Alaska: Where Native groups have corporations – and political heft

The idea was to settle land disputes in advance of oil development. It was also meant to prevent some of the problems occurring on reservations in other states.

“Life on Indian reservations was pretty tough in the 1960s,” said Lloyd Miller, an Anchorage attorney specializing in Native American affairs. “The majority view was that replicating the reservation system in Alaska would produce the same kind of economic distress and poverty which Native American people faced at the time on reservations down south.”

It is unlikely, he said, that Congress would make the same decision today. Congress left in place some 230 existing tribes and their governmental institutions in Alaska, and those tribal governments continue to this day as very active local governments, according to Miller. Unlike in the reservation system, in which tribes manage land held in trust by the federal government, the corporations became owners of the land. And unlike tribes, which have diplomatic relationships with the U.S., corporations are governed by state law.

The plan imposed a corporate form on people who did not have expertise in corporate management, including some who did not speak English as a first language, Miller said.

“Shares? Dividends? We didn’t know … We were learning,” said Georgianna Lincoln, a former state senator who began on the board of the regional corporation Doyon just a few years after it was established.

Many of the corporations simply failed and were later revived with the help of federal legislation. Some continue to struggle, while others have been successful, paying modest dividends.

Today some Native corporations are major contributors to Alaska’s economy. They also benefit from a government preference for minority contracts and are involved in everything from defense and mining to fishing and catering. They account for a third of the state’s 50 largest companies, according to Miller. Corporations also provide employment for Alaska Native people, and some provide college scholarships.

“They have a sense of obligation and duty to their villages, which is different than a normal corporation,” Miller said.

Opinions vary about whether the corporate model is better or worse than tribes and reservations when it comes to giving Native people access to political power, he said.

“We certainly would not do it the same way as we originally assigned our land claims,” Lincoln said, adding that rules shaping the corporations have been amended many times. “The one thing I would never have given up, never ever, is our subsistence rights.”

Alaska Native lands are managed by the state and federal government. That means that sometimes activities like hunting and fishing, which Native people see as a way of life, are restricted by wildlife managers. This summer, Lincoln said, because of a restriction on the harvest of king salmon, “not one smokehouse was going” in her home Yukon River village, Rampart.

“Alaska Native people are not at the table as decision-makers” when it comes to land and wildlife management, she said. “I was always told, if you are not at the policy table, then you are on the menu.”

Back at the AFN forum, moderators asked the candidates to weigh in on hunting and fishing rights for Alaska Natives who rely on wild foods for survival, conflicts between tribal government rights and the federal government and the federal government’s options to support poorer areas of rural Alaska. Sullivan often found himself on the wrong side of issues important to the room, occasionally eliciting boos. Hours after the forum concluded, AFN delegates voted to endorse Begich. Support from corporations, however, wasn’t so cut and dried.

Like tribes outside Alaska, especially those with gambling interests, Native corporations have the potential to flex serious political muscle. In 2010 they poured more than $1.7 million into a super PAC to support Sen. Lisa Murkowski, an incumbent Republican, in her write-in campaign, according to the Center for Responsive Politics, a nonprofit based in Washington, D.C. Murkowski had lost the Republican primary to Joe Miller, a tea party candidate whom many Natives saw as unfriendly to their interests. The Democratic challenger, Scott McAdams, was seen as unlikely to win.

The corporations supported get-out-the-vote efforts in rural communities that year. In some places, every single vote went to Murkowski. Alaska Natives have been credited with delivering her win.

This year the AFN made a big push to increase Native voting, including playing a recorded message from President Barack Obama encouraging people to walk to a nearby early voting location.

Alaska Natives tend to vote Democratic, but in the last decade, an increasing amount of corporate money and money from corporate employees has gone to Republicans, according to Sarah Bryner, research director at the Center for Responsive Politics, who also grew up in Alaska. That trend has more to do with strategy than ideology, she said. Native corporations spend a lot on lobbying, she said, and they want to maintain relationships that they have invested in. In Alaska there are more Republican politicians than Democratic ones.

“This is a community — or at least this is an industry — that really seems to favor the incumbent,” she said.

Campaign donations by Native corporations in Alaska are smaller than from some tribes in other states, especially those with gambling interests, Bryner said. Compared with 2010, the year Murkowski ran, spending by Native corporations was down.

Jim Lottsfeldt, a political strategist advising the pro-Begich super PAC Put Alaska First, said that the Murkowski race helped Native corporations see their political power more clearly. He said that the corporate donations in the Senate race are not what they were in the Murkowski race because not all corporations support one candidate. The Arctic Slope Regional Corp., which has interests in oil development in the Arctic, endorsed Sullivan.

“They like to work from a place of unanimity,” he said.

Local politicians appear to be more interested in creating a friendly business climate for multinational oil companies than for Native corporations, Lottsfeldt said. But when oil production declines, the corporations will remain.

“From an Alaska perspective, why wouldn’t we want those guys to be the winners?”

Alaska Native corporations have nurtured leaders with great financial talent, he said, but they could do more to nurture people with political skills. Alaska Native voter turnout tends to be lower than average, he said. But with a combination of home-grown politicians, increased voting and political donations, the Alaska Native community could have a serious sway over outcomes.

Lincoln is 71 and remains the only Alaska Native woman ever to serve in the state senate. Corporate managers have become far more sophisticated and connected across vast distances, thanks to technology, she said, but it is now up to elders to mentor political talent. She expects that her grandchildren’s generation will see far more political involvement and organization.

“I think that our influence has just started to be realized,” she said.