What does it take to make a believer out of anyone who has never experienced disentitlement or complete loss of a settlement won in the court of law? A loss held captive to monetary gains of a selected few called Alaska Native Claims Settlement Act Board Members who well never surrender their control of their given cash cow called stewardship. Do we as a tribe relinquish our power to this corporate world with non-indigenous people speaking and acting on our behalf?
Co-management of a ghost entitlement will be sporadically felt as the years pass but not the full blunts of ownership as past life experiences has given us in the past 40 years. Calling themselves stewards to an entitlement won in the Supreme Court of the land we know as United States of America?
Can this government-forced entity force us as for-profit shareholders to entitle them as our true leaders for the betterment of a recognize tribe, allowing the Board members to speak and act for us as our nucleus when it comes to leadership?
Corporate laws forced upon us as an entitlement labeling us as for-profit shareholders for the past 40 years. An entity forced on 225 recognize tribes plummeting these said tribal members into a society as foreign to all as stewardship is to contemporize traditions which can never come to be because of the complete failure of their given stewardship. Corporate boards who backhandedly try to adjust the given environment change through drop labels hoping the federal Government will recognize them as a tribe is a travesty and an insult to all 225 recognize tribes, tribal members. The 225 recognized tribes face full genocide through a system that has relinquished their hold onto an entitlement to a group of people whom believe it’s their Government-given duty to withhold this entitlement from the intended collective owners perpetually. Sending out letters to shareholders addressing for-profit shareholders as tribal shareholders must come to an immediate stop.
Forced entities such as ANSCA have full intent to take over our tribal business by addressing tribal members/tribal shareholders. We must put a stop to this genocidal act done by the people who have no intentions of ever giving back the power held in land ownership.
All of this greed, withheld from the people who have a history of ownership of their own environment for the past 10,000 years, done for their own good. Really?
In 40 years these board members of a forced entity have continuously lead a false envelopment it will end with full ownership of this so called won entitlement for the betterment of all.
Whereas, the ruefulness of their idea of full ownership for their for profit shareholders is actually a concealment of their true intentions. The board members’ full intentions are to withhold all of the won entitlement for eternity at the cost of the children and grandchildren. With no regret on their part for failing to show why in 40 years the only advancement shown to the homeless/landless for-profit shareholders’ is their own pockets of upper co-management.
Constraints are enforced only by board members, who have nothing to gain by abiding by the true owners of this entitlement to disperse of their land back to them from a forced entity called a corporation for profit (ANSCA), and everything to lose if they did their job to make it right and distribute land back to the true owners of this land called Alaska.
Regretful is not in their vocabulary when it comes to losing their cush jobs as board members of over 30-plus years.
Let us as tribal members detain from the grasp of a for-profit corporation our leadership and entitlement back to us as tribal members. Tribal members are indigenous people who practice their values with their clansmen/women as tradition calls for. Once and for all we as recognized tribes need to petition the United States Supreme Court that we as 225 recognized tribal members demand our entitlement of a forced entity gone astray for the last 40 years to be put back into our hands. I think we need to hold onto our sovereignty to our dying day as we have in the past allowing the tribe to entrust people to this task for which they have been raised from history. Linage which reaches into time encasing leadership for the betterment of all tribes must keep our tradition alive. Regain full ownership of our traditional land and allow all 225 tribes to co-exist and co-mingle with freedom entitled to all by the Bill of Rights.
• A Tribal member of Teikweidei/ Brown Bear house, Kawuts.Yusien/ Daniel Brown is a Local 302 member for 37 years and counting and a forced shareholder-for profit of Sealaska/ Huna Totem.
Comments (36)
Add commentThe tide is turning........
Kookesh sent packing, Thomas exits calling his opponent an a**hole. Rosita made herself look ridiculous on stage at the New York premiere of the documentary "Musicwood."
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iPTRyV0x534&feature=relmfu
No one has used the term "honorable people" as much as Rosita since Japan surrendered.
The Tlingit-Haida and Tsimshian people will never allow these people who have made themselves into comical figures turn our tribes into the Sealaska's.
