Alaska’s Natives Still Split Over Claims Settlement : Redress: Twenty years later, some Eskimo and Indian people say the act has given them power and influence. Others complain that their their lifestyle is threatened.

AKIACHAK, Alaska —  John Lomack is 4 years old. When he was a baby, his great-grandmother told the boy’s father to follow an ancient tradition of his people, the Yupik Eskimos.

Jackson Lomack killed a silver-tip grizzly. He tied a tendon from one of the bear’s legs around the infant’s wrist and rubbed bear fat over his body--all so that the dead bear’s spirit would live on in the child.

“The elders all say he will be a leader of our people,” Jackson Lomack said.

He will be the leader, they hope, who will help rescue the Yupik people from the Alaska Native Claims Settlement Act.

When President Richard M. Nixon signed the act on Dec. 18, 1971, he called it “a milestone in Alaska’s history and in the way our government deals with natives and Indian people.”

ANCSA created 13 regional and 200 village native corporations, gave them 44 million of Alaska’s 365 million acres and paid them $962.5 million over 11 years as compensation for lands they gave up. It was America’s largest and most expensive land grant.

There were two purposes--to settle native Alaskans’ aboriginal land claims, and to improve their lives.

Twenty years later, Alaska natives are sharply divided on whether the act has accomplished either goal.

In native corporation boardrooms in Anchorage, Fairbanks, Juneau and a handful of other urban centers in this mostly remote, rural state, native leaders speak of ANCSA’s many successes:

How it has brought riches to Alaska’s 75,000 Eskimos, Athabaskan Indians and Aleuts. How it has opened the doors for development and assimilation for the state’s first people, whose ancestors crossed the Bering Sea land bridge as many as 14,000 years ago. How it has given them power and influence in the dominant white culture.

But in many villages--mostly tiny communities of simple wooden houses and dirt streets scattered across the state’s vast tundra and forests--the benefits of the settlement are little felt. Many natives wonder if what they got was worth what they gave up.

Critics say the law has allowed much of their land to be taken and it threatens to forever change their traditional lifestyle.

They say its corporate structure is alien to their way of life, imposing on them a profit-based business ethic that they do not buy into, and placing a cash value on land that had been communally owned and used by natives for millenia.

“Peoples’ expectations for the settlement were extremely high,” said Julie Kitka, president of the Alaska Federation of Natives. “There’s a tremendous transition people are going through, and many people are not successfully bridging the transition.”

“On balance,” said Roy Huendorf, president of Cook Inlet Region Inc., the Anchorage-based regional native corporation, “we’re better off that there was a settlement than if there was no settlement.”

In many ways, the settlement has been a remarkable success, changing land ownership patterns and political and economic power in a developing territory that became a state just 32 years ago.

Some of the native corporations are capitalist triumphs:

* Cook Inlet Region Inc. had $99 million in revenues and assets of $576 million in 1990. With land, broadcast and other holdings in the Lower 48, it is a major mover in the Alaska economy. It has agreed with the state to develop a $500-million deep-sea port on corporation land at Fire Island near Anchorage.

* NANA Regional Corp. Inc., has assets of $450 million, including land 100 miles above the Arctic Circle that is leased to Cominco Ltd. of British Columbia. There, Cominco operates the Red Dog zinc mine. Under the agreement, Cominco must eventually hire no one but natives or their spouses at the mine.

NANA also packages tours of Eskimo life and culture. It owns a top-flight Nullagvik Hotel in Kotzebue, jade mining operations, utilities, oil drilling services and a private security company.

“In the 1960s, we had no influence over anything. Nothing! What we did was damn near a revolution,” said Willie Hensley, a central figure in the decade-long battle to obtain a settlement. He is an NANA board member and possible candidate for the U.S. Congress next year.

Hensley grew up in a sod house; now he and others who run the corporations are political power brokers. They regularly gain the ears of congressmen, state legislators and other public officials. And they make economic decisions affecting not only natives but every one of Alaska’s half-million residents and the state as a whole.

Even strident critics of America’s past and present treatment of American Indians concede that the law has given new power to many Alaska natives.

“At the time, it was a bold experiment,” said Lloyd B. Miller, an Anchorage attorney who specializes in Indian law.

ANCSA in many ways has been an incredible success, he said.

“The native people of Alaska have far more political power than native people in any other state,” Miller said.

