Alaska Native Corporations

Last summer, a conservation group teamed up with an Anchorage-area Native tribe to finish removing a defunct dam on the Eklutna River, northeast of the city.

That effort couldn’t succeed on its own, largely because higher upstream, utilities divert the river’s water into a hydroelectric power plant. The groups that removed the lower dam envisioned that their project would push the utilities into action to improve salmon habitat and boost a fishery that could bring together the Eklutna Native people, the original residents of the Anchorage area.

But now, a year later, there’s still only a trickle of water flowing through the canyon where the dam once stood.

Since its removal, the utilities have gotten an early start on a legally-mandated process to address some of the damage to fish and wildlife habitat caused by the upstream hydroelectric project. But that process begins with a study phase — no concrete steps are required until 2027.

Brad Meiklejohn, who spearheaded the $7.5 million dam removal for a group called the Conservation Fund, is pushing the utilities to act more quickly. The status quo, Meiklejohn said, is “subsidizing cheap power on the backs of Natives and salmon.”

“That’s the cost we’ve externalized here,” he said. “To keep postponing this, and keep having the fish and the Native people pay the price because of our lack of innovation and creativity – I think that’s criminal.”

The lower Eklutna dam was built in the 1920s to supply power to Anchorage, but it was shut down when the federal government built the much larger project at Eklutna Lake, far upstream, in the 1950s.

The federal project was a major undertaking driven by the scarcity of power in Anchorage — in the 1940s, the city resorted to generating some of its power with the stern half of the Sackett’s Harbor, a shipwrecked tanker. The Eklutna project required hundreds of workers and construction of a 4.5-mile tunnel through a mountain, which brings the lake water to the site of the project’s two generators.

In 1997, the project was transferred by the federal government to three utilities. One was Municipal Light and Power, Anchorage’s publicly owned utility, and the other two were cooperatives — Matanuska Electric Association, and Chugach Electric Association, which serves the Anchorage area.

Today, the project generates 175,000 megawatt-hours of electricity a year, or enough for 25,000 homes, according to a new informational website created by the utilities.

That’s less than 5% of the power used by the Railbelt, which runs from the Kenai Peninsula to Fairbanks. But it’s among the cheapest energy sources for the region, which makes it more valuable to the utilities.

Eklutna Lake is also the source of about 90% of Anchorage’s drinking water. But that amounts to just 10% of the water that’s diverted from the river, according to the utilities; the remaining 90% goes to generate electricity.

Meiklejohn said he doesn’t want to interfere with the city’s drinking water supply. But he estimates that just 10% of the diverted water would be needed to support salmon spawning, with minimal impacts to power costs.

“I think it’s a solvable problem. I think there’s enough water to allow some to go into the river for the fish,” he said. “And I would love to see the utilities get a little more proactive on this, and get some of their best and brightest minds working on a solution.”

The lower dam’s removal was a four-year effort that finished last year — Meiklejohn’s organization partnered with the Eklutna people to do the work, hiring Eklutna Inc., their Alaska Native village corporation, as the contractor.

In interviews, officials who work with the utilities said that they’re committed to addressing the impacts of the upstream hydroelectric project. But, they said, they also have obligations to their members and customers, and they want the studies to happen first to help guide their actions.

“We have to understand what the trade-offs are,” said Bill Falsey, the municipal manager for Anchorage, whose public utility owns 53% of the hydroelectric project. “We’re not going to know what policy option makes the most sense until we have really run all the scenarios.”

The hydroelectric project drains out of the lake through a tunnel in the bottom, and utility officials said it could also cost money to reconfigure their infrastructure to send water down the river. And, Falsey added, “it’s not even a known quantity what it will take to get fish to return.”

“That’s what this is about,” he said. “That’s why we are engaged in these studies.”

As part of the project’s transfer from the federal government to the utilities, they were not required to get an operating license from the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission. Environmental reviews and restrictions that could have accompanied the licensing process were replaced by an eight-page agreement that the new owners signed with federal agencies.

The 1991 agreement, which is enforceable by federal court, requires the utilities to begin studying fish and wildlife impacts of the hydroelectric project no later than 25 years after the purchase took effect in 1997, or 2022.

The utilities started the study process this summer, three years earlier than the agreement requires. But actions to address the impacts identified by the studies are not required to start until 2027, and they don’t have to be finished until 2032.

The agreement ultimately asks the utilities to deliver draft recommendations to the governor. The governor is then charged with adopting a formal plan that balances “efficient and economical power generation” and energy conservation with fish and wildlife, recreation, water supplies and “other beneficial public uses.”

Critics point out that the agreement contains no protections for the Eklutna people, and doesn’t reference them whatsoever.

In an interview, Aaron Leggett, president of the Native Village of Eklutna, said tribal members have gotten used to being patient. But he said he also sees the story of the lower dam’s removal as being too compelling to ignore, which leaves him “optimistic.”

“I think at the end of the day, we’ll get there,” he said. “We’re at the point where, at a minimum, we know we’ve taken the dam out. And to us, that’s something to be celebrated.”

More than half of Eklutna’s tribal members live in or near the Anchorage area, Leggett said. And reviving a salmon run in their community, he added, could help unify them.

Southeast’s landless Alaska Native communities want to form five new village corporations out of 115,000 acres of Tongass National Forest. The effort has new cash and — it says — the right political climate in Washington to finally get it done.

