ANCSA and North Slope oil: catalysts for Alaska Native prosperity.

• Author: Bradner, Mike
• Position: SPECIAL SECTION: ANCSA @40

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It has been said the trans-Alaska oil pipeline wouldn't have been built, at least in the 1970s when it was constructed, without the Alaska Native Claims Settlement Act issue having been settled by Congress beforehand. It has also been said ANCSA would not have passed and particularly in the form it did, had it not been for the pipeline.

Construction of the oil pipeline transformed Alaska and so has ANCSA, although its effects are more gradual. In the long run, however, ANCSA will prove as transformative an event as the pipeline.

The oil pipeline created a construction boom in the 1970s as the oil fields were built along with the pipeline itself and in the 1980s brought a gusher of revenues to the State treasury. Spending of the oil revenues, which amounted to billions of dollars, built new community infrastructure across the State and encouraged a sharp rise in the State's population.

University of Alaska economist Scott Goldsmith has estimated Alaska's population and economy would be about half of its current size were oil not discovered on the North Slope and the pipeline built. Alaska today would be about like Maine, a great place to live but not the best place to make a living, Goldsmith has said.

THE ANCSA EFFECT

ANCSA is having a different kind of effect, but one that also is profound. ANCSA led to the creation of Native-owned development corporations now among the largest employers in the state--of Natives and non-Natives alike. Many are billion-dollar corporations in terms of annual revenues, with operations in the Lower 48 and overseas that bring profits back to Alaska.

Most important, Native corporations are large private landowners, owning about 45 million acres, with oil, minerals and timber production from their lands. They are also a source of Alaskan-owned investment capital used to finance projects and development in the state. Any glance around Anchorage today shows the economic importance of the corporations in terms of the commercial buildings they have built and own. The same holds true for Fairbanks and Juneau, though on a smaller scale.

Would there have been an oil pipeline without the claims act? Probably, at some point. Would there have been a claims settlement without the pipeline. Probably, at some point, but it would be a much different settlement and almost certainly a less generous one.

What was the Alaska Native claims issue all about? Unlike in the Lower 48, where farmers and ranchers moving west displaced Native Americans from their...