Comment
Sealaskaunderground, I watched the Youtube segment and agree with you it is ridiculous. Sealaska has cut over all its land, and now it is lobbying guitar makers for help in claiming more land - land it agreed it would not try to claim back when it was allowed to claim all the old growth it has now clearcut. The idea that now the land is sacred to Sealaska and will be harvested carefully instead of removed from one ridge to the next, as far as the eye can see, is a completely dishonest notion. These guitar makers must be blind. It occurs to many that the mannerisms and phraseology used in these ceremonies and on these occasions is stolen from Hollywood and has nothing to do with Native culture in Southeast Alaska. It reminds us more than anything else of the old Kung Fu television show; "Let me tell you who have no culture of our culture, Grasshopper, as we have lived since time immemorial or at least since the inception of Food Stamps and talking pictures."
Completely contrary to the tied-to-the-land rhetoric, Sealaska chose to log its timber over just a few years and send it to Asia as logs. The chief product was not music wood but disposable diapers. I hope everyone continues to contact Begich and Murkowski to prevent this Tongass land claim from being approved in the coming lame duck session when few are watching.
I disagree with you about Bill Thomas. If he said that about his opponent, and I don't know that he did, then we can quibble about his choice of words. But Bill Thomas is a renowned judge of character, and if that is his analysis of this Yale drop-out then it's a safe bet that is what this Mamma's boy is.
Sorry to report........
Judge his comment for yourself.......at 1:32 into the broadcast.
http://www.kcaw.org/2012/11/21/final-hd-34-ballots-in-jkt-4123-thomas-4091/
Kudos to Jonathon Kreiss-Tomkins for earning the respect of
his fellow Alaskans, Native and non-Native, in Southeast.
May the future of Alaska belong to those who can work together, regardless of race, for common values--healthy watersheds, sustainable fisheries, equal opportunity to education, jobs, and justice, universal access to affordable internet, regular, reliable affordable ferry service, and more.
We are all native to planet earth and our fates our bound with each other. Our communities and our regions are the new tribes and the new families. Native traditions and values can lead the way.
nonsensical gibberish
I am fully aware of the Empires obligations to the community and to it's present leanings, but is it really necessary to print such gibberish?
Read it again. Slowly. Make any more sense now?
I didn't think so.
ANSCA is a Settlement between the Tribes and the United States
Sealaska Board of Directors or any of the other Board of Directors did not "self-appoint" themselves to be the leaders of our corporation. The corporation structure was part of the settlement. I remember, my grandmother (Katherine Rowan) told the stories of how she used to walk door-to-door in our village to collect money in a Folgers coffee can to send to the tribal representatives in Washington, DC who were fighting for our settlement. What we got was our land, money and a corporate structure.
Each year, the Shareholders vote to elect the candidates who will serve as directors for three year terms.
There is a tough balance between corporate objectives and cultural. On one hand, shareholders want jobs, economic support for their villages and opportunities. On the other hand each corporation is state chartered and governed by banking and securities. It is obligated to make money, make profit and dividends to the shareholders.
Unlike reservations, our corporate structure allows us to do as we please with our land; develop, sell or retain. I think when representatives like the board of directors refer to our tribal status, it is to remind others that there really is a delicate balance between the two worlds and they have to walk it every day.
Our land?
For having ALL that land, there isn't one Tlingit-Haida living on any of it.
Not a well written article
But I can understand and agree with the basic premise:
Sealaska is not a federally recognized Tribe and the corporate structure is set up to rape/pillage the land, not live in peace and harmony to protect the land for future use by our children.
ANSCA should be repealed. The only people who have truly made a profit are the attorneys who have collected large litigation fees due to the litigation that has occurred over the complexities of ANSCA. I agree our fathers/grandfathers did the best they could but it should be time to realize that ANSCA was a mistake and Natives should find a new direction that would recognize Tribes as nations with governmental powers and the ability to govern, provide jobs as well as preserving our culture and taking care of our resources so they will be there for our children and grandchildren.
