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Gary Fife hosted “Voice of Mvskoke,” an interview program carried on the radio and online. (Courtesy Mvskoke Media)
When Gary Fife worked as an Anchorage radio and TV reporter in the 1990s, he stood out with his long, flowing dark hair. But his presence made history. He was the first to host “National Native News,” a program that was launched in Alaska in the late 1980s.
Fife was still hosting radio shows and writing a weekly column when he died Jan. 14 in Oklahoma at the age of 73, after he was hospitalized for respiratory problems.
He devoted the last years of his life to his tribe’s online news publication, MvskokeMedia, capping off more than a half century of efforts to change the way journalists cover Indigenous peoples.
Across Oklahoma, Gary Fife was known as the Voice of Mvskoke, a voice familiar to Indian Country, in large part due to his work on National Native News.
Back then, Diane Kaplan ran the Alaska Public Radio Network. She said when Native leaders first approached her about producing a national show from Alaska, it sounded like a good idea. New satellite technology made it very doable, but financial support was a huge barrier to overcome.
Initially, there was not even enough funding for a whole year, which meant the show often survived on a month-to-month basis. There was also a struggle to find a Native American to host, produce and edit a daily newscast.
That search led Kaplan to Minneapolis and Fife, a Muscogee (Creek) Indian from Oklahoma, who believed the media was a modern extension of traditional storytelling and could be used to uplift what was then an invisible minority.
“So, I recruited Gary. And there wasn’t a second person to recruit at that time that I was aware of,” Kaplan said. “He was literally like the only person I could identify that had the skills to do that, and fortunately he said yes.”
Kaplan says Fife brought what was, at the time, a rare combination of skills – a Native American who not only had experience in reporting and broadcasting but also a deep knowledge of Native history, politics and the issues of the day, as well as lots of contacts around the nation.
Kaplan also liked Fife’s passion for the show’s mission and his belief that both Native Americans and non-Natives were hungry for meaningful stories about Indian Country.
Even so, Kaplan says it was also difficult to convince station managers that there was an audience for Native news. The program, she says, started out with fewer than 50 stations, and today there are hundreds, validating Fife’s belief that there is an appetite for serious Native news coverage.
Kaplan says Fife sacrificed a lot for the job. The move to Alaska took him far from home. The pay was lousy, and it fell mostly on Fife’s shoulders to build a network of reporters out of a pool of mostly non-Natives, because there were very few Native journalists to tap.
“Native America is like Europe. Italians are as different from the Russians as the Apaches are from the Senecas,” Fife said. “And so, we don’t speak the same language. We don’t all ride horses and chase buffalo.”
Fife said it was a challenge to educate reporters, who may have been well-intended but were often blind to their shortcomings, so Fife used his storytelling skills to open their eyes.
“I think we gained a measure of success in doing that,” he said.
Thirty years ago in Atlanta, Fife was in the spotlight at a national minority journalism conference, moderated by ABC’s Carole Simpson, one of the first Black women to anchor a network newscast. It was there that Fife challenged journalists to do a better job of covering Indian Country and confronted them about how they perpetuate stereotypes.
“One of my pet peeves used to be — is — that every new story we ever saw or heard opened up with a flute,” Fife told the 1994 gathering. “A lot of tribes don’t even use flutes, for God’s sake. I mean, would you use a polka every time you did a story on a German?”
Gary Fife represented National Native News at a national conference on minority journalism in Atlanta in 1994. CSPAN carried coverage of the discussion, giving Fife’s message about how to properly cover Native American stories a wider platform. (From C-SPAN)
In his early days, Fife was known for his gruff personality and sharp elbows.
“Gary was probably decades ahead of his time,” said Angel Ellis, director of Mvskoge Media.
Ellis said she was lucky to have Fife as a colleague, because he was both a seasoned storyteller and a teacher, who mentored many Natives journalists like herself throughout his career.
“He was the ultimate ambassador, whether it’s talking with non-Native or Natives, or even people from anywhere else,” Ellis said. “Gary was at his core a person who loved people and their stories.”
Fife has won many awards for his work. In 2022 he received the Oklahoma Society of Professional Journalism’s lifetime achievement award. Last year, the Mvskoke Nation recognized him as a living legend for his pioneering work in Native journalism.