The 1971 Alaska Native Claims Settlement Act allotted millions of acres of land to 13 regional Alaska Native corporations. But some Alaska Natives in Southeast were left out of the process.

That’s created a coalition of five landless communities in Southeast, advocating for land and their own corporations. It’s an issue that has simmered for decades. But a recent infusion of $500,000 from the regional corporation Sealaska has energized its efforts.

At a meeting in August in Wrangell, Sealaska board member Richard Rinehart recalls the early 1970s when 200 village corporations were created across Alaska.

“We all thought we were getting land just like everybody else and it was just a big surprise that we didn’t,” Rinehart said.

There’s no apparent reason certain communities were left out. Those include the five southeast communities of Ketchikan, Wrangell, Petersburg, Haines and Tenakee Springs. Together they are home to 4,400 Sealaska shareholders.

Over the years, four bills were introduced in Congress to cede federal land to the affected communities. The most recent was the ANSCA Improvement Act introduced by U.S. Sen. Lisa Murkowski in 2017. It didn’t get very far. Her office says there was a lot of opposition in Washington over parceling out a national forest.

Now, the Southeast Alaska Landless Corporation is crafting a fifth bill they hope Alaska’s delegation will support.  It will be different than previous efforts in that it contains specifics — and maps that are now being released as the landless corporation takes it message from community to community. The bill envisions 115,000 acres to be divided between the five landless Alaska Native communities.

Rinehart says the climate in Washington is right for reshaping public lands.

“Today, we have under the Trump administration new heads of the Forest Service and they are in support,” he said. “They will not fight us they will sit down and talk with us.”

USDA Forest Service Chief and Alaska’s Regional Forester met with some of the shareholders and Sealaska’s legal team last year. The Forest Service wrote in a statement that it had given advice over existing land designations in the Tongass, but hasn’t signaled whether it would support giving up management of any forest land.

Some conservation groups are wary about carving up the Tongass. But they say they’re aware it’s a complex issue that involves trying to right historic wrongs.

“It’s our hope that we can support them by working with them in partnership,” said Meredith Trainor, the executive director for the Southeast Alaska Conservation Council in Juneau.

She says she supports tribal sovereignty but not necessarily if it means public land is lost at the expense of subsistence users.

SEACC opposed past efforts. But she says there are ways a new village corporation could get its land and be good stewards of the forest.

“Such as being included in the carbon market and through carbon sequestration where communities would be paid not to log the lands,” she said.

Rinehart said that with the decline of the timber industry, carbon credits make sense. Sealaska is already in the carbon credit market.

But the landless group says nothing — including logging — would be off the table.

The campaign is traveling to all Southeast communities releasing specific maps as it goes. The five maps should be available once its tour is completed next week.

The Curyung Tribe is leaving the Bristol Bay Area Health Corp.

In a statement, Robert Clark, president and CEO of BBAHC, said the corporation “does not intend to change any of its policies about who is eligible to receive healthcare in its facilities and the scope and nature of care we provide until all withdrawal issues have been addressed.”

Tribal administrator Courtenay Carty said in an email that the tribe passed a resolution in May to withdraw from BBAHC.

“The main reason for the withdrawal focuses on patient care issues and the failure of BBAHC to take concerns from our tribal members and Council, seriously,” she said.

Last fall, the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services found that Kanakanak Hospital pharmacy practices put patients at risk of harm or death. BBAHC manages the hospital, which is listed as a self-governance program on the Indian Health Service website.

At the Curyung Tribe’s annual meeting last November, members passed a resolution authorizing the council to leave the health corporation if their concerns were not addressed.

The hospital was deemed compliant a few months later, in January. But Carty said they had difficulty working with BBAHC, and that their decision to withdraw also came after the health corporation removed the tribe’s representative from the hospital board.

The Curyung Tribe is the largest of the 28 Alaska Native tribes that currently authorize BBAHC to provide care to their members through a contract with the Indian Health Service. In 1980, it authorized the health corporation to provide health care services through the Indian Health Service on behalf of tribal members. It reissued that authorization in 1994.

The tribe is meeting with IHS and BBAHC this week to discuss the transition. The earliest the withdrawal will take effect is May 2020.

The board of directors of Cook Inlet Region Inc., or CIRI, announced Thursday that they support the effort to recall Gov. Mike Dunleavy.

The Anchorage-based Alaska Native corporation made its announcement in an email message to shareholders and on its website.

Ethan Tyler, director of corporate affairs for CIRI, said the Recall Dunleavy campaign outlined four points in their messaging that CIRI supports.

“In looking at those four points, CIRI believes that the fact of those four actions, or those four points or actions that the governor has taken, negatively impacts our business here in the state of Alaska and ultimately our shareholders,” Tyler said.

According to the post online, CIRI breaks down those four points: “The governor has repeatedly violated Alaska law and the state constitution, and demonstrated his unfitness for office by refusing to appoint a judge within the legal time frame; misusing state funds for political ad campaigns; violating the separation of powers; and incompetently vetoing state funds.”

Tyler said the last time CIRI entered into political waters was in support of Alaska Republican Lisa Murkowski’s write-in campaign for U.S. Senate.

“CIRI rarely wades into the political realm,” he said. “We thought that this presented a credible threat to our ability to fulfill our mission, and that is why CIRI is supporting the recall effort. “

According to its website, CIRI has about 8,800 shareholders.