Alaska Native Claims Settlement Act (1971)

Details of the Act

Alaska Natives had often been treated as a distinct category of peoples from Native Americans, but their treatment from the territorial period (1912–37) was inconsistent. Alaska Native peoples’ claims to various Alaskan lands had been handled equally inconsistently, and across the century, federal government actions were based on a number of conflicting premises at various times. There had long been a push, accelerated once Alaska became a state, for some kind of federal act to clarify policy once and for all. The need for this resolution was strengthened when the Atlantic-Richfield Company discovered oil on the Arctic coast of Alaska at Prudhoe Bay. Transporting oil from a remote, harsh location to the lower 48 states would most efficiently be accomplished by constructing a pipeline to the port of Valdez, where it could be loaded onto tanker ships. Pipeline construction could not begin as long as the lands through which it would pass remained in dispute.

The solution was to distribute nearly $1 billion ($963 million) to Alaska Natives in return for the permanent abandonment of their claims to aboriginal lands. The U.S. Treasury supplied $462.5 million of the settlement, while the rest came from revenue sharing in the oil industry. About one-ninth of the state (44 million acres of land) was distributed along with the money. Anyone with at least one-fourth Native ancestry was eligible for settlement benefits.

Village and Regional Corporations

The distribution of the settlement was accomplished by creating 200 local village corporations and 12 Native-owned regional corporations (and later, a 13th Native-owned regional corporation) representing Alaska Natives who no longer lived in Alaska. The regional corporations represented the Alaska Native population of 12 geographic regions of the state, and individual Alaska Natives enrolled in their local corporation and became shareholders. Alaska Natives alive at the time of the settlement received 100 shares of stock in their local corporation; a 2006 amendment made it easier for corporations to also issue stock to those born later.

Corporations were given land in proportion to the population of their enrollment. Village [Page 162]corporations own the surface rights to their lands, while regional corporations own subsurface rights to all Native lands in their region.

The 13 regional corporations formed to distribute the settlement include the following:

• The Arctic Slope Regional Corporation, which includes Barrow and Point Hope
• The Bering Straits Native Corporation, including Seward Peninsula and Unalakleet
• The Northwest Alaska Native Association Regional Corporation, including Kotzebue
• The Calista Corporation, including the southwest coast, the villages in the Bethel area, the villages on the Lower Yukon River, and the Lower Kuskokwim River
• Doyon, Limited, including the Koyukuk, Middle, and Upper Yukon Rivers; the Upper Kuskokwim River; and Tanana River
• Cook Inlet Region, Inc., including Kenai, Tyonek,

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