KTUU.com | Alaska's news and information source | Conflicts over land claims led to landmark legislation

Conflicts over land claims led to landmark legislation

by Jim Schewe
Tuesday, December 16, 2008

ANCHORAGE, Alaska -- In the later half of the 1960s, it was becoming increasingly clear that in order for Alaska to move forward economically -- and for the Native community to protect their traditional subsistence rights -- the state's land rights problem had to be addressed.

Despite the fact that the Statehood Act officially brought Alaska into the union, it left some conflicting and unfinished business.

"The Alaska Statehood Act has a couple of contradictory clauses in it," historian Steve Haycox said. "One is something called the Disclaimer. Right in the Statehood Act, Section 4, says people of Alaska disclaim any right or title to land that may be subject to Native title."

But the contradiction comes in Section 6, which says the State of Alaska could select 104 million acres of land.

"Those came into conflict because right after statehood, the state started selecting land that it wanted," Haycox said. "And almost immediately, Natives say, ‘Wait a minute, you can't have that land, because we have history of using that land.'"

Even so, Section 4 wasn't going to stop the state from making its land picks. And one of its first choices was a little piece of land on the North Slope.

"From the standpoint of the state's interest, somebody convinced Governor Egan, I suspect, to select Prudhoe Bay, and that really was what ensured the survival of the state," said William Hensley, a former president of the Alaska Federation of Natives. "But it also helped precipitate the necessity for a land claims settlement."

The state's selection of land helped ignite Native communities from across the Last Frontier, and they began demanding their rights as afforded them in the statehood act.

"And so the threat of losing those lands, it really was the 11th hour, and if we had not taken action to stop the state selections we would never have gotten anything of our 10,000-year homeland," Hensley said.

And take action they did -- in the halls of Congress, in federal and state court rooms, and in the court of public opinion.

"We had people on Johnny Carson explaining it, we had people on talk shows, late night talk shows, "Good Morning America," wherever and whenever," said Emil Notti, also a former AFN president. "We were all over."

Throughout the early '60s the state continued to select land. At the same time, Native groups made their own regional land claims.

"By 1966 this was a mess," Haycox said. "Natives had filed protests on all manner of Alaska land, on the grounds that they had once utilized and occupied it."

In fact, Haycox said, some competing Native groups filed protests on the same land.

"There was more acreage under protest than there was land in Alaska," Haycox said.

"So that put the secretary of the interior, Stuart Udall, in a real bind because under the statehood act he was the bureaucrat who was supposed to convey to the state those selections of the state through the Bureau of Land Management," Hensley said. "But on the other hand he was also the trustee of Native American interests."

This forced Udall to take some drastic measures.

"Stewart Udall in 1966 issued an injunction and said there will be no transfer of title from the federal government to the state until this problem is solved, until the Native claims problem is solved," Haycox said. "Now that wasn't just to do Native justice, although it certainly was that, it was also because nobody's gonna invest any money in land, title to which is not secure."

Udall's decision to freeze land selections brought everyone to the table to hammer out legislation that would remedy the lands claims issue.

In the meantime, the freeze was cooling off the state's coffers.

"The State of Alaska was saying we're driving the state into bankruptcy because they couldn't select land," Notti said. "They had no economy, like I said, they were turning land into money and they couldn't do that. They couldn't get land for development."

But it wasn't long, thanks to those early state land picks, before an unlikely ally for Alaska Natives began to emerge on the state's North Slope.

"And of course the oil industry, bless their souls, sought in their interest to help to resolve this contentious issue of Native claims because they wanted to make sure that, number one, their leases were good, number two, they had a right of way to build a pipeline," Hensley said. "And so they backed, encouraged, the settlement, the Congress to pass the settlement."

On Dec. 18, 1971, President Richard Nixon signed the Alaska Native Settlement Claims Act.

In the bill, Alaska Natives received clear title to 44 million acres in traditionally used areas, and nearly $963 million in compensation.

In exchange, the federal government extinguished Native title to the remaining land in Alaska.

"Some people look at it in real narrow economic real estate terms," Hensley said. "X number of acres, X number of dollars. Well, actually to me what, and I think most of those involved in carrying the load of trying to get the settlement, always believe in the land itself.

"We wanted the land because it represents the 10,000 years of history that our people have in those spaces. It's part of our identity."

To encourage the settlement money to do the most good for the greatest number of people, 13 regional Native economic corporations and more than 200 village corporations were created.

In one form or the other, all Alaska Natives would become shareholders of the corporations.

"And I know there's some lawyers claiming that they, the idea came from them," Notti said. "Now I'm not going to dispute that, but we finally settled on corporations as a way to get land that was under our control and we could develop it, or sell it, or do whatever we wanted with it and it would be up to us to do."

These corporations today are consistently among the biggest state-owned businesses, creating thousands of jobs, earning billions in revenue, and paying millions in dividends to Native shareholders.

"So in many ways, this lands claim is an experiment, to pull people from hunting and gathering into the economic mainstream, in one lifetime, in one generation," Notti said.

Although far from perfect in the eyes of some, the Alaska Native Claims Settlement Act resolved land claims issues between Alaska Natives and the federal government. But the controversy of land use was far from over for the state.

On Friday we'll take a look at another piece of federal legislation that took Alaska to the forefront of the environmental movement.

Contact Jim Schewe at jschewe@ktuu.com