Tanana Chiefs Conference: preserving the people.

• Author: Holland, Jonathan
• Position: Corporate 100 Profile

As Alaska's nonrenewable resources dwindle, more attention is being paid to the state's renewable resources. Most people think of commodities, such as fish or timber, when they think of renewable resources, but Alaska's most precious renewable resource is its people.

For more than 30 years, the Tanana Chiefs Conference (TCC) has protected Alaska's human resources with intelligence and vigor. A burgeoning social, political and economic giant in Alaska's Interior, TCC is dedicated to strengthening the Athabaskan people and their culture.

TCC is a consortium of 43 Athabaskan villages spanning 235,000 square miles of the Alaska interior, an area slightly less in size than the state of Texas. More than 86,000 people inhabit the region, about 10,600 of them Alaska Natives.

Last year, according to TCC officials, the nonprofit corporation ran nearly $36.5 million worth of health and social service programs -- 250 programs in total -- for the federal and state government in Alaska's Interior. Almost one half, or 120 of those programs, cover village safe water, public safety and remote maintenance training under the contract with the State of Alaska.

Most of TCC's revenue comes in the form of pass-through programs or grants. TCC charges administrative fees to cover the costs of running the programs. Fees range from a low of 3 percent for transfer-payment programs to 20 percent for comprehensive administration.

"Our average rate to operate the administrative side is 11 percent," says Al Ketzler Sr., TCC's chief administrative officer.

Ketzler says the local control and administration of government programs provided by TCC protects the program's recipients from indifference and lack of understanding on the part of distant bureaucracies.

"We started with one employee in 1962 -- me," says Ketzler, who served as the first president of the corporation. Today, TCC employs more than 1,100 people annually, 450 of them on a full-time basis. Another 200 hourly-wage employees work for TCC on an essentially full-time basis as well. Unlike the oilmen and miners who also traverse the Interior in search of mineral wealth, these Native employees aren't going anywhere -- they are simply staying with their land.

Cultural Roots

The Tanana Chiefs Conference is a modern descendant of traditional gatherings of Athabaskan leaders at Nu-cha-la-woy-a, the Athabaskan name for the confluence of the TAnana and Yukon rivers, where the village of Tanana now stands. With the...