Alaska Subsistence: A NPS Management History (Chapter 4)

As noted in Chapter 1, Alaska's Native peoples, by and large, had rejected the traditional reservation system that had predominated in other U.S. states. Lacking that land base, these groups, over the years, had pressed the U.S. Congress for a bill that would provide legal rights to their traditional use lands. The Federal government, however, never showed much inclination to respond to Natives' needs; the closest it had come to doing so had been in during the 1940s, when Interior Secretary Harold Ickes had implemented a series of "IRA reservations," so named because they were authorized by amendments to the 1934 Indian Reorganization Act. Those reservations, however, proved to be of limited value and most were of short duration; and as the decade of the 1960s dawned, the only lands specifically allotted to Alaska Natives were a smattering of 160-acre parcels (that had been granted by the 1906 Allotment Act) and such individual parcels as Natives had been able to acquire. [1] Except for the Metlakatla reservation near Ketchikan, Alaska Natives owned virtually no communal land. This state of affairs, to be sure, was not perceived as a critical problem during the first half of the twentieth century; as late as 1960, non-Natives had little continuing interest in the vast majority of Alaska's land base, and conflicts over ownership and resource use were small in scope and generated little heat in the public policy arena.

A series of events beginning in the mid-1960s brought increased pressure for a Native land claims bill. The first major event, necessitated by Natives' ire over state land selections, was Interior Secretary Stewart Udall's land freeze, which was carried out in stages beginning in 1966. The formation of the Alaska Federation of Natives during the winter of 1966-67 helped crystallize support for a land claims bill. But what really created momentum for a Native claims bill was the Prudhoe Bay oil strike, along with the concomitant recognition that the North Slope's "black gold" would be valueless if a way could not be built to carry the oil to Outside markets; and the Interior Department refused to allow the construction of a pipeline unless the Native claims issue was addressed. [2]

Because Natives claimed rights to lands throughout Alaska, the net effect of each of these actions was to increase pressure for Natives to consummate a lands settlement, and a major byproduct of that increasing pressure was that each proposal that purported to resolve the issue resulted in an increasing number of acres for Native ownership and use. One of the first Native claim proposals, for instance, was a 1963 Interior Department plan that would have granted 160-acre tracts to individuals for homes, fish camps, and hunting sites, along with "small acreages" for village growth. (As noted in Chapter 1, the Native Allotment Act, passed sixty years earlier, had already granted Natives the right to obtain 160-acre parcels if they could prove use and occupancy.) One subsequent proposal called for the creation of a 20-square-mile (i.e., 12,800-acre) reservation surrounding each Native village, while another, somewhat later proposal suggested a 50,000-acre grant to each village along with a small cash payment to village residents. [3]

Congress made its first attempt to solve the native land claims issue in June 1967 when Senator Ernest Gruening, at the request of the Interior Department, introduced S. 1964, which would have authorized a maximum of 50,000 acres in trust for each Native village. Native rights leaders were vociferously opposed to S. 1964—Emil Notti stated that it was "in no way fair to the Native people of Alaska." So just ten days later, both Gruening and Rep. Howard Pollock (D-Alaska) submitted bills (S. 2020 and H.R. 11164, respectively) on behalf of the Alaska Federation of Natives. These bills were intended to confer jurisdiction upon the Court of Claims regarding Alaska Natives' land claims. Later that year, Edward "Bob" Bartlett, Alaska's other U.S. Senator, submitted his own bill (S. 2690) pertaining to the land claims issue. All four bills were brief and none were extensively debated, although they did serve as a vehicle for further discussions. [4]

By January 1968, a land claims task force appointed by Governor Walter Hickel recommended that Native villages be granted a total of 40 million acres and that cash payments be provided which, under specified conditions, would total more than $100 million. Later that year, the Federal Field Committee for Development Planning in Alaska issued a report, entitled Alaska Natives and the Land, that recommended a land grant of from four to seven million acres plus a cash grant of $100 million and 10 percent of public lands mineral royalties; shortly afterward, the Interior Department countered with a proposal to provide 12.5 million acres and $500 million. [5] The Natives soon weighed in with their own proposal, which included 40 million acres and $500 million; in addition, it called for the creation of twelve regional Native corporations that would manage the land and money received in the settlement. But no one in a position of power advocated extensive Native land grants; Senator Henry Jackson (D-Wash.) stated that "The last thing that I think we want is tremendous land grants, resulting in large, idle enclaves of land," while another Senate Interior Committee member, Clinton Anderson (D-N.M.) asked, "If all the people who claimed aboriginal title were granted land, there would not be enough for the rest of us, would there?" As in 1967, none of the land-claims settlement bills submitted in either Congressional chamber received so much as a committee hearing. [6]

Up until this time, the various legislative proposals did not include land in southeastern Alaska. But as noted in Chapter 1, a January 1969 Court of Claims decision awarded the Tlingit and Haida plaintiffs money and land in a case that had first been filed back in 1935. Despite that award, however, the court had decreed that Indian title had not been extinguished to more than 2.6 million acres of land in Alaska's southeast. As a result, Natives in southeastern Alaska joined their colleagues elsewhere in the state to push for an equitable lands settlement.

Early in 1969, Congress began sorting through the various proposals, and the Senate Interior Committee attempted to work out an acceptable bill that fall. Bickering within the committee, and occasional leaks to the press of the Committee's negotiations, effectively prevented progress for several months. Then, in April 1970, a Federal judge halted all work on the proposed pipeline until the native claims issue could be worked out (see Chapter 1); as a result, various oil companies joined the chorus of those pushing for a viable Native claims bill. Within a week, the Senate Interior Committee reported a bill out, which called for $1 billion in compensation plus 40 million acres of land surrounding the villages. That bill, S. 1830, passed the Senate in July 1970, but the House did not act. The bill died with the adjournment that fall of the 91st Congress. [7]

Early in 1971, the prospects for a bill looked bleak. But in April, President Richard Nixon presented a special message to Congress that called for a 40 million-acre land entitlement and a $1 billion compensation package; that same month, Chairman Henry Jackson of the Senate Interior Committee submitted a revised bill (S. 35) that was co-sponsored by Alaska's two newly-minted senators, Mike Gravel and Ted Stevens. Attention then shifted to a House subcommittee, which reported out its version of a bill in early August, and on October 20 the entire House passed a land claims bill (H. 10367). In early November, the Senate overwhelmingly passed a bill that differed significantly from the House's version. The House-Senate conference committee sifted through these differences and reported out compromise legislation in early December. That compromise, which called for a $962.5 million cash payment, a 40 million-acre land conveyance, and numerous other provisions, was passed by both legislative bodies. President Nixon signed the Alaska Native Claims Settlement Act (ANCSA) on December 18, 1971. [8]

Alaska Natives were hopeful that that any land settlement bill that passed Congress would contain language that would provide not only land ownership but also legal protection for the Natives' continued use of the public lands. This provision was necessary because, as Alaska Natives and the Land had made clear, Alaska Natives needed far more land for their traditional uses than simple land grants could provide. To provide for this need, the earliest land-settlement bills—S. 1964, introduced in mid-June 1967—included the first tentative attempt to legislate protections for continued Native access and use. Section 3(e) of the brief bill stated, in part, that

The other three bills submitted that year contained no such protection. By the following year, however, Secretary Udall's land freeze had been in effect for over a year, and optimism about the Prudhoe Bay oil strike was quickly spreading. Perhaps in response, all three of the land-settlement bills introduced in 1968 addressed the issue of "aboriginal use and occupancy." S. 2906, introduced on February 1, stated that "The Natives of Alaska may continue to use or occupy, for hunting, fishing, and trapping purposes, and for any other aboriginal use any lands that are owned by the United States." But H.R. 15049, introduced the same day by Rep. Howard Pollock, made no such sweeping provision; it stated only that the Interior Secretary could grant lands outside the state's various Native villages "if he finds that such additional grant is warranted by the economic needs of the native group or his determination that the native group has not received a reasonably fair and equitable portion of the lands settled upon all native groups and granted by this Act." A third bill (S. 3859), submitted by Sen. Gruening in July 1968, was similar to the plan described in S. 1964 a year earlier; it gave the Interior Secretary the ability to "issue permits to Natives in Alaska giving them the exclusive privilege for not more than fifty years from the date of this Act to hunt, fish, trap, and pick berries ... on any land in Alaska that is owned by the United States. Such use shall not preclude other uses of the land, and shall terminate if the land is patented or leased." None of these bills advanced beyond the committee stage. [10]

On April 15, 1969, the Senate Committee on Interior and Insular Affairs broke new ground when it submitted S. 1830, the "Alaska Native Claims Settlement Act of 1969." S. 1830, among its other provisions, introduced the term "subsistence" to the legislative lexicon. [11] Section 13 of the bill, which addressed the "Protection of Subsistence Resources," stated that the Interior Secretary

This bill (both its subsistence provisions and other elements) was considerably revised and expanded over the following year. [13] As noted above, S. 1830 passed the Senate in July 1970 but, owing to inaction in the House, it did not become law.

During the next few months, additional effort was expended toward perfecting the bill's subsistence provisions, so by the time the Interior Department introduced a new land claims bill the following January (S. 35), the subsistence title (Section 21) had doubled in length. It continued, with some modifications, the provisions contained within S. 1830. In addition, it gave the Interior Secretary the power "to classify ... public lands surrounding any or all of the Native Villages ... as Subsistence Use Units," and it was those units that the Interior Secretary was empowered to close if, as noted above, "subsistence biotic resources" became depleted. According to longtime AFN attorney Donald Mitchell, the subsistence section in S. 35 "wasn't particularly friendly toward Native interests" and was not the product of any AFN officials. He averred that its probable author was David Hickok, a staff member on the Federal Field Committee for Development Planning in Alaska. [14]

As S. 35 made its way through the legislative process that year, its subsistence provisions became further refined, and by October 1971 a four-page subsistence title had emerged. It included provisions for both subsistence units and for closure of such units if necessary, as the January iteration of the bill had delineated. In addition, it specified that the various Native villages described in the Act "shall designate the areas ... which (A) historically have been used for subsistence purposes by their members, and (B) still are necessary, desirable and in use for such purposes." The Alaska Native Commission, which would be created by the Act, was empowered to determine the amount of these "subsistence use permit lands" for each village; the total amount of these lands for all villages would be 20,000,000 acres. The title further stated that "five years after the issuance of each subsistence use permit, and every five years thereafter, the Secretary shall review the question of whether the area still is being use for subsistence purposes. If the Secretary finds ... that the area is not being so used in whole or in part, he shall terminate the permit with respect to the unused lands." As in the January version of S. 35, Natives were not consulted on any of the language contained in Section 21. [15]

These subsistence provisions were included in the bill that passed the Senate in early November. But the House-passed bill omitted any such provisions, primarily because Wayne Aspinall (D-Colo.), the head of the House Interior Committee, felt that existing law was sufficient to provide these protections. When the House-Senate conference committee met to iron out the differences between the two bills, the powerful Aspinall prevailed on the Senate conferees to accept the House bill as it pertained to the all-important subjects of land and money. (It did so despite two last-minute appeals to the contrary by the Alaska Federation of Natives.) The remaining, "B-List" sections of the bill—that dealt with subsistence and other management issues—were referred by Senator Alan Bible (D-Nev.) to Alaska's Congressional delegation for resolution. These issues were decided, to a large extent, at a meeting in Senator Stevens's office on Saturday, December 4. Meeting attendees included the state's Congressional delegation (Rep. Nick Begich and senators Ted Stevens and Mike Gravel), along with Alaska Governor William A. Egan and Attorney General John Havelock. No Alaska Natives were present. A memorandum that was prepared after that meeting recommended that no subsistence provisions should be included in the bill reported by the conference committee. The conference, in turn, accepted that recommendation. Natives, upon hearing the news of what had transpired at the weekend meeting, were outraged at being excluded and were similarly chagrined at many of the group's conclusions. They were not, however, angry at the lack of a subsistence provision. Subsistence, at the time, was "not a political issue," and conflicts over subsistence resources on Alaska's public lands were few and far between. [16]

Although the bill, as signed into law, lacked a specific subsistence provision, the conference report accompanying the bill expressly stated that the bill protected Native subsistence users. A section of the report that was probably written by David Hickok noted the following:

Alaska conservationists, who had become increasingly active during the 1960s, were concerned when they heard about the large amounts of acreage that were being considered as part of the various Native claims settlement bills. (This concern had been growing ever since State land selections had begun a decade earlier.) Conservationists' concerns, which were also shared by officials in the various Federal land management agencies, resulted in pressure to include a special lands provision in any Native claims bill that emerged from Congress. This provision, its proponents hoped, would call for a survey and evaluation of the Alaska's federal lands for parklands, wildlife refuges, and other "national interest" lands. [18] The head of the influential Federal Field Committee for Development Planning in Alaska, Joseph Fitzgerald, recognized as early as 1966 that planning for a multifaceted "park complex" would be central to any Native claims settlement, and Fitzgerald assigned David Hickok, a member of his staff, to work with Congressional leaders on a national interest lands provision that would be included in Native claims legislation.

Federal land management officials, during this period, were also active in the planning arena. The Interior Department, in accordance with the Multiple Use and Classification Act of 1964, was charged with reviewing its lands to determine which should be disposed of and which should be retained under multiple use management, and by the late 1960s the Bureau of Land Management had completed a classification scheme in the Iliamna Lake area. [19] The National Park Service, for its part, had been planning for potential Alaska parklands since the fall of 1964. By the late 1960s it had already completed a number of initial planning studies, and provisions for park planning had gained a more broad-based legitimacy through the efforts of Interior Secretary Walter Hickel's Alaska Parks and Monuments Advisory Commission and the Federal Field Committee for Development Planning in Alaska. [20]

Legislative efforts to include a national interest lands provision had begun early. Such a provision was included in S. 1830 (which the Senate had passed in 1970), and due to pressure from conservationists, it was also included in various bills that the Senate Interior and Insular Affairs Committee considered in 1971. On the House side, conservation-minded representatives John Saylor (R-Pa.) and Morris Udall (D-Ariz.) had announced in May that they intended to introduce an interest lands provision, but due to lobbying by Natives, the State of Alaska, the oil industry, and administration officials, an amendment calling for a national interest provision was defeated in both the House Interior and Insular Affairs Committee and the full House. But Alan Bible (D-Nev.), a member of the Senate Interior and Insular Affairs Committee, vowed to fight for a national interest lands provision, and when he introduced such an amendment on the Senate floor on November 1, the Senate regarded it as non-controversial and handily accepted it. In the House-Senate conference committee, the interest lands provisions was considered on December 9, and the conferees readily agreed to the provision—specifically, a provision that would give the Interior Secretary authority to withdraw up to 80 million acres, to be studied for possible inclusion to either the national park, wildlife refuge, wild and scenic river, or national forest systems. [21] This provision, known as the "d-2" provision because it was located in Section 17 (d) (2) of ANCSA, was the fundamental engine that drove NPS planning in Alaska for the remainder of the decade.

