Calista Corporation Culture. Business.

• Author: Beans, Robert

As the people of the Yukon-Kuskokwim region, we practice subsistence by following qanruyutet (gan-ya-wu-DET), or words of wisdom, from our Elders. They tell us food creates family bonds and that Elders wish good fortune upon those who help them. We may have harvested the seal, but if we do not share the bounty from the sea, we are not following qanruyutet.

The Calista region is home to fifty-six villages spread out along the Bering Sea coast and two of Alaska's mightiest rivers--the Yukon and Kuskokwim--and it encompasses 57,000 square miles. Calista Corporation's land entitlement in the region is 6.5 million acres, less than 20 percent of the region.

To commemorate the 50th anniversary of the Alaska Native Claims Settlement Act (ANCSA), Calista Corporation is reflecting on what it means to be a successful business and promote our cultural values and traditional way of life.

Over the past fifty years, we explored business opportunities to provide jobs and benefits for our shareholders while protecting and developing our resources on the lands our ancestors settled and depended on for thousands of years.

Calista's business resilience is intrinsically linked to our values rooted in our Yup'ik, Cup'ik, and Athabascan cultures in the Yukon-Kuskokwim region. Most residents in the region still speak their traditional languages. Data from the 2010 US Census showed Yup'ik as the second most common Native language spoken in the entire country.

Living a life in line with the words of wisdom from our Elders is reflected by a willingness to share the bounty of the hunt. This spring Calista announced $8.1 million in distributions to shareholders--our largest distribution to date.

Since inception, Calista has declared more than $94 million in distributions to shareholders--more than half of which was distributed in the past five years. This is one way we fulfill Calista's core value of service to shareholders, customers, and the public.

Our corporate core value of teamwork and meeting our commitments to one another aligns with our traditional value of working together as a village to harvest what we need each season.

This teamwork helps all of us during hard times. For example, our early leaders recognized that some regions are richer in natural resources and therefore have more potential for economic development. The resulting provision of ANCSA--sharing revenue from natural resources-helped Calista and other Native corporations during our early...