Building Relations: Alaska Natives, Ancsa and the Federal Government

• Publication year: 2017

§ 33 Alaska L. Rev. 183. BUILDING RELATIONS: ALASKA NATIVES, ANCSA AND THE FEDERAL GOVERNMENT

Alaska Law Review
Volume 33, No. 2, December 2016
Cited: 33 Alaska L. Rev. 183

BUILDING RELATIONS: ALASKA NATIVES, ANCSA AND THE FEDERAL GOVERNMENT

RAINA THIELE ^[*]

[F]or me as a young person, having grown up all over the state and also having exposure to Anchorage and the outlying locations, I had experience with The CIRI Foundation, the Cook Inlet Tribal Council, the Heritage Center, and a variety of different tribal organizations, all of which were pushing a college education. Not only asking "How do you apply?" but also asking: "How do you pay for this? Where can you go? How do you work this process?" As I think about the forty-fifth anniversary of ANCSA, which is the theme of today's conference, I can see a direct link between that law and where I am today. These institutions, many of them, are either the direct or indirect result of ANCSA. They have created this immense amount of information for Native people to draw on which helps us get to where we need to go. And of course there are different opinions about ANCSA, some positive, some negative. The economic impacts have been wonderful, but we also still continue to struggle to secure our rights to hunt and fish for subsistence purposes.

We also struggle, as I have seen myself, with a lot of federal misinformation. A lot of folks at the federal level have a thin understanding of Alaska and who Alaskan Native people are. It is very difficult to try to understand the political and legal differences between our Alaska Native system versus the system of the lower forty-eight tribes. It is much simpler in the lower forty-eight in many ways. You have some treaty tribes, you have large tribes that are federally recognized, and they control the economic vibrancy in their communities. So it is easy to understand the governance and economic drivers as they are typically controlled by a single entity. Whereas here in Alaska, we have a much more complicated system. And it is not even necessarily the federal government's fault that folks do not understand this, but it can definitely get discouraging when you always have to explain and explain again. Because folks have a low base knowledge and the folks that are in government are not always really in government, for decades and decades...