In one of his last interviews, Fife was hopeful about the future of Native journalism.
“There is a growing cadre of young Native people joining this field, and they’re good,” he said. “And I’m glad to be able to say that I’m seeing these changes during my lifetime.”
A podium at the 2022 Alaska Federation of Natives convention in Anchorage. (Elyssa Loughlin/Alaska Public Media)
Alaska’s federal and state governments have never comfortably co-existed on the Kuskokwim River. Each shares management of the river, and each has its own priorities. Now that the federal government has filed a lawsuit against the state, it’s come to a head.
The Alaska Federation of Natives is the latest party to side with the federal government. A federal judge last week granted AFN’s request to intervene in the case.
The Kuskokwim has historically provided a wealth of salmon to the communities that hug its shores. Decades ago, the river’s silty waters produced one of the largest king salmon fisheries in the state — enough to have both subsistence and commercial fisheries, as well as an abundance of chum salmon, sockeyes and silvers.
In recent years, king salmon numbers crashed to a crisis point that restricted and sometimes even closed subsistence harvests.
At that point, the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service stepped in to enforce a federal rural subsistence priority in the lower stretches of the Kuskokwim, which flows through a federal wildlife refuge.
The state continued to manage the fisheries upriver, outside the refuge.
In 2021, the state opened up the whole river to subsistence fishing for all Alaska residents, because its managers felt there was a surplus of fish that season. But the federal government filed suit. It argued the state had not only overstepped its bounds but also failed to manage for a rural subsistence priority, breaking federal law.
AFN says it sought to join the federal lawsuit — because it believes the state’s actions threaten subsistence protections under the Alaska National Interest Lands Conservation Act, or ANILCA.
AFN legal counsel Nicole Borromeo says the landmark Katie John court case, which affirmed a rural priority for subsistence fishing, is also jeopardized by the state.
“It does more than challenge Katie John,” Borromeo said. “The state is arguing in no uncertain terms that Katie John is no longer good law.”
Katie John was a Mentasta elder who successfully sued the state to open the Copper River to subsistence fishing in a place where her family had fished for generations. It turned out to be a legal fight that went on for decades.
“We fought the battle. We’ve won the battle,” Borromeo said. “But apparently the state has yet decided to mount up again for another legal attack on the rural priority.”
State Fish and Game Commissioner Doug Vincent-Lang says it’s the federal government that’s picking this fight, not the state, which is simply following its constitutional duty to provide equal access to fish and game and protect its authority over navigable waters.
“Well, if we didn’t respond to this, we would have accepted the fact that the federal government could replace state management with federal management on any of Alaska that touches the federal reserve,” Vincent-Lang said, “and that becomes untenable.”
In times where the runs are strong enough to support subsistence fishing, the state has taken over management of subsistence fisheries in the Lower Kuskokwim, which Vincent-Lang says affects the overall management of the river.
“They’re basically managing within the refuge for subsistence priority,” Vincent-Lang said. “But that’s impacting our ability to meet escapements in the upper river.”
There is one thing the state and AFN agree upon, that this legal fight has far-reaching implications. Borromeo says this case may eventually have to go all the way to the U.S. Supreme Court to be resolved.
Otherwise, she says, the state will continue to make management decisions that undermine rural priority.
“The state’s been very clear that it will only stop if the U.S. Supreme Court tells them to,” Borromeo said, “So we need a ruling from the U.S. Supreme Court.”
Vincent-Lang also believes it may come to this.
“I think it needs to be settled,” he said.
It’s an old battle that stems from a problem that’s hard to fix — conflicts in the Alaska constitution with federal law that can only be resolved through a state constitutional amendment, which remains politically out of reach.
Inmates at Hiland Mountain Correctional Center in 2018. (Will Mader/KTOO)
A national prison research group that tracks inmate populations says American Indians and Alaska Natives are vastly overrepresented in state prison systems nationwide — and Alaska tops the list.
The Prison Policy Initiative, a Massachusetts-based think tank, drilled down on inmate population counts from 2021. It looked at every state and found that Alaska Natives make up 40% of the people incarcerated in Alaska, yet are only 14% of the state’s population.
