Alaska News

Village Pillars: Willie Kasayulie -- patient, persistent with a long view

One benefit of being the named plaintiff in a landmark case that drags on like, forever?

People eventually learn to pronounce your name. That's no easy feat if your last name is Kasuyulie and you're from a remote Southwest Alaska village.

But that's indeed what's happened to Willie Kasayulie and his wife, Sophie, from Akiachak. Their last name, for the record, is pronounced Kuh-sie-lee. Ask Willie, and he'll tell you the name comes from kasuk, the Yup'ik word for eating raw food.

At any rate, Kasayulie jumped into the headlines again recently, when the state settled Kasayulie vs. State of Alaska, a 14-year effort to make sure rural schools were treated fairly when it came to spending state construction dollars.

When Kasayulie and others first sued in 1997, the state had fallen way behind on building and repairing rural schools. Many were overcrowded, with students sometimes meeting in libraries or storage areas. Some were unsafe and not up to code.

In a way, Kasayulie won the lawsuit years ago, when state Superior Court Judge John Reese called the state's funding of rural schools unconstitutional, inequitable, and racially discriminatory.

Since then, state lawmakers funneled more than $1 billion into rural school construction. Last year, the final puzzle piece fell into place, when rural legislators successfully passed a bill tying rural school funding to the process long enjoyed by urban schools. Starting next year, rural schools will get a percentage of the millions the state pays each year to reimburse school construction bonds in urban areas.

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The agreement and the new funding stream are expected to provide another $260 million for several rural schools over the new few years.

Kasayulie today is recognizable by graying hair that breaks off past his shoulders. He hasn't cut it in years and at 60, he looks more like an aging rock star than an activist and a top official at a big corporation. But he's fought the state for decades.

"I'm doing this for the children," he says.

Beginning in the 1980s, he and others dissolved Akiachak's city government, in order to give the tribe more power in the village. And they created the Yupiit Nation, a regional effort to enhance tribal powers in Akiachak and other villages.

Raised at a time when most villages had no high schools, Kasayulie left the village as a child to attend boarding schools in Wrangell and Oregon. Recognized as a promising student at Oregon's Chemawa Indian School, he was picked to attend a high school program in Vermont that taught him all about state government. He returned to Alaska in 1971, the same year the Alaska Native Claims Settlement Act created Native corporations and seeded them with start-up cash.

Kasayulie never received a college degree, but he's now vice-chair of one of those corporations, Calista Corp. He's also president of his local village corporation, and was once co-chair of the Alaska Federation of Natives.

Though he received an unusually worldly education, his greatest lesson came back in the village of Akiachak. At the time, men still took steambaths in the qasgiq, a sort of community hall for males. At the feet of elders, he says he learned about the seventh-generation concept -- that today's actions affect your descendents seven generations into the future.

It stayed with him his entire life.

Contact Alex DeMarban at alex(at)alaskadispatch.com

Alex DeMarban

Alex DeMarban is a longtime Alaska journalist who covers business, the oil and gas industries and general assignments. Reach him at 907-257-4317 or alex@adn.com.

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