Next Month, Native Business In Alaska Business Monthly.

• Author: McCorkle, Vern C.

It has been a generation, and some, since one of the greatest social experiments of the western world commenced-the Alaska Native Claims Settlement Act. Its passage by Congress was contemporaneous with several imperatives, not the least of which was reaching agreements and making arrangements to build the trans-Alaska oil pipeline through federal and, eventually, Native-owned real estate.

We have used Native real estate instead of Native land because one of the intents of Congress, it is reported, was to bring western ways to aboriginal residents of Alyeska, who were attached by heritage to land. When one puts monetary equivalency on land, it becomes real estate. Thereafter, the entire basis upon which Native people related to their land was to change. In doing so, landholders became shareholders. For years, sincere and compassionate onlookers wondered about the wisdom of Congress in propounding such a theory and then legislating it in the Act of 1971. It created regional and village Native corporations and allowed them to collectively select 44 million acres of land for a home base and future investments, and appropriated $962.5 million in...