The numbers also show that, in Alaska, the total number of Native people in prison is almost equal to the number of white people in prison. In the 2021 count, 4,600 people were incarcerated in Alaska prisons. Out of those, almost 1,895 were white, compared to 1,855 Natives.
Wanda Bertram, a Prison Policy Initiative spokeswoman, said those numbers are a red flag.
“That suggests something not just out of proportion, but also deeply unjust about the criminal justice system,” Bertram said. “I think that what it says is Alaska’s criminal justice system is racist. It’s just that simple.”
A graph comparing Alaska general and prison populations’ proportions of American Indian or Alaska Native (AI/AN) inmates to other states. (Courtesy Prison Policy Initiative)
But Brad Myrstol, a researcher at the University of Alaska Anchorage Justice Center, said the picture is more complicated, because Alaska’s prison system is structured differently than most other state correctional centers.
“It’s one thing to talk about disparities and try to understand how they’re produced,” Myrstol said. “It’s quite another thing to talk about discrimination, which implies a systematic intent.”
He said, when analyzing data, he looks at what he calls the “three D’s”: difference, disparities and discrimination.
Myrstol said the “difference” for Alaska lies in how its prison system is structured. Most other states, he said, house inmates in two separate institutions, prisons and local jails. But in Alaska, the two are combined into one, known as a “unified corrections system.” Alaska and five other states — Connecticut, Delaware, Hawaii, Rhode Island and Vermont — have unified systems.
A breakdown of nationwide facility types in which AI/AN people are held. (Courtesy Prison Policy Initiative)
In most states, unsentenced or pre-trial inmates are housed separately.
Myrstol said there is more racial disparity in this population, usually traced to poverty. He said white inmates are more likely to be able to afford bail or legal help to get out on supervised release, but Alaska Natives and other minorities are less likely to have those resources, so they remain incarcerated longer while awaiting sentencing. Myrstol said a backlog of court cases, created by the COVID-19 pandemic, has made the problem worse.
Myrstol said he can’t say whether Alaska’s criminal justice system is racist.
“What I will say is we see disparities throughout the criminal justice system in Alaska and elsewhere. And the reasons for those disparities are complex, but they are very important to understand,” Myrstol said. “But we have to guard against oversimplistic, single-cause explanations.”
But Prison Policy Initiative said regardless of how you add up the numbers, American Indian and Alaska Native inmate populations nationwide are way too high compared to overall population.
A graph of nationwide per-capita rates of prison and jail incarceration by ethnicity from 2021. (Courtesy Prison Policy Initiative)
And given Alaska’s numbers, Bertram said the key to reducing those rates is understanding the root cause of these disparities – such as looking into whether high rates of homelessness among Alaska Natives drive up their numbers in prison.
“That could mean that low-level things like panhandling or sleeping on the street — or using drugs — can get you jail time, that can sometimes lead to prison time for other charges,” Bertram said. “And people who are poor are effectively railroaded into the prison system.”
Bertram said nationwide incarceration rates for Alaska Natives and American Indians as a group, reported by the federal Bureau of Justice Statistics, have been growing at an alarming rate.
“In this country, you’re disproportionately likely to end up in prison if you’re a Native American,” Bertram said. “And that’s true, regardless of what state you’re in. It’s even more likely, even more disproportionately likely, if you’re in Alaska.”
A depiction of AI/AN inmates in Indian country and local jails from 2000 through 2021. (Courtesy Prison Policy Initiative)
Since 2000, inmate populations in Indian Country jails climbed by 62%. In all other local jails, the number is even higher, at 85%.
As for Alaska prisons, Brad Myrstol said, it’s easier to identify the disparities than it is to resolve them.
“(The state) Departments of Corrections have very little control on the inputs that they receive,” he said. “We live in a society where we seek equality under the law — and when we see disparities, it begs really important questions.”
University of Alaska Southeast students in Professor X̱’unei Lance Twitchell’s Alaska Native Studies class. (Courtesy UAS)
Since the U.S. Supreme Court struck down affirmative action practices at public and private universities, Alaskans on the forefront of diversity initiatives have been assessing the impacts.
Sen. Elvi Gray-Jackson at a legislative committee hearing. (Courtesy Elvi Gray-Jackson)
Throughout her long history in public service, state Sen. Elvi Gray-Jackson has fought against racism. She said the court’s affirmative action ruling was a gut-punch for African Americans.
