Tongass timber history a reminder of history’s contradictions

Taxpayers for Common Sense just announced that the U.S. Forest Service has lost $30 million annually for the last 20 years on timber sales in the Tongass National Forest. That forest has a checkered history, as do the Alaska politicians associated with it.

In 1947, Congress passed the Tongass Timber Act, legislation that authorized 50-year leases from the U.S. Forest Service to timber companies for harvesting pulp timber, a guarantee that planned pulp mills would have a secure wood supply. Pulp mills on the Tongass Forest had long been the dream of the chief forester for Alaska, B. Frank Heintzleman, who had been in Alaska since the 1920s and dedicated his career to Alaska’s economic development. With the 1947 timber act, he projected construction of five mills in Southeast Alaska, which he thought would create 5,000 jobs and support 60,000 people, almost the total population of Alaska in 1947. Gov. Ernest Gruening and Alaska territorial delegate Bob Bartlett aggressively supported the forester’s plans and the timber act. In time, two pulp mills would be built and Heintzleman would be appointed Alaska’s territorial governor.

But Heintzleman, Gruening and Bartlett had a big problem. In 1947, the Tlingit and Haida Indians of Southeast Alaska filed a suit in the U.S. Court of Claims asserting their ownership of virtually all of the land in Southeast Alaska, the Alexander Archipelago — about 18 million acres, including all of the Tongass National Forest. The claim was based on an assertion that the Tlingit and Haida had always had a concept of property ownership, and they never relinquished their property to the Russians, who therefore didn’t own what they purported to sell to the United States in 1867; the Tlingit and Haida still owned it, and they wanted compensation for the U.S. appropriation of it when the Tongass Forest was established. Until the ownership issue was resolved, neither timber companies nor potential funders of the pulp mills would risk investing in Alaska.

When Congress was debating the timber act, representatives of the Alaska Native Brotherhood, the principal Native advocacy group in Alaska at the time, traveled to Washington, D.C., to protest passage of the act. There were various proposals to deal with the Native land claim, including dismissing it from consideration entirely, or giving the Tlingit and Haida some land around their villages, amounting to perhaps 10% of their claim. Gruening and Heintzleman thought the claim was spurious and gave it no credence. Bartlett was not so confident.

The plan that finally emerged, included in the act, provided that the money collected from the timber lease sales would be put into escrow, and should the Tlingit and Haida prevail in their suit, would belong to them. The Natives opposed this plan, but their protests fell on deaf ears, and Congress passed the act.

When it did, Gruening wrote to Bartlett that Alaska had “dodged a bullet.” Gruening was as committed to Alaska’s economic development as Heintzleman. They feared that should the Natives own the forest, there would be no pulp mills, or if there were, the whole enterprise would be under Native control. Disparagingly, they did not like the thought of Natives controlling such development.

For Gruening and Heintzleman, Alaska’s economic development took precedence over Native land rights, whatever those might be. These same arguments would be made later, during debate over the 1971 comprehensive Alaska Native Claims Settlement Act.

Gruening has been lauded for his role in championing Alaska’s 1945 Anti-Discrimination Act. That’s not inappropriate; he supported that act and equal opportunity for Natives. But for him, and for many other Alaskans, Alaska’s economic advance took priority, and they rejected the notion that any one group should be privileged in implementing it. Gruening and others similarly championed construction of a dam on the Yukon River below Fort Yukon, which would have created a lake the size of Lake Erie and destroyed the breeding habitat of hundreds of thousands of waterfowl. In that case, economic development took priority over environmental considerations.

We must remember that real history is messy and full of contradictions. That’s because it’s produced by human beings whose lives are messy and full of contradictions.

Stephen Haycox is an emeritus professor of history at the University of Alaska Anchorage.

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