Anchorage Daily News

Few people have had as big an impact on Alaska as William "Willie" Hensley, whose college paper on land ownership led to the Alaska Native Land Claims Settlement Act, the creation of the Alaska Federation of Natives and the Native corporations so prominent in today's state economy.

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"Fifty Miles form Tomorrow" by William L. Iggiagruk Hensley

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His epiphany, in 1966, that Native title to Alaska's land needed to be resolved came at a propitious moment. A generation earlier, and his contention would have been ignored or dismissed. A few years later, after Alaska had selected lands promised at statehood, would have been too late.

The man responsible for triggering and ramrodding the resolution of the land claims issue and for the associated political and corporate developments that have meant billions of dollars for Alaska came from humble origins. He was born in Kotzebue in 1941, the son of an Inupiaq mother and a Russian trader.

In his new autobiography, "Fifty Miles From Tomorrow," Hensley recounts his childhood, education, career, personal achievements and setbacks, as well as his love of poetry, among other things.

The following excerpts are presented here by permission of the publisher.

Chapter 1

Qaugrirunga: I Become Conscious

In my first real moment of consciousness, from when I was only 2 or 3 years old, some adult was in the midst of an alcoholic binge and molesting Saigulik, who was four years older than me. ...

My mother, Makpiiq, had no skills that I am aware of, and I can't imagine what kind of work she found in Nome. Of course, I have no clear memories of those early years. We doubtless lived in one of the cold tarpaper shacks the Inuit occupied if they were lucky enough to get work in local bars or restaurants or in the nearby gold mines. Without adequate income for fuel, food and warm clothing, life was fairly brutal. I have only one photograph from this period: a winter picture of Makpiiq, Saigulik and me in the company of my Aunt Isabel and a tall white man whose identity I do not know. I am squinting into the sun, obviously unhappy.

At the end of the war, my mother's first cousin Agnagaq, whose English name was Fred Hensley, came through Nome. He found my sister and me in terrible shape -- abused, malnourished, badly clothed and living in squalor. When he arrived, Saigulik and I were on the verge of being taken away from my mother by the territorial government that ruled Alaska at the time. Somehow, Agnagaq was able to convince the local magistrate that the two of us should be allowed to return to Kotzebue with him.

It was the best thing that had ever happened to me. I do not remember feeling sad about leaving my birth mother, whom I saw only once or twice again all the rest of my life. As young as I was, perhaps I somehow sensed how lucky I was to have been rescued from that squalid life in Nome.

(Hensley continues with a vivid description of the thinly insulated one-room house where he found sanctuary, where plumbing consisted of rainwater and a honey bucket. The adults and the oldest son slept on cots, while the other children huddled under blankets as far from the door as they could get. He describes the sights and smells of the place -- and how happy he was.)

Chapter 12

Nunavut Tigummiung! Hold on to the land!

(After attending boarding school and college in the Lower 48, Hensley enrolled at the University of Alaska in Fairbanks as a finance major, "despite the fact that I never had any finances to manage." While there he took a course in constitutional law from Alaska Supreme Court Chief Justice Jay Rabinowitz.)

As part of the course, [Rabinowitz] assigned us a research paper on any legal subject we wanted to explore, any issue involving constitutional law. After all the reading I had done as a homesick undergraduate, keeping up with my homeland's early years as a full-fledged state, I knew exactly what I wanted to investigate: Alaska's vast lands -- and the complex, vital and sometimes deeply personal issues surrounding Native ownership.

I took stock of the situation: It was 1966, seven years since Alaska had become a state, and the fledgling state had a population of fewer than 300,000 and almost no private land to tax. Delving into the numerous issues regarding the foundation of my state, I learned that virtually all of Alaska was under the control of the federal government. To ensure that the new state could survive, the act of Congress that created it granted the state government the right to select up to 104 million acres for state ownership. Not surprisingly, the state officials aiming to pick out the acreage with the greatest potential for oil, gas and mineral deposits were paying no attention at all to Native interests in the land, and were, in fact, poised to steal it away from us entirely.

• • •

I turned to the history of Alaska in particular, and the key event of 1867's Treaty of Cession, which governed the sale of Alaska by Russia to the United States for $7.2 million. I concluded that, after being handed off from the Russians to the Americans, the Alaskan Natives found themselves in an even more confusing situation. The laws they were required to obey were vague at best, and there were no standards for how they might go about achieving citizenship, or whether this was even an option. More upsetting were the stories I read about non-Natives exploiting these ambiguities to take possession of land the Natives -- communal in outlook, and new to the foreign notion of private property -- had used and inhabited for generations.