“It was unbelievable,” Gray-Jackson said. “We’re going backward, instead of moving forward.”
The state senator said she worries that employers will apply the court’s reasoning to the workplace.
“Folks are already marginalized. And I think this is going to make it worse,” Gray-Jackson said.
On June 29, the high court ruled that Harvard and the University of North Carolina’s admission policies are unconstitutional, with a 6-3 majority saying they violate the 14th Amendment’s equal protection clause.
The decision doesn’t affect the University of Alaska system because of its open admissions policy, in which almost everyone who applies gets accepted.
Diane Hirshberg is director of the University of Alaska’s Institute of Social and Economic Research. (Courtesy UA)
But Diane Hirshberg, director of the university’s Institute of Social and Economic Research, said she finds the popularity of the ruling disturbing.
“One of the concerns I have about the anger towards affirmative action is people are not recognizing what it’s trying to rectify,” said Hirshberg, who believes opponents mistakenly think affirmative action is designed to take away from one group to give to another.
“What we’re trying to do is really build a system that welcomes everybody and helps everybody succeed, meeting them where they’re at,” she said.
Hirshberg said affirmative action levels the playing field beyond just race, that people forget that white women have benefited more than any other group.
For Alaska Native corporations, which have invested heavily in education, the decision is discouraging. Since their formation 50 years ago, 12 regional corporations have collectively handed out more than $100 million in scholarships. And that doesn’t include village corporations like the Ukpeaġvik Iñupiat Corporation in Utqiaġvik.
Dr. Pearl Brower is currently President and CEO of the Ukpeaġvik Iñupiat Corporation in Utqiaġvik. (Courtesy UIC)
UIC’s president and CEO Pearl Brower said the corporation has grown to include 60 companies.
“We employ about 3,600 people in almost every state in the nation,” Brower said.
Many of those jobs, she said, go to Alaska Natives, and include executives who have attended prestigious schools. Brower worries the court’s decision will reverse the big gains made in Native hire.
“No matter where you look, you don’t ever see an Indigenous person in the forefront. They are already so underrepresented,” she said.
And yet Brower has seen much progress in her lifetime. Before she became president at Ukpeaġvik, she was director of the Iḷisaġvik College – and most recently oversaw the University of Alaska’s diversity initiatives for Alaska Natives.
“At the core, what all of this does is provide more opportunity for everyone,” said Brower. She said that goes not just for minorities but also majorities, who get to broaden their horizons by exposure to other ways of thinking and doing.
Rosita Worl is president and CEO of Sealaska Heritage Institute, which partners with the University of Alaska Southeast for Native studies classes. (Courtesy SHI)
Rosita Worl, head of the Sealaska Heritage Institute, a non-profit arm of the Sealaska Corporation, said research shows that diversity fosters creativity and open-mindedness, an asset for companies who need workers comfortable communicating across different cultures.
But in the wake of the ruling, Worl expects college admissions for minorities, including Alaska Natives, to drop.
“To me, it’s just so unfathomable that the Supreme Court did that,” Worl said.
“The individuals who brought the case were saying that it was racial discrimination,” Worl said. “But the Supreme Court ruled, no, it wasn’t racial discrimination — because the rights that we hold are political rights.”
Worl said those political rights could have bearing on the court’s affirmative action ruling. She said Sealaska attorneys have begun an intensive legal review on behalf of students on scholarships. She said 450 students have Sealaska Corporation scholarships at more than 180 academic and vocational schools.
“I’m hopeful that we’ll be able to get word out to universities, that because of our political status, affirmative action can be applied to Native American admissions to colleges,” Worl said.
Alex Cleghorn, an attorney and chief operating officer for the Alaska Native Justice Center, hailed Worl’s approach.
“It’s an interesting read on the situation,” he said.
Cleghorn said it’s yet to be seen if Native American political status can be tied to affirmative action. He worries about future interpretations of the court’s ruling and their impact on equal opportunity programs.
“I know that I benefited, not just admissions in that program but additional support around succeeding in school,” said Cleghorn, who is of Supiaq heritage.
