Junior Achievement Alaska Business Monthly Hall of Fame Laureate: Margie Brown.

• Author: Stomierowski, Peg
• Position: Junior Achievement 2009 Special Section - CIRI Inc.

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For Margie Brown, president and CEO of CIRI, there's something to be said for new beginnings. As a young woman, she was in college while the Alaska Native Claims Settlement Act (ANCSA) was being negotiated, and she watched and listened to intense debate about the future--often from the sidelines.

Brown reflects that if she and her peers had not been so naive when first implementing ANCSA, "we might have been more intimidated by the task that was set in front of us."

After all, "there weren't a lot of women" in charge of the new social and economic initiatives--not like today.

When she went to work at CIRI in 1976 as an assistant land planner, "people weren't even sure what they (the Alaska Native corporations) were," she said. "It was a very large social experiment ... we had to invent ourselves."

She did--tentatively but successfully--two years later becoming CIRI land manager. She rose to senior vice president and a member of the executive team at CIRI before retiring in 1995. Then, after 10 years of retirement at age 55, she came back to the company as president and CEO. This time, she could not claim to be naive about the huge responsibilities involved.

The move simply felt right. She looks at her time away, not as a hiatus, but as a time of seeding personal growth. She and husband, Allen, rebuilt their cabin that had burned during the 1996 Miller's Reach fire near Big Lake. She also reconnected with village life by working for two years to help GCI roll out digital telephone service in rural Alaska.

"When I came back ... I felt reinvigorated," she said. "I had given myself the time to change gears and I had a perspective I didn't have as a younger woman."

In the years away, she'd gained a better sense of balancing personal and professional priorities. At work now, "my demeanor is supportive and calming," she reflected. "I try not to sweat the small stuff, which comes with age and being comfortable in my own skin."

One of a 13 regional corporations Congress established under ANCSA in 1971, Anchorage-based CIRI is owned by more than 7,540 shareholders of Athabascan and Southeast Indian, Inupiat and Yup'ik Eskimo, Alutiiq and Aleut descent. Its business interests include energy, resource and real estate development, construction services, tourism, telecommunications and aerospace defense.

FROM VILLAGE TO OUTSIDE

Brown, a Yup'ik Eskimo from the

Interior village of Takotna, was born in Anchorage. Both parents were...