, Interior – under Democrat President Barack Obama – began writing rule for lands-into-trust. Meanwhile, the state of Alaska under Republican Gov. Sean Parnell appealed the federal court ruling.
The state was still arguing the case when Parnell lost his bid for re-election. Rural Alaska helped Walker and Mallott, the Democrat candidate for governor before joining Walker on an independent ticket, squeak out a victory with 48 percent of the vote.
Walker eventually dropped the state appeal of lands-into-trust.
The beginnings
How Alaska got to that point goes back to a 1993 administrative order under which the federal government decided to recognize every ANCSA-designated village in Alaska as a tribe. As a result, the state became to be home to about 40 percent of the nation’s tribes though only about 2 percent of the American Indian and Native population lives in Alaska.
The state opposed the original decision on tribes much as it regularly opposed lands-into-trust, although opposition as well as support has waxed and waned along party lines.
Gov. Steve Cowper, a Democrat, in 1990 issued an administrative order recognizing Alaska tribes. The governor who followed him into office, the late Wally Hickel, promptly rescinded it with the declaration that Alaskans are “all one people.”
Not much of substance came of it, however, and the following string of governors – Republicans Frank Murkowski, Sarah Palin, and Parnell – while largely accepting the existence of tribes, fought the idea of establishing “Indian country” wherein tribes could exercise full legal authority over federal lands-in-trust.
It is hard to imagine the picture could get so confused in a state where almost 50 years ago a good-faith effort was made to avoid the oppression of the lower 48 system of Indian reservations in favor of an idealistic and well-meaning inclusion.
With the fledgling state then on the cusp of an oil boom and the good intentions of the “Flower Power” era still wafting, ANCSA was a bold scheme to embed Native people in the fabric of fast-growing Alaska “in conformity,” as the act said, “with the real economic and social needs (of) Natives, without litigation, with maximum participation by Natives in decisions affecting their rights and property, without establishing any permanent racially defined institutions, rights, privileges, or obligations, without creating a reservation system or lengthy wardship or trusteeship, and without adding to the categories of property and institutions enjoying special tax privileges or to the legislation establishing special relationships between the United States government and the state of Alaska.”
The weaving has not gone smoothly. There is no denying the good the Claims Act did for some Natives. Sixteen of the state’s largest businesses are now Native corporations, and the financial success has given those corporations the money to wield significant political power.
Just ask Joe Miller.
But many rural Natives still live in poverty and depend heavily on federal and state assistance to survive, and many urban Alaska Natives struggle to stay above the poverty level.
“In Alaska, Medicaid covers two in three (American Indian and Alaska Native children and more than one in four American Indian and Alaska Native adults,” according to the Henry J. Kaiser Family Foundation. About a third of rural Alaskans report receiving SNAP – Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program benefits or what used to be called food stamps. Crime rates in rural Alaska remain high and law-enforcement resources low.
In the decades since the passage of ANCSA, there are reasons to question how well it has worked for Alaska Natives overall, especially in rural areas with no economic base and no apparent resources on which to build an economy.
No one can know, however, whether lands-into-trust would make things better or not, though there are those who argue it could.
“This authority helps tribes in many ways; for example, by facilitating tribal land restoration and economic development, insulating tribes from state and local jurisdiction and taxation, and protecting land with historical and cultural significance,” Geoffrey Stommer and colleagues wrote in the American Indian Law Journal.
Stommer, an Indian law attorney in Portland, sees land-into-trust a potential “game
changer, a shift in ownership and land tenure that brings enhanced tribal jurisdiction and opportunities for economic development, cultural resource protection, and the exercise of tribal sovereignty.”
But there is also the possibility land-into-trust could create more new problems than it solves old ones.
Out on the Kuskokwim River in far Western Alaska, there are villages which hope land-into-trust will free them from the yoke of state and federal regulations on the harvest of Chinook salmon and allow them to set their own limits. But with the salmon runs weak these days and everyone along the river wanting their “fair share” of the fish, someone would still need to moderate between what could be more than two dozen tribes to protect the salmon run from being decimated.
In such a situation, it’s not hard to imagine the bureaucratic tangle of lands-into-trust envisioned by the state of Alaska affecting more than just the state of Alaska.
Categories: Commentary, News, Politics
Jum Crow says “If the State wants to keep it, there is also a responsibility to provide the necessary quality of life afforded to the rest of the residents.”
Spoken like a true Marxist. It is NOBODIES responsibility to provide any such “quality of life” to you or anybody else. You want to live in rural communities, klanish and be poor, have at it. Want to travel where the jobs are and prosper have at it. Guarantee these poor people tou speak off don’t go with their cellphones or ATV’s.
If the State wants to keep jurisdiction over areas they should spend the money to help these areas. If no services are willingly given why should the residents keeping waiting for assistance that will never arrive? Besides welfare assistance what other monies are spent to further the quality of life in this proposed new “Indian Country?” Lots of rhetoric about how Native Corps don’t spend money in rural Alaska, let’s see some figures on how much money is spent in Rural Alaska on the “second class”’citizens out there?