Alex Cleghorn is an attorney and chief operating officer at the Alaska Native Justice Center. (Rhonda McBride/KNBA)
Cleghorn said it’s risky to forecast where future Supreme Court rulings will go. But, he said, it’s maddening to watch the very same court issue two decisions that are so diametrically opposed.
“This has been true throughout history,” Cleghorn said. “So, the same U.S. Supreme Court that decided Brown v. Board of Education was the same Supreme Court that decided Tee-Hit-Ton in Southeast.”
While the 1954 Brown decision banned racial segregation, Cleghorn said the court’s 1955 Tee-Hit-Ton ruling was blatantly racist – that it not only denied Lingíts compensation for their land and sale of their timber, but was written in language steeped in prejudice.
Cleghorn quoted from Justice Stanley Reed’s majority opinion:
“Every American schoolboy knows that the savage tribes of this continent were deprived of their ancestral ranges by force. Even when the Indians ceded millions of acres by treaty, in return for blankets, food and trinkets, it was not a sale, but the conqueror’s will that deprived them of their land,” he read.
Cleghorn said the Supreme Court, both then and now, has moments that inspire – and others that evoke shame.
Alaska Federation of Natives President Julie Kitka, Tanana Chiefs Conference board Chairman Brian Ridley and Central Council of the Tlingit and Haida Indian Tribes of Alaska President Richard Peterson all hailed the Supreme Court’s ruling upholding the Indian Child Welfare Act. (File/KNBA)
Tribes throughout the nation and all across Alaska are celebrating the U.S. Supreme Court’s decision to uphold the Indian Child Welfare Act. In a 7-2 vote, the court rejected claims that ICWA is racist and unconstitutional.
And with the court’s decision to back the right of tribes to oversee child custody cases came a collective sigh of relief among Alaska Native leaders.
“This is something we care deeply about,” said Julie Kitka, president of the Alaska Federation of Natives.
Kitka says AFN has been involved in this fight for many years, because a lot more was a stake beyond protecting Native children.
“A lot of threads of Federal Indian law, the authority for the Congress to deal with Alaska Natives, Native Americans, derives from that,” she said.
Had efforts to overturn ICWA succeeded, Kitka says tribal sovereignty could have seen widespread erosion. It also could have undermined AFN’s progress in working with the state to build a better partnership with tribes in child custody matters.
ICWA, a law that was passed in 1975, puts tribes in the driver’s seat in child custody cases. It requires that American Indian and Alaska Native children be placed within their extended family, tribe or other Native people, whenever possible, so they can maintain cultural ties.
“Today’s decision represents a huge win for tribes throughout the nation and reaffirms tribal sovereignty,” said Brian Ridley, chairman of the Tanana Chiefs Conference executive board.
Ridley says TCC’s programs to support tribal adoptions and foster care placements have been a huge success story.
Ridley said it’s taken many years of work to reach a point where the tribe has been able to fully realize the mission of ICWA — protect Native kids and keep them in Native families.
The Association of Village Council Presidents (AVCP), which represents tribes in Southwest Alaska, concurred – and in a statement said ICWA has been the gold standard of child welfare.
But during a Supreme Court hearing last year, Matthew McGill, an attorney representing the Brackeens, a white family fighting to adopt a Native child, argued that ICWA had discriminated against them – and put the interests of the tribe over the needs of the child.
“That means each year hundreds, if not thousands of Indian children are placed in non-Indian foster homes. And sometimes there, they bond with those families,” McGill said in his oral arguments, which he talked about the harm to the child when the tribe intervenes to enforce ICWA.
Along with the Brackeens, several states and white families seeking to adopt Native children also joined the fight to overturn ICWA. They claimed ICWA was unconstitutional and racist, because it gave tribes preference.
Tribes have argued that they have a longstanding political relationship with the government, and are not a racial classification, which the court affirmed. Had ICWA been overturned, the status of this relationship might have changed and potentially weakened tribal sovereignty in other areas.
Justice Amy Coney Barrett wrote the majority opinion, which leaves the federal law intact. She cited more than a century of precedent and the plaintiff’s lack of standing on the issues.
In his dissenting opinion, Justice Clarence Thomas wrote that the court had allowed the federal government to overstep its powers by displacing state authority, to regulate child custody proceedings.