The National Park Service, which managed less than seven million acres of Alaska land in December 1971, reacted to ANCSA's passage by commencing an immediate, whirlwind effort to identify and evaluate lands for consideration as National Park System units. On December 21, just three days after the bill signing, Director George Hartzog assigned Theodor Swem, the agency's Assistant Director for Cooperative Activities, to coordinate the agency's Alaska effort; six days later, Swem requested the assistance of Richard Stenmark of the Alaska Group Office in Anchorage in identifying and evaluating proposed withdrawal areas. [22] The NPS and other land management agencies acted quickly because they had to: according to the timetable laid out in ANCSA, they had just 90 days to make a preliminary withdrawal of d-2 lands and nine months to issue a final withdrawal order. Given that timetable, agency officials hurriedly compiled what meager resources they had on Alaska's outstanding natural and cultural areas; they then began assembling an ad hoc planning team that was intended to provide information and guidance about potential parklands—either new NPS units or extensions to existing units.

Table 4-1. Proposed NPS Areas in Alaska, March 15, 1972


Study Area Name (Present Park Name)	Study Area Acreage
New Areas:
Aniakchak Crater (Aniakchak NM)	279,914
Chukchi (none)	68,400
Gates of the Arctic (Gates of the Arctic NP & Pres)	11,323,118
Great Kobuk Sand Dunes (Kobuk Valley NP)	302,729
Imuruk Lava Field (Bering Land Bridge NPres)	209,182
Lake Clark Pass (Lake Clark NP & Pres)	3,265,036
Mount Veniaminof (none)	562,386
Noatak River (Noatak NPres)	9,003,000
Nogabahara Sand Dunes (none)	91,244
Saint Elias — Chugach (Wrangell-St. Elias NP & Pres)	8,318,778
Tanana Hills (Yukon-Charley Rivers NPres)	1,779,210
Additions to Existing Park Units:
Katmai National Monument	1,218,490
Mount McKinley National Park	4,019,251

On March 15, 1972, Interior Secretary Rogers C. B. Morton made the preliminary withdrawal of d-2 lands. (See Table 4-1 at right.) They comprised the following areas (names in italics are of present park units).

The combined acreage of the twelve proposed new units and two park additions totaled some 45 million acres. Significantly, the NPS made no provision, during this initial withdrawal, for land that would later be included in either Kenai Fjords National Park or Cape Krusenstern National Monument, and the initial withdrawal also failed to include any additions to Glacier Bay National Monument. [23]

In May 1972, just a few weeks after Morton's withdrawal, NPS Assistant Director Ted Swem brought a contingent of NPS planners to Alaska, and for the next several months the team fanned out across the state and did what it could to gather information about these and other potential parklands. NPS staff also worked with other Interior Department agencies to coordinate the land withdrawal process. [24] On September 13, Interior Secretary Morton issued his final 80,000,000-acre land withdrawal, which included 41.7 million acres for new or expanded NPS units. During the six-month study period, the NPS dropped several areas and added new ones, so that the September withdrawal areas largely approximated the areas—at least in name—that Congress adopted several years later.

Once the withdrawal process was completed, the NPS and the other land management agencies had another major ANCSA-imposed deadline to meet: the completion, by mid-December 1973, of master plans and draft environmental impact statements for each of the proposed national interest lands units. In response to that mandate, these agencies began to intensively study the areas that they had selected; they studied each unit's wildlife and fisheries, inventoried cultural resources, assessed interpretive themes and tourist potential, local and area transportation patterns, and performed other research tasks intended to demonstrate the suitability of these areas to Congress and the public.

As part of that information gathering effort, these agencies responded to the data they gathered by increasing or decreasing the size of the various proposed units; and in response to conflicts between these agencies, the total acreage assigned to each agency's withdrawals changed as well. This fine-tuning took place during various increments between late 1972 and late 1973, and it continued throughout the following year during the agencies' preparation of final environmental statements for each of the various proposed units. Table 4-2 on the facing page shows the extent to which unit acreages changed during this period.

# - The various final environmental statements were issued between November 1974 and February 1975; January 1975 was chosen as a midpoint during the publication process.

^ - In Dec. 1973, Chukchi-Imuruk National Wildlands was a joint proposal between NPS and the Bureau of Sport Fisheries and Wildlife (BSF&W), but by January 1975 the unit proposal was for Chukchi-Imuruk National Reserve, to be administered by the NPS.

* Proposals called for the Noatak National Ecological Reserve (in Dec. 1973) and the Noatak National Arctic Range (in Jan. 1975) to be jointly managed by the BSF&W and the Bureau of Land Management. It is included here because of Noatak's eventual inclusion as an NPS unit.

@ - In December 1973, the Wrangell-St. Elias area was divided into a Wrangell-St. Elias National Park (NPS, 8,640,000 acres) and the Wrangell Mountain National Forest (USFS, 4,560,000 acres); by January 1975, the acreage of the NPS area was still 8,640,000 acres while the USFS area had risen to 5,500,000 acres.

Driven by the promise of vast new additions to its system, [27] National Park Service leaders in the wake of ANCSA's passage began their planning effort, hoping in the process to maximize the number of acres in new or expanded park units—provided, of course, that the resources included in those areas were of sufficient caliber to warrant NPS designation. Subsistence values were a secondary consideration. Agency planners, recognizing ANCSA's generous land conveyance provisions, took care to avoid including village sites in the various proposed park units. Beyond that consideration, however, they had no compunction about including subsistence use areas within the various proposed units. Never, either at this early stage or at any other time in the proposal process, did any NPS official propose redrawing proposed boundary lines in order to exclude subsistence users. As historian Frank Williss has noted, the NPS's new approach—of preserving large ecosystems as a primary goal rather than providing for recreational and developmental needs within the parks—was one witnessed, to some extent, throughout the National Park System. Because of the acreages involved, however, the tilt toward preservation (combined, simultaneously, with a concern for the protection of traditional land uses) was more pronounced in Alaska than elsewhere. [28]

At the time of ANCSA's passage, subsistence activities had been taking place throughout Alaska for hundreds if not thousands of years. Urban as well as rural residents harvested subsistence resources; both Natives and non-Natives participated in a subsistence lifestyle. Some depended on subsistence resources more than others; a subsistence-based lifestyle remained healthy and strong in many areas, while in several areas subsistence activities were becoming less important. [29] But NPS planners, along with other federal officials, were only vaguely cognizant of these and other essential facts about Alaska's subsistence lifestyle. (The initial definition of subsistence, according to one early planner, was "timber and game for local use.") [30] NPS officials, as a consequence, commenced the park proposal process relying more on preconception and supposition than on hard, verifiable data. It is not surprising, therefore, that the agency's initial subsistence-related proposals were dramatically transformed during the planning process that preceded the passage of Alaska lands legislation.

The NPS made its first public utterance about subsistence activities in the proposed parks in July 1972, when it issued a short report documenting values and issues related to its various proposed units (as listed in the March 1972 preliminary withdrawals). This report, which paved the way for the revised recommendations that Secretary Morton issued two months later, expressly condoned the legitimacy of the Alaska Native cultures when it stated that

The report was less specific about overtly condoning the legitimacy of subsistence uses. It did, however, briefly describe subsistence activities (including harvesting areas and species hunted) for the various proposed park units. Seen from a historical perspective, the report's approach to subsistence appears unpolished—there are several references to "subsistency" hunting and fishing—but because virtually no subsistence data existed that pertained to the national interest lands, the newly-obtained information proved highly valuable. [32] Significantly, subsistence uses as described in the report seem to apply only to Alaska Natives. One shortcoming of the report was its failure to mention any human uses in the proposed Aniakchak Crater unit. (This omission was corrected in subsequent reports.) In addition, the report noted that in the proposed Katmai extension, "many of [the] animals [in the proposed unit] have never been hunted by man and know little fear of him;" and regarding the proposed Kenai Fjords unit, the report noted that human use "tends to be extremely light, with fishermen being the most numerous public intruders." These notes, brief as they were, may have set a precedent because the Alaska Lands Act, as passed in 1980, did not authorize subsistence activities either in Kenai Fjords National Park or in the newly-expanded portions of Katmai National Park. [33]

Shortly after the release of the July 1972 park proposal document, state and federal authorities settled a legal matter in a way that had far-reaching ramifications on the future of Alaska subsistence. The conflict was over land claims. The previous January, the State of Alaska—which had been unable to file any claims during the years preceding ANCSA's passage—had filed for 77,000,000 acres under the Statehood Act. Two months later, however, confrontation arose when Interior Secretary Morton made his initial 80,000,000-acre national interest lands withdrawal. A month later, the state sued over the legality of some 42,000,000 acres that had been claimed by both governments. The land-claims conflict, if allowed to fester, threatened to derail the national interest lands planning process, but on September 2, the state announced that it had agreed to drop its lawsuit and its claim to the contested acreage. In return for that action, however, the state was allowed to select large blocks of national interest lands that had been part of the Gates of the Arctic and Mount McKinley park proposals. In addition, the state extracted a crucial concession: that some 124,000 acres of land in the Aniakchak Crater proposal area would be open to sport hunting. [34] Before long, NPS and Congressional authorities recognized that lands in other proposed park units also needed to provide for sport hunting; and as noted below, Congressional approval of the first two NPS-administered "national preserves" in October 1974 created a classification under which sport hunting could be authorized. The September 2, 1972 agreement, in short, proved to be the wedge that, years later, resulted in 19,000,000 acres of national preserves in Alaska.

Between September 1972 and December 1973, as noted above, a primary purpose of the NPS's Alaska Task Force was the further investigation of the various proposed park units, and the fruits of that investigation were encapsulated in various master plans and draft environmental impact statements (DEISs). To a large extent, the NPS forged its subsistence policy during that time. (Most of this was ad hoc policymaking, although Bob Belous of the NPS, in November 1973, completed an interim report on subsistence use in the proposed parklands at the behest of Assistant NPS Director Ted Swem and Alaska Task Force Director Al Henson. [35]) Most if not all of the documents produced in December 1973 included a separate section discussing subsistence, and the subsistence recommendations emanating from these documents are a logical outcome of those discussions.

Most of these recommendations were surprisingly consistent with one another. In statements that presaged the possibilities for both cultural change and ecological degradation, the various DEISs and master plans typically made the following recommendation:

In a notable departure from the implications suggested in the July 1972 document, all of the units proposed to be added to the National Park System, including Kenai Fjords and the Katmai extension, included provisions for subsistence within their DEISs. Another notable change was that race was no longer a factor in determining subsistence eligibility. [37] But clouding the picture was the fact that many subsistence users would be competing with others for the available resources. This was because the proposals for six of the nine new NPS areas—Aniakchak Caldera, Chukchi-Imuruk, Gates of the Arctic, Lake Clark, Wrangell-St. Elias, and Yukon-Charley—allowed sport hunting to continue. This state of affairs was doubtless spurred by pressure from hunting groups and was a logical outgrowth of the September 1972 decision that had ensured the continuation of sport hunting in portions of the Aniakchak proposal. [38]

Particular attention was paid to subsistence at five of the proposed parks. In the Wrangell-St. Elias National Park proposal document, an extended discussion on the subject detailed differences between subsistence and sport harvests, and it also included several harvest tables that had been prepared by a resource management team from the Joint Federal-State Land Use Planning Commission. [39] At Kobuk Valley, a primary purpose of the NPS proposal was "to foster the continuation of the Alaska Eskimo culture by providing for traditional resources uses, such as hunting, fishing, and gathering, provided such uses are consistent with the preservation of primary resource values." To accomplish that goal, the agency proposed that the monument be closed to sport hunting, and perhaps to justify the proposed hunting ban, the draft EIS provided an extensive discussion of the Eskimos' strong dependence on subsistence harvests for their food intake. [40] Noatak, similar to Kobuk Valley, was singled out as an area where subsistence activities were a central aspect of the proposal. Stating that "the Noatak Valley represents the largest undeveloped and pristine river valley in the United States ... best characterized as a vast primitive expanse by virtue of low human numbers, scant development, outstanding scenery, and concentrations of wildlife," the draft EIS concluded that the Noatak and adjacent Squirrel River basins were "of significant value as natural, undisturbed laboratories," in large part because "such areas are practically nonexistent in the conterminous United States, and are becoming increasingly rare worldwide." Based on that premise, a primary purpose of the so-called Noatak National Ecological Range—to be jointly managed by the Bureau of Land Management and the Bureau of Sport Fisheries and Wildlife—was "to continue to make available renewable natural resources for subsistence uses, and to protect and conserve these resources for all Americans." As with the Kobuk Valley proposal, the Noatak document provided extensive data to demonstrate area residents' dependence on locally available fish, game, and other food sources. [41] A fourth proposal in which subsistence values were emphasized was the Chukchi-Imuruk National Wildlands document. A primary purpose of this unit, which was to be co-managed by the the NPS and the Bureau of Sport Fisheries and Wildlife, was the "interpretation of the ecological, geological, cultural, and scenic features and processes of the area, with emphasis on developing understanding and respect for an alternative cultural system as exemplified by the present day American Eskimo culture." [42]

A final proposal in which extensive attention was paid to subsistence lifeways and resources was at Gates of the Arctic. Of particular interest at the proposed park were the Nunamiut people—so-called mountain Eskimos—who resided at Anaktuvuk Pass. As historian Ted Catton has explained in remarkable detail, these villagers were historically anomalous to other northern Alaskan residents in that they were inland, nomadic people whose diet and lifestyle revolved around caribou and their migrations. By 1900, however, most of the Nunamiut had moved to the Arctic coast, and by 1920 the mountains were probably entirely deserted. (So-called "push factors"—namely, a crash in the caribou population—were the primary cause of the migration, but the "pull factors" of whaling ships, trading posts, and mission schools along the Arctic coast may have also played a role.) During their tenure along the coast many Nunamiut learned English, adopted Christianity, and absorbed other aspects of American culture. But the lure of the mountains (and a rebound in the caribou population) caused the group to migrate seasonally away from the coast, and after 1939 they gave up traveling to the coast altogether. In 1943, a Nunamiut group was "discovered" by pilot Sigurd Wien at the north end of Chandler Lake; two years later, a USGS surveyor witnessed a Nunamiut caribou hunt. [43]

In 1949, the Nunamiut—five families from Chandler Lake, followed by eight families from the Killik River—moved to a plateau at the headwaters of the John River and founded the village of Anaktuvuk Pass; before long a school, airstrip, and church were established at the site. [44] The Nunamiut, like other Native peoples, welcomed these and other trappings of modern civilization. Non-Natives who encountered them, however, were mesmerized by the more traditional aspects of culture that they represented. Located in the isolated wilderness of northern Alaska, and carrying on many traditions that had remained unchanged for hundreds of years, those who visited—and wrote about—the Nunamiut identified this so-called "lost tribe" as being uniquely "ancient," "Stone Age," and "timeless." This distinction, whether it was accurate or not, was shared by anthropologists, government planners, and other observers, and it fit neatly into the widely-held notion—largely promulgated by conservationist Robert Marshall—that the central Brooks Range was the "ultimate" or "last great wilderness." [45] A series of anthropologists, drawn to Anaktuvuk Pass, were so enamored by what they saw that they encouraged the Nunamiut to value their primitiveness. The villagers responded to these visits amicably enough; even so, they marched ahead and—to the dismay of many—acquired new technology as the occasion demanded. By doing so, they lost much of their charm in the perception of non-Natives, many of whom were ardent wilderness enthusiasts. The Nunamiut, sensitive to these changing attitudes, soon began to feel that they were being treated as intruders in their own homeland. [46]

