Tag: Winters rights

Get Hal Shepherd’s new book “Return to Ekeunick’s Time – Defending Waters and Tradition in the Arctic”

One of the primary motivations

behind the campaign for Alaska’s statehood was the impact of large canneries on salmon that used fish traps and wheels to drain returning runs. At the same time, due to the lack of the Territory’s regulatory authority and because federal authorities were under the control of corporate interests, these canneries avoided paying taxes and laws to protect the fishery.

Return to Ekunick’s Time looks at how, as the 49th state to enter the union, Alaska had the benefit of observing the mistakes made by other states that were beginning to experience environmental degradation due to industrial extraction. As such, in the early years after statehood, the State was a leader in creating and enforcing environmental policy which, together with the emerging activism of Alaska Native communities, played a part in the birth of the nationwide environmental movement.

Eventually, however, the lure of the riches, particularly from the discovery of oil in Prudhoe Bay, became too much for Alaska’s political leadership, and over the past 50 years, the extraction industry has dominated state policies. Today, under a series of conservative politicians in power at both the federal and state levels (as championed particularly by the former Trump administration), resource extraction corporations are once again having substantial impacts on water and subsistence resources relied upon by Alaska Native communities.

At the same time, after a campaign led by powerful industrial interests and conservative politicians to discredit the environmental movement, today tribal leaders and everyday citizens in Alaska are hailing a new era of protecting water resources by emphasizing traditional values and management strategies in the face of existential threats from climate change and politics. According to Alaska Native author William Oquilluck, during the time of Ekeunick – the legendary leader of the Inupiat people in ancient times – “the Eskimo’s ancestors did not use their minds like later times when they invented tools, clothes, houses, boats, and weapons. They had no worries about living.”

Could the return to traditional values as a means of addressing the impacts of climate change and mismanagement of natural resources, help to move the needle towards a return to times when Alaska Native people will no longer have to worry about the survival of their traditions and culture?

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U.S. Supreme Court Tells Alaska Moose Hunter to “Rev Up Your Engine!”

The U.S. Supreme Court, recently, ruled in favor of John Sturgeon who sued the National Park Service in 2007, after rangers on the Yukon-Charley Rivers National Preserve  told him he could not use a hovercraft for hunting moose on the Nation River near the Canadian border. While the Park claimed it had jurisdiction to manage navigable waters inside park boundaries, the state which which allows hovercrafts, joined in the law suit and maintained that it had the right to manage waters within the state including those of such rivers.

When in the Spring of 2019,  the U.S. Supreme Court made it’s decision it concluded that, for the purposes of the Alaska National Interest Lands Conservation Act, the Nation River does not qualify as “public land” and, therefore, that the park service does not have authority to regulate Sturgeon’s activities on that part of the river found within the preserve. According to the Court “[t]hat means Sturgeon can again rev up his hovercraft in search of moose.”

Despite worries from tribal interests, that the Sturgeon litigation would reverse decades of  legal precedents for federal subsistence fishing rights in Alaska, the Katie John case was kept intact by a single footnote buried in the middle of the 46-page ruling which stated that the Katie John is “not at issue in this case, and we therefore do not disturb the Ninth Circuit’s holdings that the Park Service may regulate subsistence fishing on navigable waters.” As a result, immediately after the ruling was issued, the Alaska Federation of Native’s largely supported the decision stating “[o]ur Board previously approved two principles related to the case: private landowner’s access to – and use of – inholdings within conservation system units; and no net loss to subsistence rights. This ruling accomplishes both.”

In apparent agreement with AFN, Alaska’s congressional delegation said that the Court upheld “promises made to Alaskans in ANILCA” limiting the NPS rights over state and native lands and praised the decision for not over turning Katie John.

The decision could also impact other rivers in the state which could be interpreted as navigable waters and therefore, under the state, rather than the federal jurisdiction. Concurring opinions from Justices Sonia Sotomayor and Ruth Bader Ginsburg pointed out that the majority decision raises uncertainty about what remains of the park service’s authority over navigable waters in Alaska’s parks.