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[article provided by LH. Thanks!]

http://www.adn.com/stories/T00021657.html
Wednesday, February 16, 2000

Natives appeal to feds
Subsistence case changes direction

By LIZ RUSKIN
Daily News reporter

Angry at the governor's decision to appeal the Katie John subsistence
fishing case, the state's largest Native group decided at a special
convention Tuesday to chart a radically new political course.

The Alaska Federation of Natives is abandoning a decade-long effort to get a
state constitutional amendment granting a rural preference for subsistence
hunting and fishing. It will instead turn to Congress for the protection
Natives have been unable to get from the state, AFN President Julie Kitka
said after the all-day convention.

AFN no longer supports Gov. Tony Knowles' effort to resolve the subsistence
dilemma with a constitutional amendment and will oppose any amendment unless
the state changes its subsistence policies, the convention decided.

"You're going to see a unity like you've not seen before on this issue,"
Kitka told reporters.

Among other resolutions the convention adopted:

* To urge Congress to develop a "Native and rural priority" in managing
resources on federal lands. Current federal law grants a subsistence
priority for rural residents of any race.

* To get Congress to reclassify Native corporation lands as Indian country
at the request of the individual corporations. The purpose, said AFN
co-chairman Roy Huhndorf, is to give Natives more of a hand in managing the
resources on their lands.

* To direct Kitka to look into the possibility of Native economic sanctions
to pressure opponents of the subsistence protections AFN seeks.

Natives have been waiting 30 years, since Congress passed the Alaska Native
Claims Settlement Act, for legal protection for their subsistence rights,
said Huhndorf. Native people are frustrated, and the Katie John appeal "is
sort of the pot boiling over," he said.

"I think people are just saying now, 'Enough is enough,' " he said.

Despite short notice, hundreds of delegates from across Alaska met at the
Hotel Captain Cook to decide a subsistence policy in light of Knowles'
announcement three weeks ago that the state will appeal the federal court
decision known as Katie John.

Federal law grants a rural subsistence priority, but the Alaska Supreme
Court has determined that the state constitution does not allow it. Because
state fish and game managers weren't giving rural residents that priority,
the federal government in 1990 took over hunting management on the
two-thirds of Alaska lands it owns.

Katie John is an Athabaskan elder who wanted to fish at a camp on the Copper
River. In deciding her case, a federal appeals court in 1995 ordered the
federal government to manage fishing in navigable waters running through and
adjacent to federal land to ensure rural Alaskans' subsistence needs.

John, a resolute gray-haired grandmother from Mentasta Lake, spoke to the
convention Tuesday. She recalled the days when money wasn't important and
people lived off the land and water. It was hard work, she said, but people
were happy.

"That how I was raised," she said. "That's how all my folks was raised."

Knowles has said that he backs Katie John's right to subsistence fish but
that the state had to appeal her case to oppose the federal trampling of
state sovereignty.

"The governor strongly supports the rights of rural Alaskans, but he has
also said he supports the state management of fisheries," his spokesman, Bob
King, said.

But if Knowles succeeds in his appeal and the Katie John decision falls, the
federal protections for rural subsistence fishing are unenforceable, said
several AFN convention participants.

And, some said, it's hard to keep fighting for state management when, under
federal control, the rural subsistence priority is guaranteed, and the
managers give tribes a greater say in the decisions.

Some participants thought AFN should go a step farther and walk away from
Knowles' offer to negotiate a government-to-government relationship with the
Alaska Native tribes.

"How could you negotiate with Custer?" asked Fred John Jr., Katie John's son
and chairman of Ahtna Inc., the regional Native corporation in the Copper
River Basin.

The tribes are meeting today in Anchorage to decide on a negotiating team to
meet with the state. Mike Williams, head of the Alaska Inter-Tribal Council,
said the negotiations should go on, despite the disappointment with the
governor's decision to appeal Katie John. There are other issues that are
important to tribes - such as education, rural sanitation, public safety and
substance abuse - and Knowles' offer is an opportunity to raise the status
of the tribes so they can solve those issues, Williams said.

"If we lose that opportunity, I don't think we'll have another any time
soon," he said.

---
* Reporter Liz Ruskin can be reached at lruskin@adn.com
 

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