There seemed to be some hope, however, in the 1959 act of Congress admitting Alaska to the union. It stated: "As a compact with the United States, said State and its people do agree and declare that they forever disclaim all right and title to any lands or other property (including fishing rights), the right or title to which may be held by any Indians, Eskimos, or Aleuts ... or is held by the United States in trust for said Natives."

The United States had never won any land from Alaskan Natives in battle. It had never signed any treaties with the Alaskan Natives. Legal precedent was clear: If land had not been taken in battle or seized by act of Congress, the federal courts had consistently found that Native Americans retained "aboriginal title" to it. That had to mean that we still owned most of Alaska!

I knew instinctively that if we permitted the state to begin to "select" its 104 million acres from the federal government, we would never be able to retrieve that land. Somehow, we had to stop their selections. Otherwise, all we could look forward to would be a lifetime of litigation, ending in settlements of a few cents per acre -- similar to those received by Indians in the Lower 48 -- and no land. As I finally came to comprehend the danger my people faced, it almost made me ill. If we did nothing, we were going to lose our land, just as all the Indians to the south had, a century before.

Without control over our lands, our livelihoods, our culture and our future were doomed, I argued passionately in my paper, maintaining that aboriginal rights to the land could be trumped neither by the nascent state nor by private interests. I finished it in the spring of 1966, and Judge Rabinowitz gave me an A.

Chapter 18

Atautchikuaq: As One

(Hensley became an energetic advocate for Native rights, particularly with regard to land ownership. He organized with other Alaska Native leaders, worked with lawyers and politicians, traveled exhaustively and learned how to navigate the corridors of Washington, D.C., from which any meaningful change would have to emerge.)

[We] found unexpected sympathy from Nixon's administration. I have always been amused by the irony: It was, after all, Mr. Nixon's Quaker forefathers from Whittier whose missionaries had come to "save souls" in my part of Alaska and had worked so hard to suppress our language, change our customs, alienate our children and generally cut our people off from our cultural roots.

Nixon's vice president, Spiro Agnew, was another unlikely ally. In 1967, President Lyndon Johnson had appointed me as the first Alaska Native to sit on the National Council on Indian Opportunity, a body he had created to focus on poverty and other issues confronting American Indians. After Nixon was elected, Agnew inherited the chairmanship of the council, whose members included Donald Rumsfeld, then head of the Office of Economic Opportunity, and George Shultz, secretary of labor.

This was an incredible opportunity to spread our message. At least six members of the president's Cabinet attended each meeting -- people who could be powerful advocates of any cause. Every time I had a chance to speak to the Cabinet members and the vice president, my goal was to press for support for our Native land claims. Appropriately enough, our meetings took place in the Indian Treaty Room in the Old Executive Office Building. God only knows how many millions of acres of Indian land had been taken by hook or by crook in this very room over the course of 200 years. I just hoped that Alaska Natives were not going to join the ranks of tribes who had given up land for blankets or a few cents an acre and been relegated to reservations that were only a fraction of their former holdings.

Slowly, the momentum was building. ... Our land claims had stymied state land selections -- and along with them, the creation of the corridor destined for the 800-mile-long trans-Alaska pipeline -- and the consortium of oil companies slated to build the pipeline wanted the problem solved as quickly as possible. Ultimately, they joined in the effort to pass a "fair" Native claims settlement bill. ...

All of these developments, combined with the positive intervention of President Nixon in the spring of 1971, led to an increasingly affirmative environment on Capitol Hill. And over the next five months, both the Senate and the House of Representatives passed versions of the Alaska Native Claims Settlement Act. The battle was not over: As a conference committee worked to reconcile the two bills, the system worked to minimize the size of the settlement.

In the end, a bill was passed and was signed into law by President Nixon. It awarded Alaska Natives 44 million acres of land -- about 16 percent of Alaska's territory -- and $962.5 million dollars for relinquishing claims to the rest. To administer the land and the money, the act called for the establishment of a system of village and regional corporations, whose shareholders would be eligible Alaska Natives.

We had begun, five years before, with Alaska Natives having no recognized claim over any of our traditional lands. Now we had nearly $1 billion and 44 million acres of land, deeded to us by the highest authorities in the land. It had taken sacrifice, energy and commitment from all of Alaska's tribes. Not everyone was happy with the outcome; there were those who felt strongly that we should have held out for more. But when the Alaska Federation of Natives voted on the settlement, before President Nixon signed it into law, the result was 511 delegates in favor, 56 against. For better or worse, we had won.

Excerpted from Fifty Miles from Tomorrow by William L. Iġġiaġruk Hensley. Copyright © 2009 by William L. Iġġiaġruk Hensley. Published in January 2009 by Sarah Crichton Books, an imprint of Farrar, Straus and Giroux, LLC. All rights reserved.

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