Plan for expanding Federal Subsistence Board with Alaska tribal members gets public airing

The Biden administration has made formal a promised plan to give tribal governments more say in how customary harvests of fish, game and plants are managed in rural Alaska.

The Department of the Interior and Department of Agriculture released a proposed rule to expand the Federal Subsistence Board with three new public members nominated by Alaska tribes. The proposed rule, published in the Federal Register last week, would also require the board’s chair to have some personal experience with and knowledge of subsistence practices.

Subsistence is the term used for non-commercial and traditional harvests of wild resources for personal or family consumption, crafting into clothing or tools or use as art material. The Federal Subsistence Board oversees management of the subsistence program that is carried out on federal public lands and waters within the state. Its current membership consists of regional directors of five federal agencies within the Interior and Agriculture departments — the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service, National Park Service, Bureau of Land Management, Bureau of Indian Affairs and U.S. Forest Service — and three public representatives.

Public comments on the proposed rule will be accepted through April 26.

Interior Secretary Deb Haaland’s Alaska adviser, Raina Thiele, and Interior’s top attorney, Bob Anderson, described the new rule and how it came about in a presentation Tuesday, the first day of a four-day joint meeting of all the regional subsistence advisory councils.

Thiele said that Haaland, who described her vision for adding tribal representatives to the board when she spoke at the Alaska Federation of Natives convention in October, views the expansion as part of a wider policy of strengthening relations between the federal governments and tribes.

Subsistence management in Alaska is one of the top subjects for which more Indigenous voices in decision making are considered vital, said Thiele, who is Dena’ina Athabascan and Yup’ik and spent her childhood in the Bristol Bay region.

“As we know, as we all are aware, subsistence practices hold immense cultural and historical importance for Alaska Native communities and for rural communities and have supported life ways, food security, Indigenous practices and cultures for thousands of years,” she said.

Anderson, speaking to the gathered regional representatives at the annual meeting in Anchorage, said the board-expansion plan reflects desires of subsistence users.

“Through the consultation process, the public testimony made it clear that the Native voice and tribal issues were very important,” he said.

Under the proposed rule, the new board members are to be nominated by tribal governments but need not be tribal members themselves, Anderson said. They would have to have some personal knowledge of and experience with subsistence practices, he said.

The idea got a generally positive reception among attendees at the meeting.

“I’m just really excited to have seen this come out and I look forward to the implementation as we go forward,” said Natasha Hayden, a member of the Kodiak/Aleutians Subsistence Regional Advisory Council, one of 10 such councils in the state.

However, there are problems that would be difficult for the subsistence board to address, even if it were expanded with new tribal representatives.

Management of natural resources in the ocean is of vital significance to subsistence resources along coastlines and in rivers, several audience members said. They expressed complaints about salmon that is accidentally netted by big commercial fishing vessels targeting other species in the ocean — what is referred to as bycatch. Other concerns raised were about the entanglement and ship-related deaths of marine mammals and potential distortions of the ocean ecosystem created by vast numbers of hatchery fish being released.

But responsibility for fishing in federal waters and marine mammal safety is with the North Pacific Fishery Management Council, the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration and other organizations, and is outside the scope of the Federal Subsistence Board’s duties. In some cases, as regional representatives attending the meeting pointed out, decisions affecting Alaska subsistence resources are being made in other nations and are thus international issues.

A big disconnect exists between federal and Alaska state subsistence management, Anderson acknowledged. Several regional representatives attending the meeting expressed frustration with those federal-state conflicts.

Darrel Vent, a member of the Western Interior Alaska Subsistence Regional Advisory Council, was among them.

The management structure is “kind of fragmented,” said Vent, who is from Huslia. The federal government adheres to subsistence priority for rural residents harvesting on federal lands and waters, but the state does not. That has led to difficulties in his community and in others, he said.

“On the state side, we’re really hurting with the type of management,” he said.

Anderson told the gathered regional representatives that the federal-state management split remains a formidable challenge.

He said it goes back to a 1989 Alaska Supreme Court decision, in a case called McDowell v. State, that overturned a state rural subsistence priority that was in alignment with federal law. While many attempts were made to amend the state constitution to allow for a state rural subsistence priority, they fell short, he said. That led to the current situation with the federal government enforcing a rural subsistence priority on its territory within Alaska but the state allowing subsistence access to all residents, rural or not, on state territory.

The conflict flared up dramatically in 2021, when the federal and state governments clashed over management of sparse salmon runs in the Kuskokwim River. The federal government allowed a small amount of subsistence fishing by rural residents in a section of river flowing through the Yukon Delta National Wildlife Refuge, but the state issued a rule allowing subsistence fishing by all Alaskans.

That led to an “outcry from tribes and local residents as well,” Anderson told the assembled representatives.

In 2022, Interior sued the state over the issue, and the state responded by claiming it has authority over the 180-mile section of river that flows through the refuge — and that federal subsistence policy should not apply there.

The case, which has become a flashpoint over subsistence management, is pending in federal court in Anchorage.

“We expect a decision from the judge any time now,” Anderson said. “We think that we’ve got a very strong case, and it will prevail.”

The state, in its briefings, has claimed that the section of river flowing through the refuge is state territory rather than federal territory and that federal management of subsistence there interferes with the state’s rights to manage its salmon runs.

Originally published by the Alaska Beacon, an independent, nonpartisan news organization that covers Alaska state government.