It was in the midst of this process—in which outsiders' admiration of the Nunamiut's traditional lifestyle was being tempered by the invasion of new technology—that the NPS began considering a parkland in the central Brooks Range. The agency, at the behest of Interior Secretary Stewart Udall, had first considered the area as a park unit back in 1962, when he had sponsored the visitation of a film crew to the Arrigetch Peaks area. Political sensitivities forced Udall to leave that film footage on the proverbial cutting room floor, and the park idea was shelved for the time being. [47] Then, in June 1968, an NPS team again reconnoitered the area. (During that visit, planner Merrill Mattes acidly noted that Anaktuvuk Pass was "not exactly Shangri-La.") The report resulting from that visit recommended a 4.1 million-acre, two-unit Gates of the Arctic National Park; the two units of that park, perhaps in deference to the Nunamiut presence, were drawn well away from Anaktuvuk Pass and the John River valley. That park proposal, along with proposals pertaining to Mount McKinley National Park, Katmai National Monument and four non-Alaska park areas, were forwarded to Interior Secretary Stewart Udall in a package that became known as "Project P." This package, which was forwarded to President Lyndon Johnson in January 1969—in the last few days before Richard Nixon was inaugurated—proved controversial. As a result—and several reasons have been speculated behind his action—Johnson signed proclamations pertaining to only three of the seven park proposals. Of the Alaska proposals, Johnson agreed to sign only the Katmai expansion proclamation; left unsigned were proclamations to create Gates of the Arctic National Monument, along with a proposed 2.2 million-acre expansion to Mount McKinley National Park. [48]

No sooner had the monument proposal been rejected than progress—in the form of a winter haul road—thrust its way up the John River Valley and through Anaktuvuk Pass. The road, dubbed the "Hickel Highway," was carved out during the midwinter months of 1968-69, and for six weeks after its completion large trucks roared through the village. A similar scenario repeated itself for a few weeks the following winter. [49] Then, in December 1971, came ANCSA's passage, and with it came the legal right for newly organized regional and village corporations to select land in and around Anaktuvuk Pass. [50]

It was in the atmosphere of these changes that the NPS resurrected its Gates of the Arctic park proposal. At first, NPS planners (who were hired in May 1972) paid little attention to the area's Native populations. The July 1972 proposal boundaries, for example, stayed more than 12 miles away from Anaktuvuk Pass, and the brief report on the park proposal merely noted that "caribou and moose are hunted mainly for subsistence by local people, many of whom depend upon the game for most of their food." [51]

Shortly after the issuance of that report, Native interests began to recognize that the National Park Service might well be an ally in their cause. Anticipating (or perhaps hoping) that the NPS would protect their subsistence resources, the Nunamiut Corporation (the newly-established village corporation for Anaktuvuk Pass) and the Arctic Slope Regional Corporation (the regional corporation encompassing the village) began to entertain the idea of a permanent dual-ownership arrangement. Sensing common ground with the NPS, Native officials formalized this idea on April 23, 1973, when ASRC's president testified before the Joint Federal-State Land Use Planning Commission that the Inupiat Eskimos were in favor of a Nunamiut National Park that would be cooperatively managed by the NPS and the Eskimos. This bold action was the first proposal of its kind in Alaska. [52]

In response to the ASRC proposal, NPS planner John Kauffmann began discussing with the Nunamiut just how such a park plan might jibe with the agency's own proposals. What emerged from those discussions was a proposal, issued in December 1973, for a tripartite park unit. The eastern and western thirds of the central Brooks Range would be designated the Gates of the Arctic Wilderness Park; in this 7,130,000 acre area, which the NPS would manage, subsistence hunting by Natives would be permitted, but non-Native sportsmen would be limited to "fair-chase hunting." (The fair-chase concept, hearkening back to the methods practiced by elite sportsmen decades earlier, suggested a minimum ten-day stay in the wilderness and a lack of dependence on radio and other communications.) Sandwiched between the two units of the wilderness park, an area called the Nunamiut National Wildlands was proposed. In that 2,390,000-acre expanse, which included Anaktuvuk Pass and adjacent areas, management would be largely similar to that of the wilderness park. In the wildlands, however, subsistence hunting would take priority over sport hunting, and the NPS, the Nunamiut Corporation, and the ASRC would cooperatively manage the area. Ironically, the continuation of subsistence activities was not an expressly stated purpose of either the wilderness park or the wildlands proposal; instead, the wildlands proposal was more generic. It stated that a primary purpose would be "to assure that the outstanding cultural, natural, and recreational resources in the area are managed in a manner which will perpetuate the resource values for public use and benefit." [53]

The NPS, at both the local and national levels, and the various Native parties were all in full agreement with the proposal as outlined above. But the Federal government's Office of Management and Budget (OMB) was not. On December 16, 1973—just one day before the Interior Secretary's deadline to forward this and the other park proposals to Congress—the OMB rejected the National Wildlands concept, which was to have been applied to both the Nunamiut and Chukchi-Imuruk proposals. As noted in an errata sheet that was stapled to the front of each draft EIS, the OMB explained that the national park system should not be encumbered with new area designations. Much to the chagrin of Interior Department officials, the OMB refused to countenance proposals in which the NPS shared its management authority with non-Federal parties (in the Nunamiut case) or with other Federal agencies (in the Chukchi-Imuruk case). In the Nunamiut case, OMB was willing to allow a cooperative agreement issued by the Interior Secretary allowing a Native corporation "mutually compatible administration" of park lands; in the Chukchi-Imuruk case, Interior Department officials reacted to OMB's dictum by declaring that the NPS would administer the area. [54]

As noted above, the period between September 1972 and December 1973 witnessed a huge increase of NPS knowledge about land use activities on lands being proposed for inclusion in park units, and the issuance of the various DEISs in December 1973 reflected the agency's increasing sophistication toward subsistence matters. The various DEISs, by proposing the continuation of subsistence activities in all of the proposed park units, clearly showed that the NPS was sensitive to the needs of both Native and non-Native subsistence users. (See Table 4-3, opposite page.) The Federal government, moreover, openly advocated subsistence as a core value in two proposed park units (Kobuk Valley and Noatak [55]), and in the Gates of the Arctic proposal, the NPS supported a unit—the Nunamiut National Wildlands—that would be jointly managed with two Native corporations. The OMB's rejection of the latter proposal tempered the agency's future actions toward that park proposal, but it in no way diminished the agency's philosophical attitudes toward the value of subsistence in that area. The NPS, quite apparently, had a special recognition toward subsistence values in the proposed northern-tier parks: Gates of the Arctic, Noatak, Kobuk Valley, Cape Krusenstern, and Chukchi-Imuruk. As former employee Bob Belous noted, the agency had no intention of downplaying the significance of subsistence activities in the other proposed park areas. Subsistence in the northern tier parks, however, "was more susceptible to publicity," and the photographs and descriptions that emanated from the various NPS proposal documents for these park units often highlighted Natives, Native harvesting, and Native craft items. [56]

Table 4-3. Subsistence Eligibility in the Proposed Alaska Parklands, 1973-1980

Note: The above chart covers subsistence uses on proposed new lands only. Several of the units noted above, at various times during the proposal process, had both parks (or monuments) and preserves. In those cases, the above use decisions pertain only to the proposed parks or monuments; in all of the adjacent preserves, subsistence uses are allowed. The names given for the proposed park units are those in the final (Dec. 1980) bill; other names, as noted elsewhere, were often used in the various environmental statements or draft legislative bills.

Document Identification:
DEIS = Draft Environmental Impact Statement; FES = Final Environmental Statement; HR 39 = House Bill 39; 10/77a = 10/12/77 Committee Print #1; 10/77b = 10/28/77 Committee Print #2; S 9 = Senate Bill 9, Proc. = Presidential Proclamation; Law = Alaska National Interest Lands Conservation Act, signed 12/2/80.

Symbols on Chart:
Y = subsistence is sanctioned
N = subsistence is prohibited
Y(t) = subsistence is sanctioned "where such uses are traditional"
Y* = subsistence is sanctioned, and additional measures are proposed to protect subsistence values
Y = subsistence is a purpose of the proposed parkland
Y = "protecting the viability of subsistence resources" is a purpose of the proposed parkland
(Y) = subsistence is sanctioned by virtue of its status as a proposed national preserve
Y! = subsistence is sanctioned only on the proposed North Addition
@ = Alagnak Wild River was in an "area of environmental concern" near the proposed Katmai National Park in 1973 and 1975. In the 95th Congress, the House continued to treat the Alagnak as part of a proposed Katmai addition. But S 9, in Oct. 1978, gave it separate treatment, and bills in the 96th Congress did the same.

After NPS planners, as part of their work with the Alaska Task Force, turned in their recommendations about proposed park units to Congress in December 1973, the focus of the park planning process officially moved from the executive to the legislative branch. Congress, however, showed little interest in the matter; as Frank Williss has noted, "Neither the Nixon nor the Ford administrations showed any inclination to work for passage of the bill in 1974 or subsequent years." NPS staff, however, remained active on the issue. The agency continued to carry on an intensive effort to gather data that would be available as Congress deliberated the measure; much of that activity, at least initially, was directed toward the preparation of final environmental statements for the various proposed park units. [57]

During the preparation of the draft and final environmental documents, NPS personnel were active in other spheres that dealt with subsistence uses and Native relationships in Alaska. One focus of activity was a renewed spotlight on the Native Alaskan heritage center idea. As noted in Chapter 3, an NPS planning team in 1968 had recommended the establishment of at least three Alaska Native cultural centers: that is, easily-accessible sites where both visitors and Alaska residents could learn about Native Alaskans and their lifeways. That idea had not emerged from the proposal stage, but within a year of the passage of ANCSA in late 1971 the idea of a series of heritage centers that would "collect, document, and preserve local artifacts and ... display them in a meaningful, organized manner" was presented in a NPS report. [58]

The report, which compiled both Native and non-Native ideas related to the topic, shied away from specific recommendations. Instead, the report suggested a range of alternatives: one or more state centers (primarily for tourists) that would represent all Alaska Natives, one or more regional centers (for both tourists and Natives) that would be located in each regional corporation's geographical boundaries, and a series of village centers (primarily for villagers) that would "provide communal focal points ... so important to village social life and necessary for village cohesiveness." The NPS, for its part, offered technical and organizational capabilities; it also offered staff that might assist with the design and implementation process (although the agency "should not primarily serve as the final producer of working plans"). The agency even suggested a series of pilot projects and a list of regional corporations that might logically adopt those projects. It did not, however, offer major funding for such centers; money to build and maintain these facilities would need to come either from grant programs of private organizations and foundations or from the regional corporations themselves. [59]

So far as is known, this report did not result in any immediate action toward implementing heritage centers in Alaska. The concepts presented in the report, however, did not winnow away. During the 1970s, several entities considered the idea, but the idea remained in the conceptual stage until after the passage of the Alaska Lands Act. In 1987, momentum finally began to build when various Native organizations founded a group dedicated to planning and constructing such a center. That group surmounted numerous obstacles in its quest. By the summer of 1994 they had obtained a 26-acre parcel, and on May 8, 1999 the Alaska Native Heritage Center opened to the public. The site has been open on a year-round basis ever since. A detailed account of the process that resulted in the center is noted below. [60]

Throughout this period, NPS officials were dealing with ongoing issues relative to allowable activities within the existing parklands. As Chapters 2 and 3 have suggested, subsistence uses at Mount McKinley National Park and Katmai National Monument were not an issue; regulations at these and most other U.S. park units prohibited hunting, subsistence fishing, trapping, and other consumptive uses. At Glacier Bay National Monument, however, the agency's official prohibitions were tempered by the recognition that harbor seal harvesting, berry picking, and other subsistence activities had long been practiced by Tlingits residing in nearby Hoonah. In recognition of that fact the Interior Department had adopted, with some misgivings, a laissez-faire attitude; NPS Director Arno Cammerer, in 1939, had noted that the agency had "no intention of making any sudden changes in the uses which the Indians have been accustomed to make of the monument area," and in December 1946 that attitude was reflected in an agreement forged in Washington between the Bureau of Indian Affairs and the NPS. [61] That agreement, again with some misgivings, was renewed in 1954, 1956, 1958, and 1960. But the March 1964 discovery by NPS rangers of scores of Native-killed harbor seal carcasses forced the agency to rethink its previous position in the matter. The recognition that at least some Hoonahs were harvesting seals for commercial purposes, and the inability to legally separate the few market hunters from others who made only occasional use of the monument's subsistence uses, caused some park officials to conclude that there was no easy way to sanction Native seal hunting without jeopardizing the monument's resources. [62]

Park officials, at the suggestion of the agency's Washington hierarchy, decided to let the seal problem subside, and the agency tried its best to ignore the problem for the remainder of the decade. The Alaska Native Claims Settlement Act, with its multitudinous provisions, had the potential to address this problem. But as noted above, the Act did not contain a provision protecting Native people's historic uses of public lands for subsistence purposes, and a solution to Glacier Bay's subsistence dilemma remained unsolved. [63] But less than a year later, on October 21, 1972, President Nixon signed the Marine Mammal Protection Act into law. The law's primary thrust was the prohibition of marine mammal harvesting. Specifically excluded from the prohibition, however, was "any Indian, Aleut, or Eskimo who dwells on the coast of the North Pacific Ocean or the Arctic Ocean." The Act condoned subsistence harvesting, and it also allowed a limited commercial use of the harvested animals. But it did not allow these Natives to engage in a blatant commercial harvest, nor did it allow marine mammal harvests to be "accomplished in a wasteful manner." [64]

Feeling empowered by provisions in the Act, Glacier Bay Superintendent Robert Howe wrote to his superior, Alaska State Director Stanley T. Albright. In that letter, written just five days after the Act's passage, he asked for authority to terminate harbor seal harvesting in the monument. Howe noted that "We truly believe that seal hunting in Glacier Bay is neither legal nor longer necessary. In fact, considering the new national legislation it might be illegal anywhere when 'hide hunting' is the end result." Three weeks later, Albright telephoned Howe and asked him to inform Hoonah's residents that their harvesting privileges in the monument had been terminated. Whether he immediately did so is uncertain, and the first documented communication on the matter between the NPS and Hoonah residents did not take place until January 1974, when the monument's chief ranger telephoned Hoonah's mayor, Frank See, and told him about the hunting prohibition. The agency never put the rule against Native hunting in writing, nor did it ever hold a public meeting on the subject. But perhaps because the mayor and other Hoonah residents were in the midst of other matters that were just as critical to the community—if not more so—agency officials received no protests regarding the hunting ban. Beginning in 1974, therefore, the NPS maintained an official prohibition against Native hunting in Glacier Bay. [65]

After the NPS and other Federal land management agencies, as required by the ANCSA timetable, turned in the various draft EISs and master plans for the proposed conservation areas in December 1973, emphasis turned toward the preparation of a series of final environmental statements (FESs). To a large extent, changes in the EISs would be based on the tenor of public comment. In addition, however, the gathering and analysis of new data by agency staff brought more changes. As in the rest of the Alaska planning effort, there was little time to lose; final documents which incorporated both the additional field work and the heavy volume of public participation had to be completed and published in little more than a year. [66]

In order to prepare the various final environmental statements, NPS personnel fanned out across the state during the summer of 1974. The preparation of the FESs took place that fall. They were completed and distributed to the public between December 1974 and February 1975.

