In the article about the Alaska Native Claims Settlement Act published Dec. 8 in the ADN, the second paragraph began, “Since its inception, ASRC has paid out more than $1 billion in dividends, with recent per shareholder payments as high as $7,000 per year.” I’m dumbfounded that someone thinks a high of $7,000 per year for petroleum revenue is a success. How low can our bar be?
Considering billions and billions of dollars’ worth of oil have been siphoned out of Alaska for decades, I think it’s fair to say that nothing was ever fair about it. I’m aware that the young Native leaders at the time were told, “the train’s leaving the station, so jump on or be left behind.” Obviously, they felt they had to jump on and did.
When it comes to Alaska Native food security, aka subsistence, rural folks who’ve lived off the same land for centuries before the colonial era became to be currently fight for their food security every day with few to no allies. ANCSA extinguished all Aboriginal title to the lands of Alaska, thus creating the “subsistence problem.”Fifty years ago, our sovereign rights were signed away for a pipeline and our culture was privatized so oil can flow.
In my lifetime, not one industry has been created to provide a sustainable and viable Alaska-based industry to provide a livable wage for Alaska Native working-class people and/or rural families by any corporation. We still depend on outsiders to make a livable wage, even in the fishing industry.I’m what they called an “afterborn” or “leftout” because I was born in 1972. Sealaska Corp. in 2008 agreed to offer people like me a lesser-valued stock option other than an original issued stock they call “life estate stocks.” Life estate stocks aren’t owned by a shareholder, but held in perpetuity until the shareholder dies, then they go back into the pool. Original shares, for those born in 1971 or before, are owned exclusively by the shareholder and can be willed to anyone upon death or gifted to a direct family member at any time. They’re also worth considerably more money than a life estate stock.
It’s nearly impossible to hold our corporate boards of directors and CEOs accountable, because the corporations follow corporate law, not tribal law, and adopted rules for proxy elections. In a proxy election, a shareholder with more shares has more votes. A hundred shares is 300 votes to be distributed as the shareholder sees fit. If Alaska Native Corporations based their wealth on our cultural values and the health and well-being of our Alaska Native people, they’d be failing miserably. Lucky for them, they follow the American standard and are considered a success.Alaska Native homelessness has been rampant most of my life due to state policy discrimination and a continued 20% unemployment rate — pre-COVID — that has plagued our people for decades. The privatization of our culture through ANCSA was only created to tap the untold trillions of dollars’ worth of oil and to construct a pipeline to transfer that wealth to port to be shipped out to make other people wealthy beyond belief.
— Yeilyadi Olson
Anchorage
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