By KATIE MORITZ - JUNEAU EMPIRE
Nearly 43 years after the Alaska Native Claims Settlement Act was signed into law by President Richard Nixon, Sealaska Corporation will likely receive the final acres of Tongass National Forest land it is entitled to.
Robert Dillon, a spokesman for Sen. Lisa Murkowski, R-Alaska, and the Senate Energy and Natural Resources Committee, said the Sealaska lands bill, formally known as the Southeast Alaska Native Land Entitlement Finalization and Jobs Protection Act, will likely move through the House and Senate by Christmas. If signed into law by President Barack Obama, it would transfer 70,000 acres of the 17 million-acre Tongass National Forest to Sealaska, fulfilling the Native corporation’s decades-old ANCSA entitlement of 375,000 acres. The corporation represents Southeast Alaska’s Tlingit, Haida and Tsimshian tribes.
The development was announced Wednesday after more than a year-long stall in Congress. Murkowski first introduced a version of the legislation in 2008 after Rep. Don Young, R-Alaska, introduced his House version. Since then, it’s been steadily met with opposition, stops and starts.
The secret to making headway with the Sealaska bill was to wrap it up in a public lands bill package, Dillon said. The bill is one of 57 small lands bills “that are important to individual members” of Congress, he said.
“If you brought them up individually on the floor there wasn’t a lot of interest,” Dillon said. “To put together this package... that raises the interest level of people wanting to get it done. It’s called legislating — the old-fashioned way, the Ted Stevens way.”
Individual lands bills have rarely moved in the House or Senate in the past two years, he said. The 57 bills are attached to the larger National Defense Authorization Act, annual, must-pass legislation that guides the U.S. Department of Defense’s spending.
Murkowski’s announcement touted bicameral and bipartisan support for the Sealaska bill, which has been met with pushback by Republican lawmakers who wanted to protect public lands. Conservation groups have also spoken out against handing over the land, in the interest of preserving old-growth forest.
Murkowski said in a news release that she has “worked tirelessly with all stakeholders to address concerns” which has been a difficult process “because every acre of the Tongass is precious to someone.”
“If you put enough bills together and strike the right balance between conservation and economic opportunity and development, you get mass where you have enough votes to move the package,” Dillon said of the legislative process.
Despite fanfare from legislators, Sealaska itself is holding off on any celebration until the bill is signed into law. The corporation learned of the development on Tuesday night but didn’t send out a press release about it, an indicator of “how cautious we’re being,” CEO Anthony Mallott said.
“Obviously, you can’t help feeling excited, but the process is still moving,” he said.
Within the 70,000-acre land package there are nine large sites “mostly identified for their timber value, old growth and young growth;” nine smaller sites for economic and job development projects other than logging and mining; and 76 culturally significant sites, Sealaska Vice President Jaeleen Araujo said.
The corporation has been taken to task throughout the bill’s progress for percieved “cherrypicking” of the best sites on the Tongass, and for its plans to log a portion of the acreage. Washington, D.C.-based conservation group Alaska Wilderness League released a statement Wednesday criticizing the bill’s advancement.
“The Tongass National Forest is a world-class fishery and tourist destination, and is the crown jewel of our national forest system,” Executive Director Cindy Shogan said in a news release. “It is never a good day when we lose thousands of acres of valuable Tongass old-growth. Decades of clear-cutting have already led to the decimation of much of the old-growth in the Tongass and have greatly increased the expanse of degraded wildlife habitat.”
The release said the organization is “heartened by the inclusion of more than 150,000 acres of (Tongass) conservation” in the same legislation.
Sealaska spokeswoman Dixie Hutchinson said the corporation has not received special treatment from the U.S. Forest Service, which has jurisdiction over the Tongass. The forest is a patchwork of various land-use designations.
“These lands that Sealaska (selected) are what are deemed by the Forest Service as economic (development) lands,” she said. “We’re not doing anything that’s above and beyond what’s available to us.”
For example, the corporation had to avoid no-build, wilderness-designated lands, and asked for a much greater number of cultural sites than it was ultimately granted, Araujo added.
“My response is always, ‘Who cherrypicked what first?’” she said. “It’s about returning land to Native ownership. ... We are trying to complete a land entitlement.”
In 1971, ANCSA compelled the federal government to transfer land titles to Alaska’s 12 Native regional corporations, including Sealaska, and smaller village corporations.
“Having gone through a very long-term process shows the importance of this lands bill for us and getting finality on our total entitlement is worth that effort,” Mallott said. “(Sealaska has) many areas we’d like to move our focus on to. Getting this behind us will allow us to work to integrate those new lands. ... We are anxiously waiting to see this finalized.”
