A bad history for a bad bill

If S. 881 passes out of committee next month, Southeast Alaska and the nation will be worse off. Here is an untold story.

If S. 881 passes out of committee next month, Southeast Alaska and the nation will be worse off. Here is an untold story.

Back in 1977, Sealaska Corp. got Congress to change ANCSA, then six years old. The 1977 amendment required former Gov. Jay Hammond to consent to transfer of 76,600 acres in Yakutat, and others in Saxman. Also removed from transfer were Sealaska lands around Angoon.

Byron Mallot, chief of Yakutat and powerful board member of Sealaska, pulled off a coup. In one sentence, Sealaska insured the lands around these communities were saved from logging. But by saving his own village, he concentrated the logging around the remaining Native villages of Hoonah, Klawock, Kake, and Hydaburg.

In 1978, Hammond consented to Yakutat lands being transferred to Sealaska if they could exchange these lands to the U.S. Forest Service. As far as I can tell, nothing happened until 2002 when negotiations began between the U.S. Forest Service.

Sealaska was offered lands "of equal value" to the lands in Yakutat. The Forest Service offered: Cleveland Peninsula, Sitko, Neko, E. Gunnick Bays, Seal and Chicken creeks, Alice Lake and E. Spaski, Hoonah, Hobart and Whitestone.

Sealaska rejected the offer. Instead, they began to push for legislation to get in Congress what they could not get from the agency managing the Tongass for all users. S. 881 is the latest reincarnation.

Instead of seeking a mere land exchange for the 76,600 Yakutat acres, Sealaska saw an opportunity to reach way beyond anything Congress gave in 1971.

Now 39 years latter, Sealaska wants Congress to give it parcels in bays up and down the 350 miles of the Tongass, and federal land developed at huge cost to U.S. taxpayers , most of which are in the hunting and fishing grounds heavily used by the public and none of which were contemplated by Congress long ago.

This bold overreaching beyond the scope of ANCSA is what has ignited a fury among the people living in rural Alaska who made investments of hard labor and money to live next to federal land protected by the Forest Service. A bill so far reaching should be aired in public.

Read the full editorial at the Juneau Empire