Tanacross revived! (Alaska Native Business News).

• Author: Stricker, Julie
• Position: Dihthaad Global Services LLC

Jerry Isaac wanted to see changes in his community, which was facing difficulties due to poverty and drug and alcohol addiction. So he created jobs for the families who lived there.

Jerry Isaac was born in the Native Village of Tanacross 48 years ago and he still calls the community of 150 on the Upper Tanana River home.

But life wasn't always easy on the home front. Social problems, like drug and alcohol abuse, were common. Jobs were few and opportunities scarce. The promise of economic and social self-sufficiency contained in 1971's Alaska Native Claims Settlement Act caused barely a ripple in the tiny village.

The solution, Isaac decided, was jobs, and the only way to get them was to create them through sustainable, environmentally sound development.

In 2001, Dihthaad Global Services LLC was incorporated, with the goal of zero unemployment in Tanacross.

Less than two years later, Dihthaad has received contracts in excess of $6 million and the people of Tanacross are working.

In the summer of 2001, "we had a little over $1 million in payroll and we had 100 percent of tribal members employed," Isaac says. "All of those who wanted to work, were working. We had 100 percent employment for those who desired to work."

In December 2001, the Native Village of Tanacross-Tanacross Village Council received the Tanana Chiefs Conference's "Village of the Year" award for economic development success.

Dihthaad's seeming overnight success was anything but overnight.

Isaac was working as a roustabout with Doyon Drilling in the late 1980s when he heard several co-workers talking about Doyon's millions of dollars in profit. He thought about what that kind of money would mean for Tanacross. He believed that the best economic development begins at the grass roots and he started pitching his vision of Tanacross' future to the tribe.

"It was a long process," he says. "There were a lot of growing pains."

The business success of the Native regional and village corporations created under ANCSA impressed Isaac, who is also president of the Tanacross Village Council and the nephew of the last traditional chief, Andrew Isaac. Under the act, the federal government distributed 44 million acres of land and nearly $1 billion among Alaska Natives to settle land claims blocking construction of the trans-Alaska oil pipeline. Twelve land-based for-profit regional corporations were created, with a mandate to provide for shareholders' economic and social well-being.

Today, the...