In their approach to subsistence, the recommendations in the various FESs were even more far-reaching than those in the December 1973 draft EISs. All proposed NPS units, for example, were still open to valid subsistence uses. As in the various draft documents, almost all of the final environmental statements issued the following boilerplate statement, which was similar to (though more specific than) language in the December 1973 documents:

Additional subsistence-related proposals were also offered. Most of the proposals for NPS-administered units—in fact, all but the Gates of the Arctic and Yukon-Charley proposals—included proposed park purposes that related to either Native subsistence activities or other Native activities. [68] The two strongest of these statements were at Cape Krusenstern, where the NPS promised "to encourage and assist in every way possible the preservation and interpretation of present-day Native cultures," and at Kobuk Valley, where the agency stated its intention "to foster the continuation of the Alaska Eskimo culture by providing for traditional resource uses, such as hunting, fishing, and gathering, provided such uses are consistent with the preservation of primary resources values." [69] Three proposed park units—Aniakchak, Harding Icefield-Kenai Fjords, and Lake Clark—had as a purpose "to provide for Native involvement in ongoing monument operations, research, and the provision of visitor services" [70] Both the Katmai and the Lake Clark proposals included language, in their park purposes, calling upon the agency "to encourage and foster cooperative agreements between the NPS and Native groups [as well as with other entities] to help assure optimum use of the region's resources" [71] Still other park purposes were for "developing understanding and respect for ... the present-day American Eskimo culture" (for the Chukchi-Imuruk proposal) and "to insure that ... traditional Native lifestyles and subsistence uses are allowed to continue" (for the Harding Icefields-Kenai Fjords proposal). [72] Provisions pertaining to access were also offered. At Aniakchak, the agency promised to "work with Natives in providing for access to lands in the monument in which Natives have interests," and the Gates of the Arctic FES stated that "The Secretary [of the Interior] may authorize snowmobile use for subsistence purposes within the park." The Gates of the Arctic document, in addition, introduced the traditional use concept. "Traditional subsistence use of the park," it noted, "will be allowed to continue." The document later went on to define as traditional such activities as hunting, fishing, trapping, and fuel gathering. [73]

A key element in the preparation of the various FESs was the growing expertise about the proposed parks by NPS staff. Some of these employees specialized in particular themes—geology or zoology, for example—but others immersed themselves in the study of particular clusters of park units. This expertise had begun back in the spring of 1972, when the agency had decided to organize four study teams to collect information for the various proposed park units. The initial captains of these study teams, chosen in May of that year, were John Kauffmann, Paul Fritz, Urban Rogers, and John Reynolds; in addition, the agency assigned Zorro Bradley to head a fifth team that would study historical and archeological areas and provide cultural resource assistance to the other four teams. [74] During the preparation of the draft and final EISs the personnel heading the study teams changed; Paul Fritz and Urban Rogers, for instance, were replaced by Gerald Wright and Fred Eubanks, respectively. Beginning in early 1975, however, the level of park expertise dramatically increased when Director Gary Everhardt decided to add ten new professionals to the planning team. These "keymen," as they were called, were given the task of gathering and coordinating knowledge about individual park units. John Kauffmann, who since 1972 had been spearheading the agency's efforts for several proposed parks in northwestern Alaska, became the keyman for the Gates of the Arctic proposal, but most of the other keymen transferred to their new positions from the Denver Service Center. [75]

In addition to their park responsibilities, each of the keymen was assigned an additional collateral duty, and one high priority project in the latter category was the preparation of a subsistence policy statement. Robert Belous, the keyman for the Cape Krusenstern and Kobuk Valley proposals, had written an interim subsistence report back in November 1973; as a follow-up, he issued a Subsistence Policy for Proposed NPS Areas in Alaska, completed in September 1975. Belous then teamed up with Dr. T. Stell Newman, the keyman for the Chukchi-Imuruk proposal, and in April 1976 the two completed a Draft Secretarial Policy: Subsistence Uses of New National Park Service Areas in Alaska. Newman wrote a final subsistence policy document, The National Park Service and Subsistence: A Summary, which was issued in November 1977. [76] The 1976 draft policy was "widely circulated in Alaska for public comment" (according to language in the 1977 study), and the comments generated in response to that draft helped mold the Secretary of the Interior's position on subsistence when he submitted the Department's proposals to Congress in September 1977. In prefatory remarks for the 1977 study, Newman noted that in order to gain a "better understanding of this unique lifestyle," the NPS had conducted "over ten man-years of professional anthropological research ... on the nature of subsistence in the proposed parklands." [77]

As historian Bill Brown has noted, a major source of philosophical guidance for agency officials during this period was ecologist Raymond Dasmann and his concept of the "future primitive." Dasmann, in a seminal 1975 paper on the subject, noted that it was "a good time to reexamine the entire concept of national parks and all equivalent protected areas." "Is it not strange," he stated, that park managers the world over had "taken for granted that people and nature were somehow incompatible"? After suggesting that the world was divided into "ecosystem people" (that is, people who were members of "indigenous traditional cultures") and "biosphere people" (that is, "those who are tied in with the global technological civilization"), he noted that ecosystem people were institutionally fragile because they were dependent upon a single ecosystem for their survival. Historically, he noted, only biosphere people had created national parks. But because of a sharp rise in global development, ecosystem-based homelands were rapidly diminishing. Concerned about that trend, he urged that a profound change be instituted in how national parks should function. "National parks," he noted, "must not serve as a means for displacing the members of traditional societies who have always cared for the land and its biota." "Few anywhere would argue with the concept of national parks," he continued, "but many would argue with the way the concept has been applied—too often at the cost of displacement of traditional cultures, and nearly always with insufficient consideration for the practices and policies affecting the lands outside of the park." He therefore made several specific recommendations. First, "The rights of members of indigenous cultures to the lands they have traditionally occupied must be recognized, and any plans for establishing parks or reserves in these lands must be developed in consultation with, and in agreement with, the people involved." In addition, Dasmann urged that "wherever national parks are created, their protection needs to be coordinated with the people who occupy the surrounding lands. Those who are most affected by the presence of a national park must fully share in its benefits...." NPS officials recognized that their options were limited in the various long-established parklands of the Lower 48 states. In Alaska, however, the millions of acres being considered as new national parklands provided an excellent tableau where Dasmann's ideas might be manifested. [78]

G. Bryan Harry, who served as director of the NPS's Alaska Area Office from 1975 to 1978, called Belous a "gigantic philosophical champion of Natives in the national parks." NPS (AKSO)

All three of the documents that Belous and Newman produced from 1975 to 1977 were philosophically consistent with, and were logical extensions of, the recommendations that had been laid out in the draft and final EISs. The documents were unequivocal regarding the legitimacy of subsistence activities in the various proposed park units. The 1975 study, for example, noted that the NPS "recognizes that the continuance of such harvest of wild food and other biological resources from lands currently proposed as additions to the National Park System ... is an important opportunity for retaining an unbroken link with the Nation's cultural past." It further noted that

Portions of the 1975 draft policy, as noted above, suggested a preference for Native use. Other parts of that policy, however, backed off from that preference. Subsistence permits, for example, would be issued to "local residents who have demonstrated customary and consistent use of [Subsistence] Zones for the direct consumptive use of renewable resources at the time of enactment of ANCSA," a local resident being defined as "a Native or non-Native living in the vicinity of a Subsistence Zone and making consistent and customary use of the Zone for subsistence purposes." The 1976 and 1977 documents made clear that Natives and non-Natives would have equal access to subsistence resources; as noted in the 1976 report, "The need for subsistence resources is not the exclusive claim of Native people in Alaska.... This is consistent with the Alaska State Constitution which recognizes no racial priority but considers all citizens equal under the law." [79]

Other key areas of subsistence policy were first discussed and evaluated in these documents. The idea of a Subsistence Resource Council as a local management element first arose in the 1975 statement, as one leg in a "tripartite" arrangement that would also include the NPS and the Alaska Department of Fish and Game. The rationale that demanded the existence of a series of subsistence councils also brought about the insistence that subsistence resources be managed on a regional basis. The study noted that "Because of broad variations in subsistence use patterns and problems across the state ... each unit will be managed under a separate and distinct management plan with a local subsistence resource council representing each unit." Third, the agency made it clear that the proposed subsistence provisions, appropriate as they were, would pertain only to the Alaska parks. The 1976 study noted that because the allowance of subsistence principles comprised "a distinct departure from longstanding NPS management principles," it was therefore "imperative that such design and management departures ... are not to be a precedent for alteration of park system management for existing units in or outside the State of Alaska."

A final theme the various policy statements covered was the subsistence zone idea. The policy writers made it clear that subsistence, in the agency's opinion, was a modern as well as a traditional land use, and that "ancient aboriginal ways of life [should not] be artificially restored or preserved as a static remnant of the past through legislation or prohibition." But even though the agency had no intention of generally suppressing subsistence activities, it did conclude that subsistence uses should not be allowed throughout all of the proposed park units. As the 1976 document made clear,

The 1977 document reiterated the contrast in subsistence dependency; it noted that "Subsistence needs and practices vary widely across the state, from a major dependence in the northwestern Alaska proposals to scant dependence in most other proposed parklands." It also took the subsistence zone idea from the general to the specific; it contained maps outlining proposed subsistence zones for all but three of the proposed parks. No subsistence zone was planned for Aniakchak, either because data was unavailable or because subsistence use was deemed "slight," and subsistence zone maps were omitted for the Glacier Bay extensions and for the Noatak proposal because insufficient data was available to delineate an accurate use area.

Another activity that the NPS undertook during the 1974-1976 period—one that played a large role in delineating the various subsistence zones noted above—was the completion of a series of studies on subsistence use in the various proposed parks. As has been noted, virtually no data was available about subsistence use in the national interest lands prior to ANCSA, and park planners eagerly sought subsistence data to help guide the evolving legislative proposals. The preparation of these studies was entrusted to the University of Alaska's Cooperative Park Studies Unit, which had been established in 1972 to stimulate park-related research. One of CPSU's two subentities was the Anthropology and Historical Preservation Program, which was headed by Zorro Bradley, an NPS anthropologist and adjunct faculty member at the Fairbanks campus. [80]

During the first several years of the CPSU's existence, historical and cultural studies were largely overlooked. The program did, however, gain one key contact: a Hughes schoolteacher named G. Ray Bane. During the winter of 1973-74, Bane had told a friend that he and his wife, Barbara, planned a 1,400-mile dog-mushing trip. From Hughes, which was a Koyukon Athabaskan village, they would mush down river to Huslia; north to Shungnak, a Kobuk River Inupiat village; then on to Kotzebue, Wainwright (where he had previously taught), and Barrow. Zorro Bradley, having caught wind of the trip, asked Bane to send him a report of his observations along the way. The Banes took their trip, as planned, between February and May 1974, and while visiting Fairbanks shortly afterwards, Bane and Bradley discussed the idea of a subsistence study of Shungnak, which was just beyond the borders of the proposed Gates of the Arctic unit. As Bane later recalled, the NPS "needed to know Shungnak's land use patterns and how the reality of a park would change them." Bane's proposal was approved shortly afterward, and the couple moved that summer to Shungnak. The Banes were later joined by anthropologists Richard K. Nelson and Douglas Anderson. The three of them, along with several other researchers, pooled their efforts and emerged with a landmark document entitled Kuuvangmiit; Traditional Subsistence Living in the Latter Twentieth Century, which revealed the subsistence patterns of five Kobuk River Eskimo villages. [81]

Ray and Barbara Bane, who had resided in northern Alaska since the early 1960s, came to the attention of NPS officials shortly before they embarked on a 1974 dogsled trip. Ray later joined the agency, and for more than 20 years thereafter he was an important voice in the subsistence arena. George Wuerthner photo

In June 1975, the CPSU's cultural program became far more active when it commenced identifying and evaluating broadly-defined historical sites as defined in Section 14(h)(1) of the Alaska Native Claims Settlement Act. For the next fourteen months, a ten-person CPSU team inventoried more than 7,000 Alaskan historical sites. Once that task had been completed, team members started work on cultural studies related to specific proposed park units, and many of those studies focused on subsistence use patterns. Compiling those studies caused many CPSU researchers to make repeated visits to various villages surrounding the proposed park units; by their actions, they complemented the role of the agency's various "keymen." By 1977, a considerable body of subsistence data had been gathered; that data proved invaluable as hearing testimony when various Alaska lands proposals were being considered that year in the U.S. House of Representatives. By 1979, subsistence studies had been completed and published for the Aniakchak, Cape Krusenstern, Gates of the Arctic, Katmai, Lake Clark, Mount McKinley, Noatak, and Yukon-Charley proposals. [82]

One event during this period, significant as it was for the proposed parklands, took place thousands of miles from Alaska. On October 11, 1974, President Gerald R. Ford signed Congressional legislation that established the first two national preserves: Big Cypress in southern Florida and Big Thicket in eastern Texas. As historian Frank Williss has noted, the preserve concept allowed for hunting and other land uses, so long as those uses did not affect the preservation of the natural values for which the area was established. Prior to the signing of this bill, the only NPS-administered areas in which a diversity of land uses were allowed were the national recreation areas, which were popularly perceived to be limited to reservoir environments. But the bill's passage, coming as it did in the midst of the national interest lands planning process, suggested the possibility to future Congresses that national preserves—allowing any number of nontraditional uses—were a legislative option for the various Alaska park proposals. [83] Two years before President Ford signed the bill, the State of Alaska had convinced Interior Secretary Morton, as part of a larger agreement, to allow sport hunting in the coastal portion of the Aniakchak Crater proposal. The ramifications of this agreement had the potential to open additional national interest lands to sport hunting. [84] Many park supporters—from both inside and outside the agency—were "nervous about a park with hunting," according to one planner active in developing various park proposals. But as noted above, Interior Department planners in December 1973, lacking other alternatives, had decided to allow sport hunting in many park proposal documents. The preserve idea thus served as a way to segment the various park proposals based on historical levels of sport hunting activity; and in January 1976, NPS planners posited just such a division for the proposed Lake Clark unit. [85]

As noted in Chapter 1, Alaska Natives prior to the 1960s had made many attempts to acquire land for their own purposes. The Alaska Statehood Act, however, had set a process into motion that promised to usurp huge expanses of land that Natives had been using for subsistence purposes for time immemorial. But as a practical matter, rural Natives during this period (and rural non-Natives as well) had few conflicts from other users in their pursuit of subsistence fish and game resources. Rural users, moreover, benefited in 1960 by the institution of separate subsistence fishery regulations—brought about by the inclusion of Section 6(e) in the state constitution—for those who used gill nets, seine gear, and fish wheels. Both Natives and non-Natives, of course, used gill nets and seining equipment, but the creation of separate regulations for these gear types provided a modicum of protection to Native families who fished primarily for personal and family consumption. As to hunting, the state made no distinction in its regulations between subsistence and sport hunting.

