ANCSA and ANCILA
{ Introduction | Alaska Native Claims Settlement Act | Alaska National Interest Lands Conservation Act }
Introduction
Alaska has been described as the last great frontier of the United States. The largest state in the country, Alaska has a land area of 375 million acres and one-third of the coastal shoreline of the Nation. It is a huge state with tremendous value including cultural, natural, scenic, historical, archeological, geological, scientific, wilderness, recreational, and wildlife resources. Settlement of Native land claims and striking a balance between preservation and development of lands in Alaska was the intent of the Alaska Native Claims Settle Act (ANCSA) and the Alaska National Interests Lands Conservation Act (ANILCA). Each of these acts, which have a profound effect on land ownership and management in Alaska, are briefly described in this section.
Alaska Native Claims Settlement Act
On December 18, 1971, Public Law 92-203, the Alaska Native Claims Settlement Act was signed into law. The purpose of ANCSA was to legislate the terms by which Alaska Natives could acquire title to their lands. There claim had been unresolved for more than 100 years since the United States purchased Alaska from Russia in 1867.
When the Territory of Alaska was acquired, the treaty conveyed to the United States dominion over the territory and conveyed title to all public and vacant lands that were not individual property. The treaty provided that the Alaska Natives would be subject to the laws and regulations adopted by the United States concerning aboriginal tribes and that the lands used by the Natives of that time were not regarded as individual property. Congress provided by the Act of May 17, 1884 that the Indian Tribes and other persons in the territory, known as Natives, should retain possession of any lands actually used, occupied or claimed by them.
In the past to settle Indian Tribe land claims, the United States had granted title to a portion of the tribe's land, extinguished the remaining claims by placing these lands in the public domain, and paid the fair market value of the titles extinguished. this procedure was initiated by early treaties and completed by the Indian Claims Commission Act of 1946. This option was not available to Alaska Natives because the United States had not acted to extinguish the aboriginal land titles.
In addition, the extent to which Natives in Alaska could prove their claims of aboriginal title was not known because Native leaders asserted that Natives had used and occupied most parts of Alaska. ANCSA did not attempt to determine the number of acres to which the Alaska Natives might be able to prove an aboriginal title. If the tests developed in the courts with respect to Indian Tribes had been applied to Alaska, the probability was that the acreage would have been very large. A judicial settlement would have taken many years, would have involved great administrative expense, and would have posed risks for all parties. Therefore, it was a consensus of the Executive Branch, the Alaska Natives and Congress that a legislative rather than a judicial settlement was the only practical course.
The Alaska Native Claims Settlement Act was hailed as a new departure for the resolution of aboriginal claims. By its terms, Alaska Natives would have land, capital, corporations, and opportunities to enter the business world. By its terms, Alaska Natives would receive title to 44 million acres of land and $962.5 million in compensation. By its terms, Alaska Natives were obliged to set up corporations to serve as the vehicles for the ownership and management of their land and the money, which became corporate assets. For twenty years, Alaska Natives would be the only voting shareholders in these corporations.
With the passage of ANCSA in 1971, Congress extinguished by legislation the aboriginal title Alaska Natives held to their lands throughout Alaska, and it extinguished also their aboriginal right to hunt and fish on these lands. The 44 million acres Natives would receive title to was about ten percent of Alaska's territory. After the passage of ANCSA and the Alaska National Interest Lands Act (ANILCA) in 1980, the federal government had reserved for itself 197 million acres of land, about sixty percent of the state. The State of Alaska was allowed to select 124 million acres, about thirty percent of the state. The ANCSA extinguished Native claims to 321 million acres of land or ninety percent of the state. The $962.5 million payment provided to Alaska Natives amounted to about three dollars per acre. {image maps of ANCSA lands in Alaska and Southeast Alaska}
The Alaska Native Claims Settlement Act required the establishment of twelve regional corporations and more than two hundred village corporations. Most Natives enrolled in both their local village corporation and in the regional corporation established for the region in which the village was located. The typical village shareholder holds one hundred shares in the village corporation and one hundred shares in the regional corporation. Native who do not live in a village become stockholders only in a regional corporation and are known as at-large stockholders.
Natives who did not permanently reside in the state were allowed to join one of the twelve regional corporations or a thirteenth regional corporation, which is based in Seattle. The 13th Regional 
Corporation (its official name) received no land but it did receive a prorata share of the $962.5 million. In total eighty thousand Native persons who claimed to have at least one-quarter Native blood became either village or at-large shareholders. There was only one issue of shares. No one born after December 18, 1971, the date Congress passed ANCSA, received shares.
Village corporations received title to twenty-two million of the forty-four million acres conveyed. The village corporations received only surface title to their lands. The regional corporation received the subsurface title to the village lands within their regions, as well as the surface and subsurface title to land they received independently of village selections.
The Alaska Native Claims Settlement Act gave villages the option of incorporating as a profit-making or a non-profit-making corporations, but they were advised that, under Alaska law, there could be no distribution of dividends to members of a non-profit corporation. All of the villages chose to establish profit-making corporations, as encouraged by the parameters of ANCSA. The incentive for and establishment of for-profit corporations has resulted in significant conflicts and tensions between for-profit economic activities and dividends and subsistence and cultural activities and values.
In Southeast Alaska, the Sealaska Corporation is the regional Native corporation. Within the Glacier Bay region, the Huna Totem Corporation is the village corporation for the village of Hoonah and Yak-Tat Kwaan, Incorporated is the village corporation for the village of Yakutat. Also within the region is the Central Council Tlingit and Haida Tribes of Alaska, and the Hoonah Indian Association and Yakutat Tlingit Tribe.
Alaska National Interest Lands Conservation Act
The purpose of the Alaska National Interest Lands Conservation Act was to strike a balance between preservation and development of Alaska resources so that both present and future generations of Americans would be the beneficiaries of Alaska's vast wealth. In keeping with this spirit, the U.S. Congress confronted the long-standing, unresolved issues of the Alaska Native subsistence lifestyle, energy development, economic growth, and transportation planning to ensure these issues would be planned for in an orderly fashion. In ANILCA, Congress added to or expanded existing units of the five national conservation systems in Alaska--the National Park System, the National Refuge System, the National Wild and Scenic Rivers System, the National Wilderness Preservation System, and the National Forest System.
The origins of ANILCA date back to the late 1950s when the Territory of Alaska became the 49th state. The Alaska Statehood Act of 1958 authorized the newly established State to select, over time, 104 million acres from the total land area of 375 million acres as an economic base for the new State.
In addition to settling long-contested rights of Alaska Natives by granting them the right to select approximately 44 million acres of Federal land in Alaska, ANCSA also contained a provisions authorizing the Secretary of the Interior the opportunity to designate new natural, cultural, recreational, and wildlife areas to be added to the Nation's conservation units. Section 17 (d) (2) of ANCSA authorized the Secretary to withdraw 80 million acres of land to be studied for possible additions to national parks, wilderness, wildlife refuges, and wild and scenic rivers systems.
Spanning three administration and five sessions of Congress, the "Alaska lands bill" was enacted into law on December 2, 1980. As a result of the complexity of the bill, Congress and the Administration spent nearly nine years, from 1971-1980, developing the legislation. {image map of conservation units in Alaska, if available}