The State of Alaska stayed neutral on ICWA and did not support the lawsuit, nor the tribes. Attorney General Treg Taylor said it was a difficult decision not to join tribes – but says the state believed other entities would give the court all the information it needed to make a decision.
In a statement, Taylor said, “It does not appear that anything has been changed, and the decision underscores our commitment to partnering with Tribes to improve outcomes for tribal children and families.”
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Chalyee Éesh Richard Peterson is president of the Central Council of the Tlingit and Haida Indian Tribes of Alaska, which represents Southeast Alaska and is the largest tribal group in the state. He says he’s still disappointed that the state did not join more than 500 tribes to fight for ICWA.
“I applaud that statement. I agree with that statement, but their actions really don’t back that up,” Peterson said in response to the Taylor’s statement. “If that’s how they felt, they would have signed on and supported tribes in this ICWA battle.”
Despite the state’s lack of support, Peterson says the tribes prevailed.
“Our sovereignty continues on and on again in these court cases, to be reaffirmed in court,” Peterson said. “It’s always scary when you go to court, but we keep winning, because we’re on the right side.”
Peterson said the timing of the decision couldn’t be better. It came as a group of Polynesian seafarers prepared to depart Juneau on a global voyage. He says both Polynesian and Alaska Native cultures have struggled to maintain their sovereignty.
“I’m just full of excitement and love. This couldn’t have happened on a better day,” Peterson said.
Peterson says the Polynesian voyagers are on a mission to spread the word about the strength and beauty of Indigenous cultures, which ICWA was created to protect.
Jodi Mitchell (far right) moderates the Consideration of 2022 AFN Convention Resolutions at the Dena’ina Center in Anchorage. (Photo by Elyssa Loughlin/Alaska Public Media)
When two major tribal organizations pulled out of the Alaska Federation of Natives this week, it fueled speculation about the reasons why. The Central Council of the Tlingit and Haida Indian Tribes of Alaska and the Tanana Chiefs Conference each had a different explanation.
Tlingit and Haida said it no longer needed AFN, that it was ready to strike out on its own to advance its causes. Tanana Chiefs said it wanted to focus on protecting salmon and subsistence, and that AFN had not taken enough action on these issues.
Since 2019, a total of five organizations have withdrawn their membership from AFN. Along with the two tribal groups, three regional Native corporations have left — the Arctic Slope Regional Corporation, Doyon and the Aleut Corporation.
Paul Ongtooguk, a retired UAA professor of Native Studies, at the KSKA studio in 2016. (Wesley Early/Alaska Public Media)
The departures have raised questions about how AFN has handled internal disputes and the health of the organization, which was formed in 1966 to fight for Native land rights.
AFN’s efforts led to the passage of the landmark Alaska Native Claims Settlement Act in 1971. Today, it remains the largest and most influential Alaska Native organization. Every October, it holds the state’s largest convention.
KNBA’s Rhonda McBride talked with Paul Ongtooguk, an Alaska Native historian and a longtime observer of AFN, about these recent developments. Ongtooguk recently retired from the University of Alaska Anchorage as director of Alaska Native studies.
This interview has been lightly edited for length and clarity.
Rhonda McBride: You’ve said you believe the decision for Tlingit and Haida and Tanana Chiefs to pull out of AFN is short sighted. Why?
Paul Ongtooguk: One of the things that happens is we can take for granted the benefits of having a unified sense of Alaska Native communities on issues. We’re not even close to the majority of the population. We’re about really one-fifth of the population in Alaska. So, if we’re going to influence things, and punch above our weight, we have to have a kind of unity that reflects a sense of shared purpose. To the degree that AFN does, or does not represent that sense of unity, that’s OK when there isn’t real pressure on us as people. But when a crisis comes, it’s hard to put together that kind of sense of unity that you really want to have at that moment. So, it’s not thinking long term from people who are pulling out of it.
Rhonda McBride: Aside from winning ANCSA, how has AFN leveraged its clout in recent years?