The tribal leaders and a few younger men and women listened intently as Peter Waskey, a white-haired elder from the Yupik village of Tuluksak, knelt, waved his arms slowly and lamented: “I have no power. I can talk with my mouth. That is all.”

A few minutes later, Albert Beaver Sr., oldest of the Yupik elders from a group of neighboring villages who gathered in Akiachak recently, took his turn. The room grew quiet, almost reverent.

“Our land is ours, no matter how much there is discontentment. The land still belongs to us,” Beaver said in barely a whisper.

For 15 hours over two days, these elders discuss their plight. In their hearts, ANCSA settled nothing.

The natives, they say, have legitimate claim to nearly all of Alaska. The United States, they say, merely purchased a few coastal settlements when it paid Russia $7.2 million in 1867.

“ANCSA is a tool to strip the land from the natives,” said David O. David, a vocal critic and chairman of the council of elders of the Yupiit nation, a group of 19 area villages where many people maintain their claims to the land.

“ANCSA is no good. It is bad medicine for Alaska natives,” he said.

The settlement was “a strategy to claim what they had already stolen,” said Spud Williams, a leader of the Tanana Chiefs Conference, a Fairbanks-based nonprofit association of about 12,000 Athabaskan Indians in 43 villages.

“They gave us a portion of our land back and a pittance,” Williams said.

The act “extinguished” aboriginal hunting and fishing rights on non-native lands. The natives can still hunt and fish on federal lands, but are limited as to when, how and where they may do so--even though these are often lands on which their forefathers hunted for hundreds of years.

Hunting, fishing, trapping and gathering are central to the lives and lifestyles of many natives.

“We still live off the land,” said Will Carlo, the descendant of an Athabaskan mother and an Italian gold miner. “If I don’t get a moose in the fall, I’ll still go out and get one in the winter and poach one.”

New land ownership patterns and corporate powers also are pitting natives against one another. On the Kuskokwim River upriver from Akiachak, the 10 villages of the native Kuskokwim Regional Corp. now issue land-use permits for moose hunters. Even villagers further down the river need them.

“Before, it seems like everyone was eating from the same table,” said Fritz George, an Akiachak tribal council member. “Now, the villages are fighting each other.”

And some say the future could be worse. An amendment to ANCSA that takes effect Dec. 18 allows native corporation shareholders to sell their shares if a majority agree--even to non-natives.

“The major concern people have in the claims settlement act is the long-term ownership of the land and resources--and keeping control,” Kitka said. “There still is apprehension whether the corporate model will do that.”

Especially at risk are those corporations that have been less than successful--corporations such as Tozitna Ltd., representing the village of Tanana, 75 miles below the Arctic Circle.

Tozitna has 589 shareholders and owns 216 square miles in and around the village. Through some bad business decisions, it has lost a fifth of its assets since its formation, said office manager Julie Roberts.

Leaders are increasingly worried about the corporation’s future. In recent years, a majority of shares have been transferred by inheritance to shareholders who live in Fairbanks, Anchorage and Seattle. Many shareholders are not natives.

“My major concern is the land,” said Roberts, 36. “These outside shareholders are not going to feel the same about the land as the people who live here and share the land and use it. The way it’s going now, I don’t know who is going to own the corporation.

“You take a bunch of hunters and trappers and try to put them in a money market world. . . . I don’t think the natives had the necessary knowledge to go into the business world,” she said.

If the corporation or its land is someday lost, and hunting and fishing rights also are a thing of the past, future generations will hold the current generation accountable, she said.

“They (young natives) are going to think: ‘Why did they do this? What were they thinking?’ ” she said.

ANCSA did not address the tribal sovereignty issue. Courts have tried to define tribal powers. The state opposes the concept, although the federal government recognizes a need for tribal self-government.

Some natives and their villages are taking matters into their own hands. Yupiks in Akiachak, including Jackson Lomack, are trying to form the Yupiit nation, a “nation within a nation.”

Akiachak and other villages have turned assets--land and money--over to the tribal council, hoping to protect the land from future sale.

But the natives are hamstrung by a lack of village leaders. A hundred years ago, the words of Peter Waskey and Albert Beaver Jr.--the elders who spoke to the Akiachak gathering--would have been law in these villages.

Today, it’s just talk, as they wait for a new, younger leader to arise.

“We will welcome anyone brave enough to get us out of ANCSA,” said David, chairman of the Yupiit nation.