Jay Hammond served as Alaska's governor from 1974 to 1982. He signed the state's first (1978) subsistence law; in many other ways, he oversaw the formulation of state subsistence policy, both before and after ANILCA's passage. ASL/PCA 213-4-16a

By the decade of the 1970s, however, conditions regarding hunting and fishing resources were clearly changing. The oil boom had brought both increased wealth to existing residents and a dramatic influx to Alaska of Outside residents, and fish and game populations in many rural areas began to be impacted for the first time. (The number of Alaska resident fish and game licenses, for example, "practically doubled" between 1965 and 1975.) There was a widespread recognition that unless regulatory steps were taken, subsistence resources would eventually be overwhelmed by sport and commercial users. [86] In response, both the Commissioner and the Board of Fish and Game, in 1973, issued a policy statement recognizing that subsistence use would be assigned the highest use priority. It noted that because of "culture, location, economic situation, or choice, large numbers of people will find it impossible to abandon or alter their [subsistence] way of life," and for those reasons, subsistence resources would thenceforth be allocated to users based on "cultures and customs, economic status, alternative resources, ... location and choice of life style." The Board of Fish and Game did not respond to that policy statement by enacting regulations or by otherwise implementing enforcement powers. [87] It did, however, begin to strengthen local fish and game advisory committees, who advised the Board and the Department on issues important to area hunters and fishers, by funding trips by advisory board chairs to Fish and Game Board meetings. [88]

In 1975, the conflict over subsistence reached a crisis point when the western Arctic caribou herd crashed. Many rural Native Alaskans, who were heavily dependent on the herd, were rocked by the crash; area villages, who had typically harvested around 20,000 animals per year, were forced to get by on a 3,000-animal harvest. The legislature, hoping to improve the villagers' plight, responded by passing HB 369, which for the first time authorized the Board of Game to regulate subsistence hunting as a separate activity and to create subsistence hunting areas. In 1976, the Game Board responded to the legislature's action by authorizing 3,000 harvest permits, to be distributed among hunters in Native villages; it also developed a three-tiered system for allocating access to hunting resources at times of scarcity. The three tiers, each tailored to increasing levels of scarcity, were 1) community access to alternative resources, 2) family income and resource dependence, and 3) individual ability to cope with the hardship. The Board of Fisheries and the Board of Game, trying to support rural sport hunters during the crisis, appeared less than enthusiastic in their general support of the subsistence lifestyle; a joint policy statement issued that year warned that "limitations on the productivity of fish and game must discourage continued increases in the numbers of subsistence type resource users." [89]

The state game board's decision to allot hunting resources, when scarce, to residents who lived closest to the available game angered a number of urban Alaskans, who felt that the resource should be equally available to everyone. In December 1976, therefore, the Tanana Valley Sportsmen's Association filed suit to annul that decision. That suit was successful. The state legislature, in reaction to the court decision, established a system for defining legitimate subsistence uses and users. The legislature made it clear that subsistence uses would have a preference over other consumptive uses, and it reiterated the Game Board's recently-established criteria to determine who would have access to harvest subsistence resources in times of scarcity. [90]

In 1976, the Board of Game first provided an opportunity for local residents to petition for subsistence hunting areas in order to encourage their adoption. The legislature also issued a finding about the subsistence use of wildlife. It stated that

In 1977, the U.S. Congress began actively pursuing legislation that would satisfy ANCSA's national interest lands provision—Section 17(d)(2). The Alaska legislature was fully aware that ANCSA had imposed a seven-year timetable for the implementation of national interest lands legislation. The legislature also concluded, somewhat begrudgingly, that it would need to pass its own subsistence law before Congress passed Alaska lands legislation. The need for such a law stemmed from two clauses: Section 6(e) in the Alaska Statehood Act (noted in Chapter 1), and language in ANCSA's conference committee report (noted earlier in this chapter). Because of those two clauses, the legislature was well aware that if it did not enact a "proposal for the adequate management of Alaska's fish and wildlife resources," the federal government would be authorized to manage fish and game resources on Alaska's national interest lands. Indeed, various working drafts of H.R. 39—the primary vehicle for Alaska lands legislation in the U.S. House of Representatives—clearly announced an impending federal takeover if the state failed to act. [92]

Nels Anderson, from Dillingham, served in the Alaska House of Representatives from 1975 through 1981 and was a major supporter of subsistence use protections. ASL/PCA 01-1919

In recognition of those factors, the 1977 Alaska legislature established an Interim Committee on Subsistence, which was chaired by Rep. Nels A. Anderson, Jr. (D-Dillingham). The eight-person committee (seven House members and one Senate member) was charged with collecting available data, conducting hearings, and gathering public testimony on the subsistence issue. In pursuit of that goal, the committee held thirteen hearings, in communities large and small, between August and December 1977. Those hearings, attended by some 500 people, helped formulate the basis for future legislation. [93]

In 1978, the Alaska State Legislature passed HB 960, a broadly applicable subsistence law. The law, which was signed by Governor Jay Hammond on July 12, became effective on October 10. It provided that "it is in the public interest to clearly establish subsistence use as a priority use of Alaska's fish and game resources and to recognize the needs, customs, and traditions of Alaskan residents." It also provided that whenever it was necessary to restrict the taking of fish and game, "subsistence use shall be the priority use." Subsistence uses, as defined in the law, meant

The legislature made it clear that race would play no role in determining access to subsistence resources. However, it sidestepped the delicate issue of just what constituted "customary and traditional uses" (so-called C&T uses) and it also failed to define who was qualified to be a subsistence user. [94] To help address these and other issues, the legislature as part of HB 960 established a "Section of Subsistence Hunting and Fishing" in the Department of Fish and Game. (The House Special Committee on Subsistence tried but failed to establish a full-fledged Division of Subsistence Hunting and Fishing.) For the next several years, the legislature had a Special Committee on Subsistence that served year-round in an oversight capacity. [95]

On November 2, 1976, Jimmy Carter defeated incumbent Gerald Ford in the U.S. presidential election. Throughout the Ford administration, Congress had shown little inclination to face the Alaska lands issue head-on. But with Carter's election, both the presidency and the Congress were controlled by Democrats, and with just two years remaining in the timetable set by ANCSA, Congress tried to solve Alaska's long-simmering national interest lands issue. On January 4, House Interior Committee chair Morris K. Udall submitted H.R. 39, a conservation-oriented Alaska lands bill; shortly afterward, bills reflecting numerous other philosophical positions were introduced in either the House or Senate. [96]

When the 95th Congress opened, much of the information available on the national interest land issue was contained in a series of environmental statements and master plans that the executive branch (i.e., the NPS and other agencies in either the Interior or Agriculture departments) had prepared several years previously. Those documents contained finely distilled recommendations regarding subsistence and a host of other lands issues. Lawmakers, however, were by no means obligated to follow the agencies' lead; and predictably, Congressional leaders showed a remarkable independence regarding how subsistence and other land issues should be legislated.

Two of the major Congressional supporters of Alaska subsistence rights were Morris Udall (left), head of the House Interior and Insular Affairs Committee, and John Seiberling, head of the House Subcommittee on General Oversight and Alaska Lands. ADN

Because of the lack of previous Congressional activity pertaining to this issue, the Udall bill was widely recognized as a work in progress and, as the Arizona Congressman himself said, the bill was "intended to establish a framework for legislative consideration on this important matter." It proposed more than 64,000,000 acres of national parklands, and the various park acreages in the Udall bill were significantly larger than those noted in the environmental documents that Interior Department staff had prepared several years earlier.

Udall prefaced his bill with a statement that emphasized the cultural aspects of the subsistence issue. In part, it reads as follows:

Several years later, at the conclusion of the Alaska lands battle, Udall again addressed the vision that he had hoped to see manifested in this bill. He noted that he, Rep. John Seiberling (D-Ohio), and Rep. Vonno L. Gudger, Jr. (D-N.C.), among others, had made a commitment to Alaska's Native people at the beginning of the 95th Congress. Specifically, they

The bill itself, a scant 29 pages long, made only a brief statement about subsistence. It made no specific suggestions regarding which proposed parks should allow subsistence. It did, however, imply that only a portion of each proposed park should be open to subsistence uses. Section 701(a) of the bill noted that

Section 101(a)(1) applied this concept more specifically to the 13.6 million-acre Gates of the Arctic park proposal by noting that no more than 2.5 million acres of the park could be included in a subsistence management zone. In addition to the zone concept, H.R. 39 discussed several additional subsistence ideas. It noted, for instance, that those eligible for subsistence activities in the proposed parks should be "people who exercise and who continue to exercise customary, consistent, and traditional use of subsistence resources in the national interest lands established by this Act, as of December 18, 1971, and their direct descendents." The bill clearly stated that subsistence was a priority use—Section 101(b) noted that "Subsistence uses of national interest lands will in all cases be given preference over any competing consumptive use in a subsistence management zone"—and based on that priority, it laid out a process for allotting subsistence resources in times of scarcity. At the same time, however, the bill's sponsors exhibited a certain wariness about the effect of subsistence uses on park resources, because one of the bill's provisions called for periodic reports to the Congress "on the effect of all hunting and fishing, including subsistence uses, on the flora and fauna within the lands included in this Act." A final concept it introduced was that of locally generated input into the regulatory process. The bill proposed the establishment of a series of ten-member "regulatory subsistence boards," one for each national interest lands unit. The purpose of each board was to "advise the Secretary or his designee on matters of concern to subsistence permittees" and to review and approve the various subsistence permit applications for that unit. [99]

Another major feature of Udall's bill was its sanction of the national preserve concept as applied to Alaska parklands. As noted above, the nation's first two national preserves (in Texas and Florida) had been signed into law in October 1974. In its various final environmental statements for the proposed Alaska park units, published just two or three months later, the administration had proposed no preserves. Udall's bill, however, proposed such a classification for Noatak, Yukon Charley Rivers, and the Chisana area. (The latter area was just north of Wrangell-St. Elias National Park.) H.R. 39 narrowly defined the preserve concept, as noted below:

The preserve concept, a necessary political compromise with sport hunting interests [101], would remain a staple of most future Congressional proposals pertaining to the Alaska lands issue.

Many Alaskans, and a broad spectrum of Outside development groups, found the Udall bill repugnant. To counter its recommendations, Alaska Senator Ted Stevens introduced S. 1787 on June 30. This bill, a product of discussions between the Alaska Congressional delegation, Governor Jay Hammond, and a lobbying group called the Citizens for Management of Alaska Lands, proposed setting aside some 75,000,000 acres in various management systems. Regarding subsistence recommendations, Stevens's bill was even more brief than Udall's. In a cursory overview of "Wildlife Management" (Section 4304), the bill asserted the primacy of state regulation, and it reiterated that in times of scarcity "subsistence purposes shall be given preference over the taking of fish and game for other purposes." [102]

To gauge public opinion regarding the evolving bills and to gather additional information, Rep. John Seiberling (D-Ohio), chair of the newly formed Subcommittee on General Oversight and Alaska Lands, sponsored a series of field hearings, both in Alaska and in five Outside locations, between April and September 1977. More than 2,300 people testified at those hearings; perhaps 1,000 of these were from Alaska, and included among them were a number of rural subsistence users. Supporters of a strong H.R. 39, as expected, overwhelmed opponents in the various Lower 48 hearings, but many were surprised to find that the Alaskans who testified were nearly evenly split on the issue. [103]

At one of the field hearings—held in Fairbanks in August 1977—Governor Hammond weighed in with the State of Alaska's position on subsistence. His four-page statement was of a general nature and elaborated on four basic tenets: 1) "subsistence habitat should be rationally protected on all lands, not just D-2 lands," 2) "the management must be unified, professional, not splintered and politicized," 3) "subsistence must be given priority on national interest lands, as it has been given priority in State law and policy on all lands of the State," and 4) "local people are demanding greater say in regulation of fish and game harvests in their areas and to the extent they can be accommodated ... this say should be provided." Hammond added that he hoped "to propose State legislation which could far better and less traumatically address the subsistence issue than alternatives before you." (His words proved prophetic; as noted in Section F above, the state's first subsistence law was enacted less than a year later.) But perhaps because there was no such law in 1977, Hammond hedged on the preference issue. He freely admitted to "the perception that state regulation has either favored urban hunters too much, or not favored rural hunters enough when the difficult allocation decisions were made," but he also testified that "a thorough review of recent fish and wildlife regulations [would] show scores of cases where the local rural user has been favored in regulation." He concluded by stating, "I would hope this Congress establishes the priority of subsistence uses where there is a conflict on national interest lands." [104]

The next major step in the legislative process took place on September 15, when Interior Secretary Cecil Andrus weighed in with the Department's recommendations in testimony before the House Interior and Insular Affairs Committee. Regarding subsistence, he reiterated Udall's proposal for subsistence management zones; these would be designated by the Interior Secretary and would be closed by that official, if necessary, should resources be in jeopardy. The state, however, would be responsible for managing, administering, and enforcing subsistence regulations. A strict non-racial subsistence policy would be adopted; to help determine eligible subsistence users, the state would be authorized to establish various local advisory committees. [105]

During the weeks that followed Andrus's testimony, staff working for the House Subcommittee on General Oversight and Alaska Lands substantially modified the original bill to incorporate both Interior Department testimony and the hundreds of comments that the public had contributed during the summer's field hearings. By October 12, the bill's Committee Print No. 1 was three times as long as the bill had been in January, and during the two weeks that followed, additional mark-up sessions lengthened the bill yet again. What emerged on October 28 was a 187-page version (called Committee Print No. 2) that bore little resemblance to Udall's initial bill. [106]

The two committee prints issued in October offered starkly contrasting subsistence provisions. The language of the January bill, which was unspecific yet vaguely limiting, was reflected in the October 12 committee print recommendations. The October 12 version of H.R. 39 authorized subsistence activities in just three proposed park units: Kobuk Valley, Cape Krusenstern, and Bering Land Bridge. In those units, subsistence was one of several park purposes, but in each case, subsistence was the last purpose listed. The following language was used in each case: "... and, in a manner consistent with the foregoing [i.e., the other park purposes], to provide opportunities for continued subsistence uses." But the October 28 committee print was dramatically different; it stated that the "continued viability of subsistence resources for continued subsistence users" [107] was a purpose of almost all of the proposed park units. With the odd exception of Aniakchak, subsistence was a sanctioned activity in every one of the newly-proposed park units, and the bill also provided the sanctioning of subsistence in Glacier Bay and Katmai additions as well as Mount McKinley's proposed north addition. [108]

The subsistence provisions of H.R. 39 became increasingly detailed as a result of the October staff-committee input. In the October 12 committee print, subsistence was just one of several topics in the bill's "General Administrative Provisions" title. But by October 28, subsistence had emerged as a standalone theme—Title VII—which contained twenty sections and occupied twenty-two pages of double-spaced text. Title VII in the October 28 committee print, for the first time, gave a detailed version of a proposed advisory committee structure that included an "Alaska Subsistence Management Council" as well as a series of regional and local subsistence boards. In addition, this version of H.R. 39 introduced the following concepts, all of which later became law: the idea of cooperative agreements between the Secretary and other organizations; the idea of federal enforcement, if state authorities failed to implement a subsistence priority; the ability of the Secretary to issue subsistence regulations; and the role of subsistence in the formulation of land use decisions. The bill's regional and local subsistence boards, however, differed from those in the present Alaska Lands Act in that they were based on regional and village Native corporation boundaries. This bill also differed from existing law in that it continued to promote the subsistence zone idea, as Udall's original bill had done. [109]

A key point under discussion in the subcommittee's negotiations was whether the federal or state government would manage the national interest lands' fish and game resources. Rep. Seiberling, who had attended many public hearings about H.R. 39 the previous summer, gave the following summary on the subject:

"Yesterday...a consensus title on subsistence was agreed to. I consider this to be one of the miracles of the day."