Paul Ongtooguk: Well, probably the last time that there was a real sense of shared purpose was trying to prevent Joe Miller from becoming a Senator and having the support of Alaska Native communities and organizations to help Lisa Murkowski to run as an independent. I think that was probably the most substantial thing in the modern era that Native organizations have done on behalf of Alaska Native interests. If Miller had been elected, it would have been a disaster. He was anti-Alaska Native. He wanted people to be assimilated, probably still does. He wants everybody to be a Republican, to be more individually minded, rather than thinking about shared interests, peoples and cultures that long predate even the existence, not only of Alaska, but of the United States. Our tribes have been around for much longer than this new experiment called the United States, or even the State of Alaska.
Rhonda McBride: When groups pull out of an established organization like AFN, what kind of message does that send?
Paul Ongtooguk: Well, it can be understood that when organizations are pulling out, they’re actually voting against (AFN), a sense that AFN is no longer serving as an honest broker between the various interests of Alaska Native organizations, that it isn’t serving as a place where you can disagree, have those disagreements be honestly embraced, that AFN serves as this sort of fair referee in managing those concerns. If AFN is seen as already having decided on its own ideology and its own direction, then people will vote, organizations vote to withdraw from AFN. And it’s only when a crisis happens that people realize the value of having a statewide voice that AFN can be.
It’s also a concern about the general health of AFN. Is it adapting? Is it reflecting the broad spectrum of interests of Alaska Native peoples and organizations? And by pulling out, it’s a way of voting publicly, a lack of confidence.
Rhonda McBride: So, you see this as a no-confidence vote from these groups?
Paul Ongtooguk: Yeah, it’s sort of the last way you get to send a message. It’s saying, yeah, this is a vote of no confidence. So, it should be a wake-up call, and it’ll be interesting to see if it is.
Rhonda McBride: Julie Kitka has been president of AFN for a long time. Is one of the undercurrents of this about her leadership?
Paul Ongtooguk: Being the head of AFN is an impossible position to have, and it always has been. I don’t want to criticize somebody who’s in the ring, while I’m in the peanut gallery looking down at it. I understand that it’s an enormous set of conflicts that are reflected in trying to run this organization. At the same time, I honestly, from an outside perspective, I haven’t seen what AFN is doing in terms of connecting with Alaska Native peoples outside of this annual get together. It’s no small thing. I haven’t seen that or have that sense that AFN is as broadly engaged as it has been in the past.
It’s easy to get insulated and pay more attention to other people, who are leading and are part of other Alaskan Native organizations. We have these meetings — CEOs, boards of directors and president — without having a broad, deep reach within Alaska Native communities and people. So, it’s always hard to stay in touch when you’re at that level. I understand that, but it’s something that has to be done. And in the past few years, I don’t know that it’s been done all that well.
Also, at some point from a leadership perspective, who is Julie Kitka prepping to take over potentially? I don’t know. I don’t see any clear evidence. Who is she sharing the spotlight within AFN? Who’s that next person that she’s sort of sponsoring to take over and, and to lead us into the future. Who’s that 30-something that’s being readied to take over. If there is somebody, I’m missing it.
Rhonda McBride: As far as other AFN leadership, it’s interesting that one of the Co-Chairs of AFN, is Joe Nelson, who is also the chairman of the board for the Sealaska Corporation – which represents the same region as Tlingit and Haida, which has just pulled out of AFN. Doesn’t that kind of put him in an awkward position with Tlingit and Haida’s president, Richard Peterson? Is this another sign of division?
Paul Ongtooguk: Right. It would be interesting to know, if succession was informally or whatever, if it was moving from one traditional group to another, as the head of AFN.
Rhonda McBride: As a longtime observer of AFN, what puzzles you the most about this latest move. What do you want to know?
Paul Ongtooguk: One of the questions I have, and that I would imagine other people might have: Is this a temporary separation, or is this an actual divorce? You would know that things are really problematic, if the organizations that are now outside of AFN, and there’s quite a number of them, have started trying to imagine a different statewide organization, a competing interest.
Every now and again, you’ll see a statewide organization of Alaska Native tribal governments, and they just sort of burn brightly for a moment and then collapse on themselves. Nothing’s really come about that’s substantial enough to actually be real competition to AFN. But if things keep pulling apart, to me that would be the question. Are you going to see an alternate organization as competition for that statewide voice?