Jeremey: what help do you think would be useful?
Where to start?
Since very little industry is occurring, I would propose putting a State Trooper in every village. As it stands now, villages hire a local officer and try to find a VPSO. But due to burnout the best people walk away from the job. As other commenters have noted the Blue Shirts only show up after the fact and are trying to restore order. You hardly ever see them out doing any community policing. Just fly in remove the bad guy and fly back out. With this current operating scenario do you blame the rural folks for trying to take” control of the wheel?”
Jeremey: I don’t blame anyone for anything, and putting a trooper in every village would surely help treat symptoms.
But what do we get for a cost upwards of $20 million? Even more villagers sent to jail? Don’t we already send too many villagers to jail?
I’d be personally more interested in something that treats the problem rather than the symptoms.
Ideas?
One major issue I see is alcohol. As the story goes, if you tell someone they can’t have it, they will find a way. So, these dry villages create a lot of drunks, bootlegs, and criminals by saying “no”. On the other hand the majority of Alaskan crimes (rapes, assaults, etc.) are alcohol related with an average BAC of .25%. Is the solution to make alcohol accesable to remove the “thrill of the chase”? “Unlike other cultures that have ingested alcohol for thousands of years, the relationship between indigenous Americans and alcohol is relatively new. Native Americans have had fewer centuries to develop the tolerance to alcohol that is present in other ethnic groups. Mix in poverty and living with ongoing oppression, and alcohol contributes to a state of emergency on many reservations.” Obviously not a solution, but merely an observation.
Now the lack of funding comes up again, hence why I used “second class” citizens. The desire to set up “Indian Country” is that the State has shown no inclination to offer a reasonable level of public safety or education in rural Alaska. If the State cannot or will not offer these services why nay say any initiative to reach out to the US Government to assist where the State will not? Or do we take queue from the Incredibles movie character “Buddy” and live by the ethos that everyone is “unique” (and thus no one is unique)? The angling for “Indian Country” status is more than just a land grab…
Craig,
we can start with the $100 million Walker wasted on his communist gasline project…
then take the additional $4.5 million he appropriated for the commuter rail line study…
that should buy western Alaska some public safety officers for a few years…
I am sure there is also some federal grant money and equipment for them under DHS as well.
we all know that “throwing people in jail” is not the only thing that troopers do in AK.
just having a police presence can deter crime from happening (think APD cars along highway during rush hour commutes)….troopers walking a beat around the village? “community policing”
troopers also assist in searches, rescues, EMS calls and other natural disasters such as wildfires.
another thing that can be done is to stop garnishing PFD’s from these poor rural residents, obviously when someone is living in poverty and they loose 30 percent of their annual cash due to Walker and his “Bankster” thugs “austerity package”….well, this only compounds a bad situation.
While there may not be a school in every village there are in most. Teachers and administrators come with these schools, and at a cost not paid at the local level in most villages. To say the state doesn’t educate or pay for education is disingenuous, dishonest, or both.
Is it the same education that is given along the railbelt or in Southcentral? Its also disingenuous/dishonest to think the urban schools are fully funded from local sources also.
What I’m trying to point out is that the current system is broke. What additional resources can the State offer to the rural areas beside paitence, hope and waitlists for capital projects? The residents in these rural areas have found a potential avenue of funding and a chance to have a say in thier part of the State. In the rest of the comments on this piece, all I’m hearing is that State jurisdiction is damn near the holy grail. If the State wants to keep it, there is also a responsibility to provide the necessary quality of life afforded to the rest of the residents.
I don’t know if it’s the same education, but I know that it costs more.
Clearly the current system is broke, not just in villages though, statewide. Maybe you haven’t been in Alaska the last few years but the state is spending more money that they take in, billions more.
“What additional resources can the State offer to the rural areas beside paitence, hope and waitlists for capital projects?” The same can be said for the entirety of the state, however we have already gone down the road of the state offering more and more resources…that lead us to the situation we are currently in.
There once was a time in this country where we did things for each other and didn’t just expect the government to do it for us. To paraphrase JFK, my fellow Alaskans: ask not what your state can do for you—ask what you can do for your state.
Molly Hootch case required the State to provide high schools in many villages, where prior they were sent elsewhere. They are now funded by the State’s algorithm for funding schools and smaller schools get more per student but other than that I don’t believe village schools cost more. Clearly, many villages are not covered by boroughs that can tax property to additionally fund schools and to that extent they get less money than some.
sort of depends on “what the meaning of is is,” doesn’t it Bill.