Rep. John Seiberling

Seiberling later went on to say that under the subcommittee's bill, "Alaska would be the only state in the Union with statutory recognition of its role in regulating hunting and fishing on Federal lands." [111] This system—management by the state, with Federal monitoring and oversight—characterized each of the bills that followed, although the specific role of the state and federal governments changed as Alaska lands legislation was debated and refined.

Little legislative action took place on either H.R. 39 or on other Alaska lands bills until January 1978, when the House Subcommittee on General Oversight and Alaska Lands began its consideration of the bill. Regarding subsistence, competing interests had strongly differing opinions about Title VII of Committee Print No. 2, but by January 30, many of those differences had been amicably resolved. As Rep. Seiberling noted a day later in the Congressional Record,

Don Young has represented Alaska in the U.S. House of Representatives since 1973. In that capacity, he was a strong voice in the creation of ANILCA in 1980 and in subsequent years has played a hand in many subsistence matters. Office of Rep. Don Young.

The subcommittee completed its work on H.R. 39 on February 7, and the newly-revised bill showed subtle but important differences from Committee Print No. 2. Subsistence, for example, was a proposed purpose in all of the new and expanded park units (Aniakchak included), but at Katmai, subsistence would be limited to the proposed Alagnak addition. As for Title VII, two new sections were added; one on limitations, another one proposing a reimbursement to the State of Alaska for costs—not to exceed $5,000,000 per fiscal year—"relating to the implementation of the State program." In addition, the structure for local participation was changed; under the new regime, there would be "not less than five or more than twelve fish and game management regions [not necessarily following Native corporation boundaries] which, taken together, shall include all public lands where the State is exercising regulatory authority under this title." Local and regional fish and game councils would be organized within each of these regions, and all references to an "Alaska Subsistence Management Council" were expunged. A final change—one that disappointed many conservation activists—was the elimination of any reference to subsistence management zones. [113]

During the negotiations over the subsistence title, a key issue that defied easy solution was deciding who had first priority, in times of scarcity, to harvest subsistence resources. As noted in the legislative history, "early drafts of the subsistence title by the House Interior Committee allocated access to subsistence resources on an ethnic basis, an approach similar in concept to that suggested by the [ANCSA] Conference Committee." Section 709(b) of Committee Print No. 2, issued in late October 1977, reflected that notion; it noted that in the event of a declining or depleted resource, "highest priority" would be given "to allowing continued subsistence uses by Alaskan Natives primarily and directly dependent upon the particular resource." The hierarchy of those who were then eligible for the harvest was similar to criteria developed in 1975 by the Alaska Game Board; it noted that those most deserving were "other persons [i.e., non-Natives] primarily and directly dependent upon the particular resource as a mainstay of their livelihood," followed by "other Alaskan Native subsistence users" and then by "other customary or appropriate users." [114]

But in the months following the issuance of Committee Print No. 2, two factors combined to remove the Native preference. According to the Congressional Record, the "ethnic basis" for access to subsistence resources" was abandoned when "Governor Hammond correctly pointed out that under the Alaska Constitution, the State cannot participate in a subsistence management system which would require it to allocate access to subsistence resources on the basis of 'Nativeness.'" [115] Perhaps because of Hammond's comments, Congressional support for a Native preference quickly eroded. Attorney Donald Mitchell recalled that Interior Committee staffers Harry Crandell and Stan Sloss, who were asked to cobble together revised language in the weeks that followed the issuance of Committee Print No. 2, were surprised to discover, at a January 1978 mark-up session, that "all members of the [Alaska Lands and General Oversight Subcommittee] were highly unenthusiastic about a Native priority ... there was not even one vote in support ... it was obvious that the politics had changed." [116] This new state of affairs was later explained on the House floor by subcommittee chair John Seiberling, who noted that:

What replaced a racial preference was a preference based on rural residency. Section 702 of the February 1978 proposal stated that management policies on Alaska's public lands should "cause the least adverse impact possible on rural people," and Section 705(c)(3)(C) stated that in times of scarcity, "priorities for such consumptive uses" should be based on "(i)customary and direct dependence upon the resource as the mainstay of one's livelihood, (ii) local residency, and (iii) availability of alternative resources." [118] As noted above, the 1978 Alaska legislature had passed a subsistence law that—being consistent with the "equality" clause in the Alaska Constitution—contained no rural preference. The difference in language between the state law and the evolving federal law on this subject would prove vexing in the years ahead, and as Chapter 7 notes, the Alaska Constitution's equality clause would later wreak havoc on the state's ability to manage subsistence resources on public lands.

After emerging from Rep. Seiberling's subcommittee, H.R. 39 was considered by the full House Interior Committee. The bill passed that committee on May 3 and was referred to the full House, where it was debated beginning on May 17. After three days of floor debate, the bill passed the House 279-31 on May 19. Many features of the Alaska lands bill were hotly debated both in committee and on the House floor, but perhaps because Rep. Seiberling had been so inclusive in the subcommittee's deliberations, few changes were made in the House regarding subsistence (regarding either area eligibility or Title VII language) after mid-February. [119]

On May 23, H.R. 39 was reported to the Senate, where it languished because of the stated opposition to the bill by Alaska's two senators, Ted Stevens and Mike Gravel. Sen. Stevens, who was adroit at parliamentary tactics, resolved that if he could not pass a bill amenable to his terms, he would delay the bill at every step. All recognized that the timetable set by ANCSA demanded resolution of the issue by December 18, 1978; if no bill was passed by that deadline, the protections given to Alaska's national interest lands would lapse. Stevens reasoned that the looming deadline would create conditions fostering a compromise between H.R. 39 and the ideas advocated by many of Alaska's more conservative residents. [120]

To a large extent, Stevens's tactics worked, and by the time an Alaska lands bill emerged from the Senate Energy and Natural Resources Committee, it was early October and just eight days remained before the Senate was scheduled to adjourn for the year. The bill, as reported, was considerably weaker than either the Interior Department or conservationists had advocated. It called for relatively small parks or monuments, relatively large preserve areas, and the creation of several national recreation areas that would be open to a variety of multiple-use activities. In its approach to subsistence, its recommendations were remarkably similar to those advocated in Udall's early (January and mid-October 1977) versions of H.R. 39. In both of these bills, the protection of "the viability of subsistence resources" was an explicit purpose in only three proposed units in northwestern Alaska (Bering Land Bridge, Cape Krusenstern, and Kobuk Valley); [121] S. 9 also allowed subsistence in the proposed Gates of the Arctic unit, but only "where such uses are traditional." [122] Neither S. 9 nor the early versions of H.R. 39 sanctioned subsistence in any of the other proposed parks or monuments.

It seems remarkable, at least in retrospect, that the subsistence-related recommendations of avowed conservationists (such as those embodied in Udall's early versions of H.R. 39) would be so similar to those of Alaska's two senators, who were largely responsible for crafting the Senate committee bill. Conservationists, at first, did not want subsistence activities in many proposed parklands because they were driven by the idea of preserving Alaska's most "pristine" ecosystems; and as a practical notion, many felt that the subsistence lifestyle was such a marginal activity in many park areas that its elimination would cause minimal hardships. Alaska's senators, however, were motivated by an entirely different philosophy. Incensed that Alaska lands legislation would be "locking up" Alaska's most valuable resources, Alaska's senators fought back by attempting to open up as much acreage as possible to the broadest array of land uses. They were particularly sensitive to the demands of urban sportsmen and the guiding profession, and in response to those demands, the bill that passed the Senate committee appears to have leveled the playing field, so to speak, by giving subsistence users and urban sportsmen equal access to fish and game resources in the various proposed park units located outside of northwestern Alaska. In the Senate bill's treatment of the proposed Lake Clark, Wrangell-St. Elias, Gates of the Arctic, and Aniakchak units, for example, both rural residents and urban sportsmen were able to harvest fish and game in the preserve portion of the units, but neither group was able to harvest resources in the proposed park or monument portion of these units.

The report accompanying the Senate committee bill took pains to explain its actions regarding subsistence activities in two proposed NPS units: Noatak and Gates of the Arctic. The Noatak was proclaimed a throwback to nature in its purest form. The report lauded the area as "the largest mountain-ringed river basin in North America still virtually unaffected by human activities," and Smithsonian Institution officials had dubbed it "one of the most biologically significant land-water units still left in a pristine state." Local residents, however, were part of that "pristine state," because the report concluded that permitted activities would include both subsistence uses and "compatible recreational uses ... that will not interfere with ... the subsistence uses of the local people." Consistent with that theme, senators expected the NPS to "work closely with Native village inhabitants of the region to assure that Native cultural values are enhanced by establishment of the Noatak National Preserve." At Gates of the Arctic, however, the emphasis was on classification and limitation. The report noted that "boundaries between the park units and the preserve were delineated to largely contain the subsistence use zone of the Anaktuvuk Pass people in the preserve." The Senate report further stated that

To ascertain specific subsistence hunting areas, the Committee urged a "thorough study of the subsistence patterns of the people of Anaktuvuk Pass." If the study showed that subsistence hunting areas had changed, the park's subsistence zone could be adjusted to reflect the new reality. [123]

In addition to advocating major changes in which parks would be open to subsistence, the Senate committee bill also proposed a different methodological approach to the protection of subsistence resources, as embodied in the bill's subsistence management title. It matched provisions that had been included in the May 1978 House-passed bill regarding a requirement that the Secretary monitor and report on the state's progress on implementing the subsistence title (Section 806); and in addition, it required the Secretary to inform Congress of these implementation efforts (Section 813). Perhaps the most dramatic change, however, was the addition of two sections specifying how subsistence decision-making would take place in the three NPS parks or monuments that sanctioned subsistence uses. Section 808 defined the roles and responsibilities of the various Subsistence Resource Commissions—an advisory body composed of members chosen by the State of Alaska, the Interior Department, and the various Regional Advisory Councils—while Section 816 defined the terms under which the various parks or monuments would be closed to subsistence uses. [124]

In an attempt to forge a compromise between the House-passed bill and the Senate committee bill, Sen. Henry Jackson (D-Wash.), head of the Senate Energy and Natural Resources Committee, arranged a series of ad hoc meetings between the bill's key players with just three days left in the session. By October 14, the Senate's final day before adjournment, the committee had reached tentative agreement on most major issues. But at that point, Sen. Gravel—who had not previously participated in these meetings—made a number of additional demands that seemed extraordinary to the other meeting participants. The practical result of his demands was that no Alaska lands bill emerged from the 95th Congress. [125]

The Interior Department, perhaps in anticipation of such action (or, more appropriately, inaction), prepared documentation to protect Alaska's national interest lands until such time as the Congress could pass an Alaska lands bill. Thus on November 16, 1978, Interior Secretary Cecil Andrus withdrew more than 110 million acres of Alaska land, and on December 1, President Jimmy Carter—using as his authority the 1906 Antiquities Act—issued a series of proclamations designating seventeen national monuments. Together, they covered some 55,965,000 acres of Alaska's national interest lands. [126]

Carter's monument proclamations tremendously expanded the amount of Alaska land under the management of the National Park Service and other land management agencies. (Thirteen of the seventeen monuments, comprising some 40,780,000 acres of Alaska land, were to be administered by the NPS.) Of the thirteen NPS monuments (ten new units plus three extensions of existing units), all but one—newly-designated Kenai Fjords National Monument—specifically allowed subsistence. [127]

The proclamations for monuments sanctioning subsistence further stated that the Secretary of the Interior "may close the national monument, or any portion thereof, to subsistence uses of a particular fish, wildlife or plant population" for any of several reasons, and in addition, the Secretary was empowered to "promulgate such regulations as are appropriate, including regulation of the opportunity to engage in a subsistence lifestyle by local residents." In response to that clause, NPS personnel scurried to formulate regulations relating to subsistence and other topics. The details of that process are discussed in Chapter 5 of this study.

All sides in the battle over Alaska's lands recognized that a legislative solution was both necessary and worthwhile. Accordingly, the process left unfinished by the 95th Congress would be approached once again during the 96th Congress.