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alaskaguy: Nations (tribal) within a nation (America)?
Our Nation is polarized enough as it is. Another wedge of sovereignty is not the way to go.
This article is pretty hard
This article is pretty hard on the Alaska Natives who’s blood sweat and tears were pored into the development of ANCSA. These individuals labored within the circumstances of the day, and they certainly had full knowledge of the many decades of failed attempts, before them, to reach a land claims agreement.
The court only mandated that there be an agreement on this issue, not what it would look like.
Who’s to say had the settlement been reached under the tribal system, and it well could have been, that things would be any different than they are now. Would the tribal leadership be any different than that of the Village or Regional ANCSA Corporations? The same people that voted for the corporation board members would have under the other scenario voted for the tribal leaders, so it’s reasonable to believe the leadership would have been the same. The acquisition of huge tracks of land and revenue generating assets would have been the same. It is also reasonable to believe that the push to convert these assets into cash, or prosperity, for a people and villages that had seen little of either, would be the same.
So hopefully the author and anybody that reads this piece will ponder this question. Having not walked in the shoes of the people that worked on this legislation, at the time it was developed and under the pressures and circumstances it was developed, could you “honestly” have done any better?
What is called, "continuation
What is called, "continuation of economic development", is at the terrible cost of native communities, their socioeconomic vitality and their cultural identities and traditions according to decades of peer reviewed research by ethnologists, sociologists, and anthropologists studying the role of ANCSA's corporate model in southeast Alaska.
History speaks for itself, as we see social scientists documenting cause/ effect relationships of ANCSA's legacy of its terrible impacts on native villages. These villages have the highest rates of domestic abuse, suicides, rape, unemployment, and are direct consequences of native corporate practices failing to achieve sustainable economies and functional village dynamics.
ANCSA has re-created native village life into those who have plenty and those who have very little and force marginal families with limited access to subsistence resources out of villages. This was never the way it was for thousands of years in Raven House.
ANCSA was supposed to create economic prosperity for all, but instead, it created economic prosperity for a relative few.
Dr. Kirk Dombowski sums this up in his dissertation, "Against Culture: Development, Politics, and Religion in Indian Alaska"-
"Alaska natives having borne the brunt of hundreds of years of colonial extraction, have been placed at the margins of the Western world and have borne a particularly heavy portion of the burden of reproducing Western culture."
There has to be a better way than the colonialist's corporate model which ANCSA imposed.
The irony is, that same corporate model is destroying the lives of tens of millions of Americans everywhere because they too have been rendered victims as the rich get richer and the poor get poorer. Davian / Juneau Empire / 2009
Oh no......more gibberish!
When you enter a discussion of this subject you will soon find there is no end to the gibberish and quasi-ethnic silliness that flows like a river.The Corporations are here to stay. I suspect that if we were to go back and "rework" ANCSA it might not be as sweet in todays world as it was back then.
The Claims were settled. All parties agreed and signed. Leave it be. If there are problems with the Corporations, let those who own the Corporations settle them, same as would be done with GE, Proctor & Gamble or Exxon. Those who are not shareholders......butt out.
With all due respect Birchwood.
If all claims were settled, the Sealaska bill would be just a figment of everyone's imagination.
Change takes time...
Alaska Natives, tribal members, and ANSCA shareholders are steadily and gradually gaining improvements in its self-determination to bring about a governance structure that yields social and economic benefits for the good of all Alaska Native people. The family and community/tribal lineages/linkages branch throughout this region of Alaska. We make better gains when there is a willingness to work together, acknowledging our differences, rather than floundering about in derisiveness. There are changes that focus on the plight of Alaska Natives; and fervent efforts to manifest cultural improvements! One must recognize that change takes time, incrementally, with outcomes that require adjustments and course changes that gain prestige and positive influence for all, including those we share this great land with, regardless of the leadership in effect. Let's fill the gaps with knowledge built upon tribal values, so that one day, we can recognize we are all in this together.
