WASHINGTON -- A House committee heard four bills Wednesday that would benefit Alaska Natives, including an economic development initiative for remote villages that would be modeled on aid programs for countries with emerging economies.
The goal is to target the worst poverty among Native populations in Alaska and throughout the United States, said Julie Kitka, president of the Alaska Federation of Natives.
"It can be replicated within the United States with predictable, positive results," Kitka said.
The program, known as the Native American Challenge Demonstration Project, would allow villages to identify specific economic development projects with clearly defined goals.
It had modest support from the U.S. Department of Commerce, which pointed to other such projects that have done well. They include a $1.2 million effort in 2004 to expand a runway in a village near Bethel. The project generated 189 jobs and created a cargo hub, said Ben Erulkar, a deputy secretary in the department's Economic Development Administration.
Few of the other bills drew much support from government agencies, though, including a bill that would designate Alexander Creek a Native village instead of a Native group.
The Department of Interior opposes such a designation because it would "undermine lengthy negotiations," said Michael Nedd, an assistant director for resource protection with the federal Bureau of Land Management.
That drew the ire of Rep. Don Young, R-Alaska, the top GOP member of the House Natural Resources Committee. The same conflicts with the same federal agencies keep resurfacing, Young told Nedd.
"Thirty-six years you've been sitting on your thumbs," Young said. "It seems like the agency's got its head stuck somewhere I don't want to talk about."
The president of Alexander Creek Inc. said that the would-be villagers consider it a victory just to have a hearing in Congress, and that they feel they're in the right on the issue.
"We're on the higher road," said Stephanie Thompson, president of Alexander Creek, which is about 27 miles northwest of Anchorage. "We're looking at protecting our land, our way of life, our inheritance."
Alexander Creek was designated a Native group in 1974 as part of the Alaska Native Claims Settlement Act, which Congress had approved three years earlier. Villagers fought the designation but signed an agreement in 1979 agreeing that their claims had been satisfied, in exchange for about $100,000 and 1,680 acres.
But no one knew what they were signing away at the time, Thompson said, and they've been fighting for the past two decades to recover their village status.
If they recover village status, they want 69,120 acres. If they're not able to get the land through swaps with the state and the Matanuska-Susitna Borough, they hope to get the cash value of the acreage, Thompson said.
The committee also heard legislation that would let Juneau's Sealaska Corp., the regional Native corporation for Southeast, acquire land outside of designated withdrawal areas to finalize its land selections under the Alaska Native Claims Settlement Act.
In addition, the committee heard a bill that would allow Native Alaskans who are Vietnam veterans to file land homestead claims of up to 160 acres if they weren't in the country when the 1906 land allotment law was repealed in 1971 and replaced with ANCSA.
Find Erika Bolstad online at adn.com/contact/ebolstad or call her in Washington, D.C., at 202-383-6104.