Because House members had fully discussed Alaska lands issues in the 95th Congress, the bill that was introduced in mid-January 1979 to address those issues—again entitled H.R. 39—was in many aspects not drastically different from that which had passed the House of Representatives the previous May. Subsistence was different, however. Perhaps because the proposed parklands were already protected via Carter's proclamation, Title II (the title that in earlier bills had proposed the various park units) was given over to changing the units' designation—from national monuments to national parks—no language about subsistence was included in the "purposes" section. Title VII, moreover, was a stripped-down version of the bill that the House had passed eight months earlier; previously fifteen sections in length, the new version was composed of just nine sections. [128]

H.R. 39 wended its way through the House of Representatives more quickly than it had in the previous Congress, and on May 16, 1979, the House passed the bill on a 360-65 vote. This bill made no statement regarding which proposed park units would allow subsistence; it was assumed, therefore, that the decisions that President Carter had made in December 1978 were appropriate. In other aspects, the bill was more akin to the document that had passed the House a year earlier than the bill that had been introduced in mid-January. A few changes were evident, however. The May 1979 House bill, for example, omitted any requirement that the Interior Secretary submit periodic reports to Congress on Title VII implementation. The bill also failed to recognize, on a park-by-park basis, the importance of subsistence as a purpose for the designation of any park units. Instead, Sec. 202(f) of the House-passed bill declared the legitimacy of subsistence uses on Alaska's parklands via the following language:

The May 1979 bill, in a manner similar to the January 1979 and the May 1978 bills, continued to promote the idea of regional and local participation. By now, it had been decided that there would be "at least seven Alaska subsistence resource regions;" within those regions, there would be one "regional advisory council" and "such local advisory committees within each region as [the Secretary] finds necessary at such time as he may determine ... that the existing State fish and game advisory committees do not adequately perform the functions of the local committee system...." [130]

The idea of regional councils, and other decentralized aspects of fish and game management, had long been debated by state officials. Natives and other rural residents, in general, favored a decentralized management system, while urban residents favored a continuation of the system—featuring local committees advising the fish and game boards—that had existed since statehood. During the 1971 legislative session, Senate Majority Leader Jay Hammond (R-Naknek) had submitted a bill that called for ten regional fish and game boards, and by the following year a proposal for twelve such boards had cleared the legislature. Governor William Egan vetoed the bill "because of procedural problems and technical flaws." [131] The state took no further action for the next few years, but in August 1977, Jay Hammond—now Alaska's governor—testified that he was "reviewing a proposal I suggested several years ago regarding the creation of regional or so-called satellite fish and game boards." Just two months after that testimony was given, federal officials—as part of H.R. 39—proposed a series of federally-controlled regional and local subsistence boards, all of which would report to an Alaska Subsistence Management Council. Hammond, now convinced that his initial proposal had merit, agreed with the latest wrinkle in H.R. 39 and pushed for a similar, state-managed system. [132] His ideas were sufficiently persuasive that by February 1978, the notion of an Alaska Subsistence Management Council had been eliminated—in its place would be five to twelve regional advisory councils—and the bill that passed the House in May 1978 called for "at least five" regional management councils. (The bill passed by the Senate Energy Committee in October 1978 also contained this provision.) A year-end annual report by the Alaska Department of Fish and Game noted that the Department had proposed and mapped out a five-region system; the fish and game boards were ready to consider proposals "to provide for regional participation in the development of fish and game regulations." They hoped to take action on the plan in the next few months. Native groups, however, openly worried that the Department's proposed boards would decide matters on the basis of politics rather than biology. As an alternative, Nunam Kitlutsisti drafted its own proposed bill; it called for seven regional resource councils and a far more decentralized way of revising the fish and game regulations. [133] (See Map 4-4)

In early 1979, the long-simmering debate between regional boards and regional advisory councils began anew when Alaska House Speaker Terry Gardiner (D-Ketchikan) introduced a bill (HB 193) calling for seven regional fish and game boards. Governor Hammond, in response, asked the legislature to pass a bill (HB 304), supported by the Alaska Federation of Natives, that authorized six regional advisory councils. The legislature, as it turned out, passed neither measure. [134] The joint fish and game boards, following the script that they had laid out in late 1978, established regulations for five fish and game regions (each with an advisory council) on April 7, 1979. [135] Native groups, in response, let it be known that they hoped to see even more regional autonomy, either by increasing the number of management regions or by replacing regional advisory councils with regional boards. The version of H.R. 39 that passed the House in May 1979 (calling for seven regional advisory councils) was therefore a slight improvement on the joint boards' month-old advisory system. [136] Neither this bill, nor any other previous bill given serious Congressional consideration, made any special provisions for participatory bodies whose sole concern would be the various proposed park units.

In the 96th Congress, as previously, a surge of Alaska lands bill activity in the House of Representatives was followed by a general lack of interest in the Senate. The Senate's Energy and Natural Resources Committee did not take up H.R. 39 until October 9; much to the dismay of conservationists, chairman Henry Jackson used the bill passed by his committee the previous October as a mark-up vehicle. Three weeks later, the committee reported out a bill, S. 9, that contrasted sharply with the House-passed bill. [137] Similar to the bill that the same committee had voted out in early October 1978, it made relatively modest acreage allotments for the national parks and for wilderness areas, although it allotted a relatively large number of acres in national preserves and also allotted several million acres into three national recreation areas.

Several other features differed between the House-passed bill and the Senate Energy Committee's bill. The Senate bill, identical to its October 1978 predecessor, noted that subsistence was a stated purpose for three proposed units: Bering Land Bridge National Preserve, Cape Krusenstern National Monument, and Kobuk Valley National Park. In addition, subsistence was a permitted use at Gates of the Arctic National Park as well as at Cape Krusenstern and Kobuk Valley. Those eligible to use those resources, however, differed between these three units. At Cape Krusenstern, anyone following the provisions of Title VIII would be permitted to use the area for subsistence purposes. At Kobuk Valley, however, that privilege was extended only to local residents who adhered to the title's provisions, and at Gates of the Arctic, subsistence could take place only by local residents and only "where such uses are traditional in accordance with the provisions of title VIII." [138] Neither the remaining park and monument units (Aniakchak, Kenai Fjords, Lake Clark, and Wrangell-St. Elias) nor the three unit extensions (Glacier Bay, Katmai, and Mount McKinley) offered provisions for subsistence. The report accompanying the passage of the Senate committee bill made additional comments about the virtues of the Noatak and Gates of the Arctic proposals; the language of those comments was almost identical to that which had appeared in the report that had accompanied the passage of the October 1978 committee bill. [139]

In the bill's subsistence title (which was Title VII in the House bill but Title VIII in the Senate bill), the Senate Committee bill made several additional modifications to the House-passed bill. Most of these were simple reiterations of the October 1978 Senate Committee bill, and among those reiterations were the two sections dealing with subsistence resource commissions. Minor alterations were also made to public participation for subsistence users outside the parks; for instance, the minimum number of statewide subsistence resource regions was changed from five (in the 1978 Senate committee bill) to six. [140]

Another new concept that emerged during the committee's work was the recognition that wildlife in the various national park units would be managed according to a slightly different standard than on other public lands. Section 815(1) of the bill proposed what no previous Senate or House bill had done—that "subsistence uses of fish and wildlife within a conservation system unit" needed to be "consistent with the conservation of healthy populations," while subsistence uses in national parks and monuments needed to be managed so as to be consistent "with the conservation of natural and healthy populations of fish and wildlife." In the report that accompanied the committee bill, the term "healthy" was defined but "natural and healthy" was not. It explained suggested management differences between NPS and non-NPS areas as follows:

Two weeks after the Senate bill emerged from the Energy and Natural Resources Committee, Senators Paul Tsongas (D-Mass.) and William Roth (R-Del.) introduced a more conservation-oriented bill as a substitute to the committee-passed bill. The introduction of that substitute, however, effectively delayed action until the following summer. On July 21, 1980, the bill was finally debated on the Senate floor, but when Sen. Stevens witnessed the strength of votes (on amendments) in favor of a strong conservation-oriented bill, he prevailed upon the Senate leadership to take the bill off the floor. The leadership then appointed an ad hoc committee of three senators—Henry Jackson, Paul Tsongas, and Mark Hatfield (R-Ore.)—who held several private meetings in an attempt to forge a compromise between the dramatically diverse factions. Out of the meetings of the "three Senators behind closed doors" came Amendment No. 1961, which was Sen. Tsongas's own substitute to the Senate's Energy and Natural Resources Committee bill. On August 18, the full Senate addressed that bill, which was co-sponsored by senators Jackson, Tsongas, Hatfield, and William Roth. The bill, as intended, was a delicate compromise between the House-passed bill and the Senate's committee bill; Tsongas himself noted, "If you look at H.R. 39 and S. 9 issue by issue, the substitute pretty much comes in the middle between those two bills. We did not intend it to work out that way, but, in fact, that is what happened." Soon afterward, the full Senate voted to accept that substitute in lieu of the committee's bill, and the following day, Amendment No. 1961—the ad hoc group's version of the Alaska Lands Act—passed the Senate by a vote of 78-14. [142]

House members, who looked on with guarded disappointment at the Senate's actions, vowed to iron out the many differences between the two bills in a House-Senate conference committee. Those efforts proved halting, however, and many issues remained unresolved when Congress recessed on October 15. House members, in particular, hoped that further progress could be made when Congress re-convened a month later. But all hopes of compromise were dashed on November 4, when Ronald Reagan—an avowed opponent of a pro-conservation bill—was elected president. That event, plus the Republican party's assumption of control over the Senate, forced advocates of the House bill to give up the fight and agree to the Senate-passed bill. On November 12, House members agreed to the Senate bill, and on December 2, 1980, President Jimmy Carter signed into law the Alaska National Interest Lands Conservation Act. [143]

The various senators that huddled together and emerged with Amendment No. 1961 in July and August 1980 made some significant changes to the bill that the Senate Energy and Natural Resources Committee had passed the previous October. Some of those alterations pertained to the nature of subsistence activity that would be allowed in the various parks and monuments. The committee bill, it may be recalled, authorized subsistence activities only at Cape Krusenstern, Kobuk Valley, and Gates of the Arctic (as well as on all of the national preserve lands), and the bill protected "the viability of subsistence resources" only at Bering Land Bridge National Preserve as well as at Cape Krusenstern and Kobuk Valley. [144] Amendment No. 1961, however, broadened those notions. The subsistence viability protections remained at the same three units noted above, but in addition, the number of new or expanded parks or monuments allowing subsistence mushroomed from three to seven. Unlike the Senate-pass bill, however, all seven of the units sanctioning subsistence permitted the activity only by local residents, and in five of the seven units—not just at Gates of the Arctic—the activity was allowed "where such uses are traditional." By contrast to the many changes in Title II, the assembled senators had little interest in tinkering with the Senate committee's version of Title VIII. The only known change to that title was in Section 807 (dealing with judicial enforcement); here alterations were made because "all of the parties involved" had felt that the section was cumbersome and ambiguous. [145]

Amendment No. 1961, as noted above, allowed subsistence uses in many new park units on a "where traditional" basis; incorporating this language on a widespread scale was a painful compromise between the Senate committee bill (which allowed subsistence in only three park units) and the House-passed bill (which allowed subsistence in almost every new or expanded park unit). Because the term "where traditional" had not been applied on such a broadly-applicable basis before, Sen. Charles Mathias (R-Md.) took pains to elaborate on how the term should be applied. As part of a report describing the so-called "Tsongas Substitute," Mathias noted the following:

Further—and somewhat contradictory—information about the concept emerged in the Senate the very next day, as evidenced by this dialogue between two key formulators of the final bill:

By the time the Alaska Lands bill was signed, there were relatively few points of strong contention in the arena of subsistence management; the House and Senate bills were remarkably similar in that aspect. On the one hand, sport hunting interests complained that too many acres were in national parks or monuments, and a plain-speaking Sen. Gravel (R-AK) stated that he "always feared that ... the massive, restrictive conservation system units designated in this legislation would be used to terminate or severely curtail existing recreational and traditional uses of the lands involved." Some conservationists, on the other hand, grumbled that they had given away too much in order to preserve the so-called "Alaska lifestyle." As Rep. James H. Weaver (D-Ore.) noted in September 1980,

Roger Contor, who followed the act's legislative progress in his capacity as the NPS's assistant to the director on Alaska matters from 1977 to 1979 [149], recognized that the final wording in the bill's subsistence section was a hard-fought, contentious compromise. In a 1984 speech to the Alaska Game Board, he noted that "During the weeks when Title VIII was being formulated, arguments were presented over nearly every written word. The same was true for the words which went into the Congressional Record and the Senate Report." Recognizing that the Game Board generally favored liberalizing the game regulations, Contor remarked that "many groups were adamant, and still remain so, that there should be NO hunting allowed in the parks, subsistence or otherwise." [150] All agreed that translating the law into a functioning bureaucratic reality would be lengthy and difficult.

Nine long years after the passage of the Alaska Native Claims Settlement Act, Alaska's rural subsistence users finally had a basic legal apparatus that promised to protect their interests. Much of their success in protecting those interests, however, depended on the success of the regulatory mechanisms that would be organized in accordance with the Alaska National Interest Lands Conservation Act. Chapter 5 will cover the process of that organization and implementation.

¹ David S. Case, Alaska Natives and American Laws (Fairbanks, Univ. of Alaska Press, 1984), 10-11; Claus-M. Naske and Herman E. Slotnick, Alaska; A History of the 49th State (Grand Rapids, Mich., Eerdmans, 1979), 198.

⁴ G. Frank Williss, "Do Things Right the First Time;" The National Park Service and the Alaska National Interest Lands Conservation Act of 1980 (Denver, NPS, September 1985), 68; S. 1964, H.R. 11164, and S. 2690, all in Alaska Native Claims Settlement Act Legislative History, vol. 1 (Bills), part 1, ARLIS; Congressional Record 113 (1967), Part 28, passim; Donald Craig Mitchell, Take My Land, Take My Life (Fairbanks, University of Alaska Press, 2001), 146-47.

⁵ Federal Field Committee for Development Planning in Alaska, Alaska Natives and the Land (Washington, GPO), October 1968.

⁶ Naske and Slotnick, Alaska, 215, 217; Donald Craig Mitchell, Take My Land, Take My Life, 197; Congressional Record 114 (1968), Part 25, passim.

¹⁰ S. 2906, 36; H.R. 15049, 24; and S. 3859, 13-14; all in Alaska Native Claims Settlement Act, Legislative History, v. 3 (Bills), part 1, ARLIS.

¹¹ The dictionary defines subsistence as "the minimum (as of food and shelter) necessary to support life." Prior to this time, "subsistence farming" was a common term for a "system of farming that produces a minimum and often inadequate return to the farmer," while "subsistence" was a synonym for food and kindred expenses that government agencies paid to its traveling employees. Most Natives never used the word "subsistence" before the ANCSA deliberations; as Jonathon Solomon of Fort Yukon noted, "I never heard the word subsistence until 1971 under the Native land claims act. Before that time, when I was brought up in the culture of my people, it's always been 'our culture' and 'our land.'" Webster's Ninth New Collegiate Dictionary (Springfield, Mass., Merriam-Webster, Inc., 1986), 1176; Franklin G. Fox to Regional Director, Region IV, NPS, July 3, 1938, in File 600, MOMC, Entry 7, RG 79, NARA San Bruno; Thomas R. Berger, Village Journey; the Report of the Alaska Native Review Commission (New York, Hill and Wang, 1985), 52.

¹³ Section 2(a)(7) of S. 1830, as passed by the Senate in July 1970, provided for "Protection of Native subsistence hunting, fishing, trapping, and gathering rights and, where it is within the power of the federal government, measure for the conservation of subsistence biotic resources."

¹⁴ S. 35, ANCSA Legislative History, 3:1, 121-23; Donald Mitchell interview, May 13, 2002.

¹⁷ Theodore Catton, Land Reborn; A History of Administration and Visitor Use in Glacier Bay National Park and Preserve (Anchorage, NPS, 1995), 208-09; Williss, "Do Things Right the First Time," 90; U.S. Senate, Alaska National Interest Lands; Report of the Committee on Energy and Natural Resources ... to Accompany H.R. 39 (Report No. 96-413), 96th Congress, 1st Session (Washington, D.C., GPO, 1979), 231. Morris Udall, a leader in Alaska Lands Act legislation, noted that the Secretary and the State accepted the idea of promising "to take any action necessary to protect the needs of the [Alaska] Natives" in exchange "for the exclusion from that act [i.e., ANCSA] of a subsistence management title developed by the Senate." Congressional Record, May 4, 1979, H 2697. AFN attorney Don Mitchell, speaking years later, noted that it was the State of Alaska that lobbied to have the subsistence priority removed, with the apparent agreement that state management would improve. Fairbanks Daily News-Miner, December 3, 2000, A6.