“Per-pupil spending in rural Alaska is far and away the highest in the nation, about $30,000 a student in fiscal years 2012 and 2013. The government divides school districts for statistical purposes into designations of city, suburban, town and rural, and more specific tracts of each.”
https://www.adn.com/education/article/alaskan-education-spending-outpaces-rest-us/2016/02/03/
“More than 60 percent of Alaska’s public school students who took this year’s statewide standardized tests failed to meet grade-level academic standards in English language arts and math, according to data from the Alaska Department of Education and Early Development.”
https://www.adn.com/alaska-news/education/2017/09/01/more-than-half-of-alaskas-public-school-students-failed-to-meet-standards-on-2017-statewide-tests/
the most expensive schools in the nation producing the worst students? what we really need is education reform in this state, but that’s another story nobody wants to talk about.
the question here is would it be better with the creation of reservations. i don’t know. i don’t know that anyone does. but reservation education isn’t exactly doing that well either:
The network of schools for Native American children run by an obscure agency of the Interior Department remains arguably the worst school system in the United States, a disgrace the government has known about for eight decades and never successfully reformed.”
https://www.politico.com/story/2015/11/how-washington-created-the-worst-schools-in-america-215774
rural Alaskans have a legitimate complaint when they say no one cares about them. but how the hell do you fix that?
No such thing under our Constitution as “Indian country!”
Actually,
we need to “dissolve” the village structure and insure modern law enforcement (public safety) exists in each Alaskan “Community”….
flying troopers into the villages every time there is a real concern is a huge waste of Alaska’s money (budget deficit), not to mention the officer rarely arrives on scene in time to stop the crime in progress.
too much sexual assault and violence are destroying the welfare of young Americans living in the western villages here in AK.
http://www.cnn.com/2014/02/03/opinion/sutter-alaska-rape-lawless/index.html
You bring up good points. Not only does the trooper arrive in these villages days after a crime, the villagers at times either hide the perp or lie about their whereabouts. The problem with this tribal nonsense is it creates an isolationist mentality. This whole tribalism nonsense is just that, NONSENSE! Alaska should be no different or above the law than any other state. So you have Eskimo/Indian blood in you, so what (all the Special Interests aside). As for Indians in general, they were a conquered people, who by all rights, should be glad they weren’t driven into the sea.
They aren’t deserving of any special privilege or tax exempt status.
http://www.adfg.alaska.gov/index.cfm?adfg=commercialbyareacopperriver.salmon_escapement
CR will now achieve the SEG on sockeye. As of today, 40K over minimum cumulative objective. The commercial fleet, also was given a 12 hour opener today. Delta summer run is saving the day!
Sounds like some people want their cake and to eat it too! If you want Indian Reservations and what was given during ANCSA, please first return what was given including any and all profits from what was given then we can talk about giving reservation land.
No such thing under our United States Constitution as an “Indian reservation!”
Do not forget that the first applications for trust land and Indian country were not in rural Alaska. They were in Craig and Juneau. Downtown Juneau with obvious opportunity for gaming and other businesses which would be free of minicipal and state regulation and taxation. Quite a competitive advantage over non Indian country businesses. Many, perhaps hundreds, of Native allotments exist within the borders of Alaska’s larger municipalities. Land anyplace in the state can be provided, sold or gifted, to tribal groups by enterprising entrepreneurs. Think Marijuana. So far casinoes would not be allowed because the state legislature totally prohibits them. But Metlakatla has a gaming operation that many think of as a casino. Lots to think about.
There is no such thing under our Constitution as “Indian land!” As of the passage of the Indian Citizenship Act of 1924, there are no more “Indians” within the original meaning of our United States Constitution…only U.S./State citizens with “Indian ancestry/race” entitled to no more and no less than every other non-Indian U.S./State citizens. There is no enumerate powers under our Constitution whereby politicians-state and federal-can pass statute law that regulates the health, welfare, safety and benefits of a select group of U.S./State citizens because of their “Indian ancestry/race!”
Mary, there is no such thing under our Constitution as “Indian country or trust land!’ There are no enumerated powers under our Constitution for U.S.C. Title 25-INDIANS.
Well Paul, there also doesn’t exist anything about IRS or income taxes in our Constitution, but you get where I’m going, right?
Imagine trying to manage both fish and game harvest to assure continued sustainablity with over 200 sovereign Alaska Native tribal governments, each deciding how many and which kinds of fish and game they want to harvest off of their part of 44 million acres.
Then try and imagine how the state and Feds would allow harvest in the remaining +300 million acres.
Chaos now.
No wonder the Community Agitator in Chief was for it – CHAOS!!!
No such thing under our Constitution as a ‘sovereign Indian nation!”
Once again the Don is correct. Nice to see Adults once again in charge.
Plus, you can bet if Obama’s hand touched it, it ends up a mess.
Usual welfare “state”. Where’s my “free” victim cheese? They can play the game like everybody else. All this native talk is just phoey. Europeans were here before the indians were. So tired of all this crying. https://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/americas/new-evidence-suggests-stone-age-hunters-from-europe-discovered-america-7447152.html