.....and some more verbose, hackneyed verbiage
If you attend enough of those self esteem, image boosting and heritage glorifying meetin's you too can come away with the ability to crank out an unceasing flow of impressive and and baffling gibberish.
Does anybody in this debate ever just sit own and speak like intelligent people in a serious debate?
Spare us all the programmed nonsense and lets just all chat like Alaskans.....you know, like we would if we were having a beer at the Triangle Club.
That is all.
Change takes time?
As long as the managements of ANCSA corporation take out millions and shareholders see a few hundred per year, the more time it takes the better.
In case you haven't noticed Star the poster children for the "governance structure that yields social and economic benefits for the good of all Alaska Native people" got they're walking papers.
ANCSA; too much, for too few, for too long!
Must more then others
His wife works for Sealaska
corp. shareholders to tribal members
I disagree with this statement. “Sealaska Board of Directors or any of the other Board of Directors did not "self-appoint" themselves to be the leaders of our corporation”
Initially board members did not self-appoint themselves, but over the years, they have appointed themselves for over 30+ years using discretionary votes, and bylaws that protect their position on the board. Recently, the board recognizes themselves as leaders of a “tribe” for purposes of changing congressional perspective regarding a land bill. Hence, we have become corporate shareholders to tribal members.
The point that Dan wants to make, is that the corporation should not represent all shareholders in the gist of being self-appointed “tribal leaders” and that this conjured perspective is deceptively wrong. The board has self-appointed themselves as “Tribal Leaders” for the sake of passing a land bill. I do not accept board members as “tribal leaders”. We already have tribal governments, and changing shareholders to tribal members was not the purpose of ANCSA. The corporation is business entity and they need to work with tribal governments, not represent them.
Additionally, I do not want the board to represent my political views by using shareholder money to influence how shareholders should vote in state election or national elections. Nor, do I believe that shareholder money should be used to defeat shareholder sponsored resolutions that are placed before shareholders on ballots for annual shareholder/corporate elections.
Give back the money
When people complain about the "corporate structure" of ANCSA corporations they are really complaining about democratic elections of leaders. They would rather the money and land be controlled the ancient way -- the powerful families in each village would have control, just like the Mafia. Democracy is not consistent with the ancient ways, and thank god for that.
ANCSA says it extinguishes any and all claims by Native Alaskans. Nobody complained when they took the cash and spent it. Now that the money is gone, they want to renegotiate the deal. Congress should insist the money be paid back before they even listen to this stuff.
To protect my own
To protect my own indifference on my writings and personal feelings of how business is run pertaining to 225 recognize tribes throughout Alaska keeps me striving for the betterment of all not the appointed few. I don't hide behind a stripper name worrying about my reputation or exposed feelings. Yes, my wife does work work .. to attack her personally well bring unwelcome response. She has her own mind and did not have a part in this written article. She works hard at her job and does a great jib dealing on a personal basis with our 20000 plus shareholders. You want to sit down and talk get hold of me when I'm not working. I may or may not have the time but if your sincere I'm willing to listen. My name is posted its not @laskatogo, or any other made up name for I have nothing to hide with a phony one. My Tlingit name is posted and my given name is as well. The article had to be condensed so I did the best I could. Did I once say the board members were doing a bad job to support no. That's not the point of the matter, the point is in the amount of time we have been for profit shareholders we have lost more than just money. We have worked hard at bring to fit into a society which on the fist place wanted all we own pertaining to our homeland without having to deal with us as people. As having experience the blood, sweat and tears our ancestors have felt in these transitional times I have more than I care to remember. Sacrifice felt and delt with has been like everybody who never felt regret for being indigenous to this land and remain true to their blood linage. My grandfathers and grandmothers along with their children my father and mother fought feverishly to belong. Let's not confuse. The issue at hand we are failing in this corporate world as indigenous people. As long as we play this game we lose. Entitlement of ownership needs to expand in hopes we may have something to pass on to our grandchildren. Let us live as human beings on our own terms for once without interference from any government entity. Build on our land without having toa compensate an society because they want what we have for nothing. Anyways I don't have to defend what I say because its the truth and someone wants to bend it to their understanding. Just exist as I have with my Beautiful wife, children and grandchildren. Just saying ...
