And now:Ish <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> writes:
Date: Tue, 13 Jul 1999 08:04:58 -0400
From: Lynne Moss-Sharman <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
Subject: Alaska: when obeying the law means children go hungry,
something is wrong with the law
Mime-Version: 1.0
Content-Type: text/plain; charset="us-ascii"
Tuesday, July 13, 1999
The fight for food and a way of life
A crisis is washing over Alaska, pitting the natives who take
90% of what they eat from the land against sportsmen and
commercial fishermen who say the state's natural bounty
belongs to everyone
Sam Howe Verhovek
The New York Times
KWETHLUK, Alaska - In the clearings along the broad Kuskokwim River where
the Yup'ik Inuit set up what they call their "fish camps," this is a busy
time. Families are racing to catch, cut and cure the fish that will last
them a year, and salmon turn scarlet as they hang by the hundreds to dry in
the early summer sun.
James Nicori and his family were up until three the other morning,
stringing fish and stoking the alder wood in the smokehouse, not that the
time of day matters too much at a point in the season when it does not get
dark at all. In August it will be time for gathering berries and wild
celery out in the bush. In the fall the men will hunt caribou.
To a remarkable degree, thousands of native people still live off the land
in the Alaskan tundra, taking 90% or more of what they eat every year from
the great back country, the rivers and the Bering Sea. "This," Mr. Nicori
said, gesturing to the Kuskokwim and the vast bush land beyond, "is our
supermarket."
But 40 years after Alaska became a state, 20 years after land-claim
disputes in the oil rush led the U.S. Congress to give the people known as
"subsistence gatherers" priority rights to fish and game, and 10 years
after the state's highest court declared that protection unconstitutional
because such natural bounty was for the "common use" of all Alaskans, the
debate has reached a crisis point.
Cheering the natives but enraging sportsmen's groups and the state's
commercial fishing industry, which are both largely white, Bruce Babbitt,
the U.S. interior secretary, announced recently the federal government
would take over allocation of fishing rights and schedules in federally
owned sections of Alaska, nearly two-thirds of the state, on Oct. 1 unless
the state legislature acted.
State lawmakers could keep Washington from doing so, Mr. Babbitt said, if
they agreed on a constitutional amendment to guarantee a "subsistence
priority" in times of shortage for those who rely on the land and rivers
here for their primary food supply.
But the state's Republican-controlled legislature has not reached accord on
a measure to put before the voters, prompting the Democratic governor, Tony
Knowles, to warn they could be letting in "the Trojan horse of federal
management" in a state that fiercely values its last-frontier style of
independence.
In many ways, the debate over Alaska's subsistence culture starkly echoes
those elsewhere over affirmative action, creating similar racial tensions.
The natives say the issue is their civil rights, while the sportsmen say
the natives are demanding "special rights" and unfair quotas.
But this fight is not over schools, contracts or employment, but over food
and a way of life that in some respects has remained strikingly unchanged
for centuries.
"This is not 19th-century history here, some historical injustice we can do
nothing about today," said George Irvin, policy director for the Alaskan
Federation of Natives, which represents the Inuit, Indians and Aleuts in
their battle for subsistence rights. "These are the last aboriginal
Americans still striving to live as they always have, on their homelands.
There has to be room in the American system for them to survive."
To an outsider, the dispute at first seems eminently solvable. After all,
the subsistence gatherers take only 2% or 3% of the state's fish and game
harvest a year, and polls show at least 60% of Alaskans favour granting
priority rights to such people. And the issue mainly arises in times of
scarcity, which come every few years when regulators determine fish are
running low in some rivers or caribou or moose herds have thinned.
But allocating these rights can be immensely complicated, which partly
explains why the legislature has so far failed, despite years of trying, to
resolve the issue.
Who, exactly, should be defined as a subsistence gatherer? Although
subsistence is rooted in native cultures, some white people also live off
the land, while many natives live in Anchorage and Fairbanks, and are just
as likely to shop in a supermarket or eat at McDonald's as a non-native.
Furthermore, ensuring subsistence gatherers the ability to carry out a
traditional way of life sometimes means, say, closing off rivers for
several weeks to everybody else. That not only irritates those who fish as
a hobby but possibly makes the difference between profit and loss in the
season of a commercial fishing operator.
Beyond the logistical considerations, it is clear the issue has touched a
deep emotional nerve.
This is particularly true for nonwhite Alaskans, or native peoples, as they
prefer to call themselves, who were the majority in Alaska into the 1940s
but now make up only about 15% of its population. Many native leaders
complain of mistreatment by the white majority, a sentiment clearly in
evidence at a rally in Anchorage in May in which native groups pressed for
protection of subsistence rights.
"Apartheid is alive and well and it lives in the Arctic, it lives in our
schools, and I'm sad to say it lives in the halls of the state
legislature," Desa Jacobsson, who is Gwich'in Indian on her mother's side
and Yup'ik Inuit on her father's, told the crowd. Ms. Jacobsson, who ran
unsuccessfully for governor last year as the Green Party candidate, was
jailed briefly several years ago after a subsistence fishing protest.