It’s hard to imagine it would ever happen, because AFN has always been that. But if an organization doesn’t pull things together well enough, or long enough, then its legitimacy does get called into question. And I’m wondering, what’s the breaking point? How many organizations pull out before something new gets created to fulfill that role?
I hope that AFN can just sort of reinvigorate itself, remake itself, to avoid that kind of outcome.
Rhonda McBride: Historically at AFN there has always been tension between tribes and the Native corporations. It’s sort of been a battle between the haves and the have nots, in which the corporations have lots of resources and the tribes have been cash poor. But in recent years, tribes in Alaska have been gaining in prominence, infused with cash from COVID money and, for example, big grants for tribal broadband programs. Some tribes have become very powerful, to the extent that they have a big impact on a community’s economy, even the state economy. It is also interesting that out of the five organizations that have pulled out of AFN, three are corporations and two are tribes. Collectively, they represent a lot of real estate in Alaska. It always seems to go back to the question at the beginning of AFN, was it a place where tribes and corporations could work together? Or maybe it was an impossible mission.
Paul Ongtooguk: I don’t know. I think that tension has always been there, and you have to throw in the nonprofit regionals, which reflect tribes in a sense, but they have their own interests as well. And the difference between the village corporations and the regionals is often no small thing either.
I always think about the former Yugoslavia, when somebody interviewing Marshall Tito, asked, “What happens to Yugoslavia after your leadership is over? And Tito supposedly said, “There is no Yugoslavia outside of my imagination.”
It sort of collapses into what we have now, these different nations. All the fissures finally broke things apart.
And I keep that in mind, when I think about an organization like AFN. There’s nothing certain about the continuity or the cohesion of AFN. We take it for granted, but when it falls apart it, it shouldn’t come as a surprise. I think it would be terrible in the long-term interests of Alaska Native peoples for it to happen. But it’s no easy thing to keep it together, and I understand and respect that.
Rhonda McBride: Explain what makes it hard to keep AFN together?
Paul Ongtogook: Well, because there are so many cultures. We have to understand that we’re not like Hawaii, with a common cultural base and common core of language. We’re, we’re like Europe, with Italy and Finland, and Norway and Spain, and Portugal and Bulgaria, Germany and France. All are European, right? They’re all very different. The amazing thing is that there’s any sort of common European organization at all.
And that’s been the history of AFN. The amazing thing is that we ever created AFN. Look at
Arizona or New Mexico, or Washington or Oklahoma. How unified and strong are their statewide organizations representing the tribes? I see nothing that’s a counterpart to AFN.
And I think the reason why we’ve been so much more effective in part, at the federal level and with Congress, is because we’ve had this organization, AFN representing a unified voice in a way that the tribes in other states simply have never achieved.
So, the standard model is to not have an AFN. AFN is the outlier within tribes in the United States. We’ve had some remarkable successes as Alaska Native peoples and organizations, because we’ve had this statewide unifying voice. So, it’s a precious commodity. It’s a precious thing to have, and you don’t want to throw it away lightly, but it can fall apart internally, or it can lose coherence among those conflicting interests.
It’s a very difficult position, and I respect anyone who can manage it — and in Julie Kitka’s case, manage it as long as she has. But the current question is, has it been too long? Is AFN not reinventing itself, well enough to reflect the current issues in a way that satisfies most of the Alaska Native peoples and organizations. And with the number of organizations that have pulled out, that’s a real open question.
Rhonda McBride: Is this a generational problem?
Paul Ongtogook: I think that’s a concern that’s legitimate, and it’s not the fault necessarily of this newer generation. There has to be a larger picture of things. I think our generation has failed the upcoming generation largely in thinking about what it means to be Alaska Native for the future.
I think the tension has always been ANCSA as the model. The use of corporations was intended to assimilate Alaska Native peoples, to move us from thinking of ourselves, our thousands of years of history, our own tribes and our own peoples — to have us transform ourselves, so that we think quarterly profits or annual dividends — and think more about capitalism and monetary success rather than to see ourselves as a “we.” Corporate individualism and individual success. Corporate CEO’s wanting to go from a two-car garage to four-car garage as a model. That’s an underlying, potentially undermining part of that corporate model.
And tribes are wondering, how do we become relevant for this new generation? At least they should be. And the new generation is saying, “What’s relevant about being a tribal member?”
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