To protect my own
To protect my own indifference on my writings and personal feelings of how business is run pertaining to 225 recognize tribes throughout Alaska keeps me striving for the betterment of all not the appointed few. I don't hide behind a stripper name worrying about my reputation or exposed feelings. Yes, my wife does work work .. to attack her personally well bring unwelcome response. She has her own mind and did not have a part in this written article. She works hard at her job and does a great job dealing on a personal basis with our 20000 plus shareholders. You want to sit down and talk get hold of me when I'm not working. I may or may not have the time but if your sincere I'm willing to listen. My name is posted its not @laskatogo, or any other made up name for I have nothing to hide with a phony one. My Tlingit name is posted and my given name is as well. The article had to be condensed so I did the best I could. Did I once say the board members were doing a bad job to support no. That's not the point of the matter, the point is in the amount of time we have been for profit shareholders we have lost more than just money. We have worked hard at tring to fit into a society which in the first place wanted all we own pertaining to our homeland without having to deal with us as people. As having experience the blood, sweat and tears our ancestors have felt in these transitional times I have more than I care to remember. Sacrifice felt and dealt with has been like everybody who never felt regret for being indigenous to this land and remain true to their blood linage. My grandfathers and grandmothers along with their children my father and mother fought feverishly to belong. Let's not confuse. The issue at hand we are failing in this corporate world as indigenous people. As long as we play this game we lose. Entitlement of ownership needs to expand in hopes we may have something to pass on to our grandchildren. Let us live as human beings on our own terms for once without interference from any government entity. Build on our land without having to compensate an society because they want what we have for nothing. Anyways I don't have to defend what I say because its the truth and someone wants to bend it to their understanding. Just exist as I have with my Beautiful wife, children and grandchildren. Just saying ...
japanese, American military ...please ...
My Father served in the Aleutian campaign as did every avaiaible man from villages all over Alaska. No bootcamp at the time just went to war right off the street. Fought side by side in the bloodiest battle in Alaska' s soil. Helped fellow soldiers survive this harsh environment well fighting to keep what has been ours for over ten thousand years. Its been recorded time and time again how the locals have given up their life to fight for American freedom. But, that's another story, you obviously don't know anything about. Remember Thanksgiving origin?
Take the history of ancsa and ise it as fact for a public outcry
Ancsa was most certainly a tool for us to advance in a society thriving on laws defining laws and acting on laws. So far there have been very little actions made by our ceo's (grammatics serve their purpose too). To continue applying traditional use of our lands for cultivating our resources. We have lost so much during the last 10 years. Our Tlingit-Haida Tsimpshian elders our dirrct link to our histories as native people. The economy as it is has forced many families into survival mode once again. Have any of our corporations offered anything better than scholarships to shareholders? Have any of those ceo's had a discussion other than steak dinners hosted and catered in private? I know that to be fact as a former caterer. (Which by the way was alot of fun) Because you get to see the difference between "favored" the ones being servedand the not so favored the ones doing the serving. The shareholders of all these corporations need to get together and demand a public outcry to to qualify a landmark for obvious legal reasons. Bring back the definition of unity for the right reasons instead of digital conversations. By the way a reminder to those public servants who were put there by your own. Remember Jesus did not come to be served He came to serve. One thing still holds true today til the day I'm I am and always will be native...before american. Great country!! That is yet a whole but another issue.
silly
Okay what? Well...so its okay for hou to advance but not natives. Silly. If your so tired of it go back to your place of origin and try to survive without their advancement. The only cry I hear is the cry of distain for being American. Defeated? Please consider being there you never even conquered your fear of self let alone conceding the concept of victory. Well...okay lol please ...just saying ...
@human?being
We are trying to rebuild our Klan membership in the area and since you seem to share many of our beliefes I was hoping i could get you to the next meeting so we could get you signed up.