But strong emotions are also felt by many whites, whose numbers swelled
from migration in the oil rush of the 1970s, but include many who were born
here and feel they, too, are natives.
"Our adversaries marched for 'special rights' -- and called it civil
rights," says a brochure produced by the Alaska Outdoor Council, one of the
principal groups representing sportsmen and sportswomen in the state. It
urges members to fight efforts to "enshrine that terrible federal
subsistence law in our state's constitution."
That law, Title VIII of the Alaska National Interest Lands Conservation
Act, was passed by Congress in 1980, establishing a subsistence priority,
loosely defined as applying to rural residents of the state and thus
covering what it termed the "customary and traditional" uses of subsistence
gatherers.
The measure guaranteed that, in years of low yield, steps should be taken
to ensure those gatherers had first rights to the harvests of fish and
game. It grew out of an agreement a decade earlier, reached in the rush to
clear a right-of-way for the building of the Trans-Alaska Pipeline, that
native subsistence rights would be protected.
But those are the protections the state court later deemed
unconstitutional. And, after years of prodding the state to change its
constitution, the federal government is set to wield its hammer, in the
form of Mr. Babbitt's threat to take over fishing management on federally
owned property in Alaska.
The state has been managing fishing on those lands and has asked to keep
doing so while it tries to work out language to protect subsistence rights,
but Mr. Babbitt said earlier this month he was disappointed the legislature
had not brought the issue before voters and it was time to act.
About half of Alaska's 100,000 native peoples live off the land to a
significant extent, according to the Alaska Federation of Natives. For
some, that may mean taking only a third or so of their food from the land.
But thousands, like Mr. Nicori and his family here on the Kuskokwim, get
90% or more this way.
The food involved runs the gamut, from berries and roe air seaweed to fish,
moose, caribou, Arctic hare and the parka squirrel.
The natives who live off the land are hardly living in the past. In many of
their villages, there are motorboats and snowmobiles, satellite television
dishes and Coca-Cola.
"There's no way you can stop it completely," said 64-year-old Mary John,
laughing as she skinned a huge bucketful of herring one recent afternoon
with her 14-year-old granddaughter Kimberly Kassaiuli in the village of
Newtok, in southwestern Alaska. "Kids do like the taste of potato chips."
Across the village, hard by the Niutaq River, several of Stanley and
Elizabeth Tom's eight children were inside the house, watching a Disney
Mighty Ducks cartoon movie as they also gutted and intricately braided fish
with tundra grass, then hung them for drying.
Except for a big bowl of rice, lunch that afternoon at the Toms' small home
came from the land: half-smoked salmon, dried herring dipped in seal oil,
salmon berries preserved last fall.
"This is a big part of who we are and what we are all about," said Mr.
Nicori, here on the Kuskokwim, who had nearly 100 king salmon and hundreds
of smaller reds and chums hanging on the lines and in the smokehouse at his
fish camp. "It is something we must never lose, no matter how modern the
world becomes."
Under the current system, the state gives priority in some cases to
subsistence gatherers. For instance, they were allowed to fish in the
Kuskokwim for several weeks this year before it opened to commercial operators.
But critics challenge that system, saying it is not strong enough to
guarantee protection in all cases, as would the federal law, which Mr.
Babbitt wants enshrined in the state constitution.
>From 1994 to 1998, several rivers in southwest Alaska had poor fish runs,
and around Bristol Bay, the state had to deliver fish caught elsewhere to
nearly 100 communities, an act of compassion that was also deeply wounding
to those who survive off the land.
Mr. Knowles is expected to call one more special session, probably in
September, in a last-ditch bid to avert the federal takeover of fishing
regulations on the government's lakes and rivers.
Though both sides say they are open to compromise, it is not clear much
common ground exists. And an unlikely alliance of forces may work against
an agreement: natives who favour the federal action and conservative
lawmakers who could reap considerable political hay out of the anger a
federal intervention could spark among many white Alaskans.
Ron Somerville, a board member of Territorial Sportsmen Inc., one of the
oldest and largest sportsmen's groups in the state, said it made no sense
"to allow our state to institute a bad federal law that discriminates
against our own residents."
But Myron Naneng, president of the Association of Village Council
Presidents, representing 56 native villages here in the Yukon-Kuskokwim
Delta of southwest Alaska, put the matter in very different terms.
"We are a very law-abiding people," Mr. Naneng said. "But when obeying the
law means that our children go hungry, something is wrong with the law."
"Let Us Consider The Human Brain As
A Very Complex Photographic Plate"
1957 G.H. Estabrooks
www.angelfire.com/mn/mcap/bc.html
FOR K A R E N #01182
who died fighting 4/23/99
[EMAIL PROTECTED]
www.aches-mc.org
807-622-5407
Reprinted under the Fair Use http://www4.law.cornell.edu/uscode/17/107.html
doctrine of international copyright law.
&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&
Tsonkwadiyonrat (We are ONE Spirit)
Unenh onhwa' Awayaton
http://www.tdi.net/ishgooda/
UPDATES: CAMP JUSTICE
http://shell.webbernet.net/~ishgooda/oglala/
&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&