¹⁹ The Multiple Use and Classification Act (P.L. 88-607) became law on September 19, 1964. Although it was national in its scope, it made special provision for lands "situated in the State of Alaska exclusively administered by [the Secretary] through the Bureau of Land Management." Duncan A. Harkin, et al., Federal Land Laws and Policies in Alaska, Vol. III (Madison, Univ. of Wisconsin, October 1970), 1148; P.L. 88-607.

²⁰ Williss's "Do Things Right the First Time," pp. 35-56 gives an excellent overview of early NPS planning efforts. Speaking on the subject years later, Sen. Ted Stevens (R-AK) said that he was "surprised" to discover in 1970 "that 50 million acres of Alaska had been classified as lands that were potential national parks." These classification orders "had been entered by the Department of Interior as internal guidance in dealing with Alaska lands." Congressional Record, August 19, 1980, S 11185.

²¹ Williss, "Do Things Right the First Time," 71-88; Catton, Inhabited Wilderness, 195-97.

²⁴ John Kauffmann interview, April 29, 1999. The initial NPS planning team included John Reynolds (MOMC), Urban Rogers and Keith Trexler (LACL), Paul Fritz (WRST), Bob Belous (KOVA), and John Kauffmann (GAAR).

²⁶ Ibid., 120-24, 142-43; Alaska Planning Group, [Various park FESs], p. 1.

²⁷ On the heels of ANCSA's passage, NPS Director George Hartzog was convinced that 95 percent of the 80,000,000 acres withdrawn under Section 17(d)(2) belonged in the National Park System. But Spencer Smith, head of the Bureau of Sport Fisheries and Wildlife, felt that four-fifths of that acreage was intended as national wildlife refuges. Both men, of course, suffered a rude awakening in March 1972 when Secretary Morton announced the preliminary withdrawals. Williss, "Do Things Right the First Time," 104; Richard Stenmark interview, July 9, 1999.

²⁸ Williss, "Do Things Right the First Time," 271-72; John Kauffmann interview, April 29, 1999. problem.

²⁹ The reality of subsistence during the 1970s is discussed in Jim Rearden's "Subsistence, a Troublesome Issue," Alaska 44 (July 1978), 4-6, 84-88; Walter B. Parker, Subsistence Realities, published by the Joint Federal-State Land Use Planning Commission in August 1977; and Berger, Village Journey, 1985. But in the early 1970s, neither state nor federal authorities had collected the information that would fill these and similar volumes.

³¹ NPS, Recommendations Regarding Alaska Native Claims Settlement Act 17(d)(2) Withdrawals, July 1972, "Background," p. 3.

³² Bob Belous, who was working as a Native liaison and photographer for the NPS at the time, summed up the agency's thinking at the time in a March 28, 2001 interview. "No one had special access to subsistence like Natives." He noted, "they deserved some recognition and maybe even preferential access."

³³ NPS, Recommendations Regarding ANCSA Withdrawals, July 1972, passim.; Williss, "Do Things Right the First Time," 132.

³⁴ Frank B. Norris, Isolated Paradise; An Administrative History of the Katmai and Aniakchak National Park Units (Anchorage, NPS, 1996), 443-44; Williss, "Do Things Right the First Time," 121-22.

³⁵ Bob Belous, Subsistence Use of New Parklands in Alaska (An Interim Report), November 10, 1973, as noted in Williss, "Do Things Right the First Time," 187, 248, 273; Belous interview, March 28, 2001. Belous, a former journalist and engineer, had joined the NPS in 1972. In the mid-to-late 1970s, he became a public liaison officer and the "keyman" for the proposed Cape Krusenstern and Kobuk Valley park units. He remained with the agency in Alaska through the early 1980s (see Chapter 5).

³⁶ See, for example, NPS, Proposed Chukchi-Imuruk National Wildlands, Draft Environmental Impact Statement (Washington?, the author, December 1973), 1-2. This document will hereafter be referred to as "NPS, Chukchi-Imuruk DEIS" and other DEISs will be referred to in a similar fashion.

³⁷ Within the NPS, the change from a Native to a rural preference took place between July 1972 and December 1973. (At other agencies, no such shift took place, inasmuch as a Native preference was never seriously considered.) On a legislative level, as noted in Section G below, initial efforts once again suggested a Native preference, but by early 1978 the changeover to a rural preference had been effected. It remained that way until ANILCA was signed into law.

⁴¹ U.S. Department of the Interior, Proposed Noatak National Ecological Range, Draft Environmental Impact Statement (Washington?, the author, December 1973), 1, 7, 146-55, 160-74.

⁴³ William E. Brown, Gaunt Beauty, Tenuous Life; Historic Resources Study, Gates of the Arctic National Park and Preserve (n.p., NPS, January 1988), 516-58; Theodore Catton, Inhabited Wilderness; Indians, Eskimos, and National Parks in Alaska (Albuquerque, Univ. of New Mexico Press, 1997), 165-72; Catton, "Ecology and Alaska's National Parks" (paper given at the Alaska Environmental History Conference, Anchorage, August 2, 1998), 16.

⁴⁴ Catton, Inhabited Wilderness, 173, 177; NPS, Proposed Gates of the Arctic National Wilderness Park and Nunamiut National Wildlands DEIS, 104.

⁴⁶ Ibid., 168; Edwin S. Hall, Jr., Craig Gerlach, and Margaret B. Blackman, In the National Interest: A Geographically Based Study of Anaktuvuk Pass Inupiat Subsistence Through Time, 2 vols. (Barrow, AK, North Slope Borough), 1985.

⁴⁸ Williss, "Do Things Right the First Time," 44, 48-49, 56-58; Catton, Inhabited Wilderness, 187.

⁴⁹ Catton, Inhabited Wilderness, 188; Naske and Slotnick, Alaska, 239. The road was abandoned after the winter of 1969-70, and in 1974 the State of Alaska agreed to a court order that closed it to further use. Congressional Record, November 12, 1980, H 10535. Four years later, more than forty miles of the road was placed within Gates of the Arctic National Monument, and the area has been administered by the NPS ever since.

⁵¹ NPS, Recommendations Regarding Alaska Native Claims Settlement Act 17(d)(2) Withdrawals (July 1972), 21, 30.

⁵⁴ Catton, Inhabited Wilderness, 200; NPS, Gates of the Arctic-Nunamiut National Wildlands, DEIS, errata sheet, 2. The NPS's proposal had called for all land in the Wilderness Park "to be designated a wilderness by the legislation that creates it;" it would have been the only park proposal that would have done so. But the OMB's action struck down the wilderness park concept. Regarding the Chukchi-Imuruk proposal, the OMB also struck down a provision that would have provided for preferential hiring of Alaska Natives. Williss, "Do Things Right the First Time," 141-42.

⁵⁵ Note that the Noatak proposal, at this time, was not an NPS proposal; as noted earlier, the area was to be jointly managed by the BLM and the BSF&W.

⁶⁰ During the mid-1970s, the idea for a Native cultural center was espoused by Calista Corporation, one of the new ANCSA regional corporations. The corporation decided that a cultural center would be a critical adjunct to a proposed shopping concourse, to be located in Anchorage near its Sheraton Hotel property. The commercial facility was never developed, however, in part because of a lack of interest from other Native regional corporations. Other proposed sites during the 1970s for a Native cultural center were downtown (near Second Avenue and Christensen Drive) and on the Alaska Methodist University campus.

The idea lay fallow for the next several years, but in 1986 the cultural center concept was presented at that fall's Alaska Federation of Natives convention. The assembled delegates voted to pursue the idea, and soon afterward an ad hoc group consisting of representatives from each of the regional corporations was formed to move the concept forward. That group, Alaska Native Heritage Park, evaluated the pros and cons of fifteen potential sites, all of which were located in Anchorage. That process revealed that an optimal site for the proposed center was in east Anchorage, near the corner of Tudor Road and Campbell Airstrip Road. (This triangular-shaped 80-acre parcel, near Benny Benson School and today's Alaska Botanical Garden, had been designated as a cultural center site almost a decade earlier as part of the Far North Bicentennial Park plan.) Inasmuch as the parcel was municipally owned, the center's backers, in 1989, approached the Municipal Assembly for a long-term lease and soon afterward received it. The group then sponsored a site feasibility study, the results of which were favorable, and proceeded to raise design and construction funds. Their efforts were derailed, however, by project opponents—neighborhood groups and environmentalists—who submitted a petition to the city asking that the lease be repealed. A protracted delay then ensued over whether a lease repeal should be placed before Anchorage's voters; that logjam was broken in the fall of 1991, when a Superior Court judge decided to proceed with a vote. That vote, on November 3, 1992, resulted in a narrow (200-vote) victory for those who advocated that the lease be repealed. Supporters of a Native heritage center, therefore, were forced to look elsewhere.

Heritage center advocates responded to the ballot setback by seeking out new sites. The group initially considered both public and privately-owned sites ranging from Palmer to the Kenai Peninsula. Soon, however, the focus narrowed to a few sites in northeastern Anchorage. One site on Fort Richardson, proposed during the waning days of the Bush administration, failed to materialize but an adjacent tract was considered near the Glenn Highway-Muldoon Road intersection. This 88-acre parcel, also on Fort Richardson, was owned by Cook Inlet Region, Inc. (CIRI), but the Municipality of Anchorage had a long-term lease. The multiplicity of interests was initially daunting. The center's backers, however, found both CIRI and the Federal government cooperative, and by July 1994 newly-elected mayor Rick Mystrom had helped arrange for 26 acres of the city's lease to be transferred to the Alaska Native Heritage Center. After a blessing ceremony that summer, fundraising began in earnest, and before long a broad array of interests—Federal agencies, Native corporations, foundations, corporations, and individuals—agreed to help underwrite the $14.8 million project. Given such broad support, backers were able to proceed with site preparation in 1997, and construction of the main building began in the late summer of 1998. The Alaska Native Heritage Center opened to the public the following spring. Jane Angvik interview, February 16, 2000; Steve Peterson interview, February 17, 2000.

⁶⁶ Frank Williss, "Do Things Right the First Time," p. 160 notes that the deadline for comments to the various DEISs was July 22, 1974, and planners received more than 6,000 comments.

⁶⁷ See, for example, Alaska Planning Group, Proposed Chukchi-Imuruk National Reserve, Final Environmental Statement (Washington?, the author, 1975?), 1. The statement's wording varied slightly for the various proposals. The Mount McKinley National Park Additions proposal, the sole proposal omitting this verbiage, offered roughly similar language and promised that "existing established subsistence activities will be allowed to continue." APG, Proposed Mount McKinley National Park Additions, Final Environmental Statement (Washington?, the author, October 1974), 5.

⁶⁸ The lack of emphasis upon subsistence values as it pertained to the Gates of the Arctic proposal was striking, particularly in comparison to the extent to which the agency had backed the Nunamiut National Wildlands proposal in late 1973. In early 1974, a bill was submitted in Congress to establish a Nunamiut "cultural park," but it never got beyond the committee stage. Williss, "Do Things Right the First Time," 156.

⁷⁰ APG, Aniakchak FES, 2; APG, Harding Icefield-Kenai Fjords FES, 5; APG, Lake Clark EIS, 2.

⁷² APG, Chukchi-Imuruk FES, 5; APG, Harding Icefield-Kenai Fjords FES, 5.

⁷⁴ Williss, "Do Things Right the First Time," 113; John Kauffmann interview, April 29, 1999.

⁷⁶ Newman, an anthropologist, arrived in Alaska in 1975 from the agency's Denver Service Center. Williss, "Do Things Right the First Time," 247. Bill Brown, in a July 14, 1999 interview, noted that top Alaska Task Force officials approved the 1977 paper.

⁷⁷ T. Stell Newman, The National Park Service and Subsistence: A Summary, November 1977, 1.

⁷⁸ William E. Brown interview, July 14, 1999; Raymond F. Dasmann, "National Parks, Nature Conservation, and 'Future Primitive'," unpub. paper given at the South Pacific Conference on National Parks, Wellington, N.Z., February 24-27, 1975, in Theodor R. Swem Collection, Conservation Library, Western History Collection, Denver Public Library.

⁷⁹ Historian William E. Brown, in an April 18, 2001 interview, noted that NPS planners focused their primary attention in the subsistence realm on traditional indigenous people; this may have been a response, in part, to those who thought, or perhaps hoped, that Native subsistence would fade away. Alaska Area Director G. Bryan Harry, in fact, stated that NPS planner Bob Belous was known among some colleagues as a "gigantic philosophical champion of Natives in the national parks." (G. Bryan Harry interview, November 3, 1998) Newman, however, was more pragmatic, and the NPS, during this period, consistently agreed with the State of Alaska's "local rural" criteria for subsistence preference as a way to avoid exacerbating tensions between Natives and non-Natives.

⁸¹ Ibid., 260-62; Ray Bane interview, September 18, 1997. In addition to Bane, Anderson, and Nelson, the study's authors were Wanni Anderson and Nita Sheldon. The Banes' dogsled trip is recounted in Joe McGinness's Going to Extremes (New York, Alfred A. Knopf, 1980), 232-33.

⁸² Williss, "Do Things Right the First Time," 262-64, 268; Bill Brown interview, April 18, 2001. The Gates of the Arctic study, called Tracks in the Wildland; A Portrayal of Koyukon and Nunamiut Subsistence, was written by some of the same researchers who previously had worked on the Kuuvangmiit subsistence study. It was completed as a CPSU paper in 1978 and reprinted for more widespread distribution in 1982. A multipart study of subsistence patterns in the vicinity of the Bering Land Bridge proposal was completed in 1981. The only proposed park areas that were not studied as part of the CPSU effort were Kenai Fjords National Park (where subsistence activities were thought to be rare) and a small proposed parkland northwest of Glacier Bay National Monument.

⁸³ Williss, "Do Things Right the First Time," 174ff. In 1980, Sen. Charles Mathias (R-Md.) explained the preserve concept this way: "Since the establishment of the National Park System in 1916, the consumptive use of wildlife resources with National Parks and National Monuments has been prohibited. However, when establishing new units of the National Park System the Congress has had a longstanding traditional practice of reviewing those values and activities within new units which, if immediately curtailed, might result in substantial hardships to the local residents of the area. Congress has [therefore] authorized the continuation of certain uses within new parks and monuments which would be prohibited under traditional National Park Service management policies." Congressional Record, August 18, 1980, S 11135. John Cook, in an April 18, 2001 interview, noted that Dick Curry, a Nixon appointee with the Interior Department in Washington, was largely responsible for developing and selling the preserve concept.

⁸⁴ Williss, "Do Things Right the First Time," 122; Frank B. Norris, Isolated Paradise; An Administrative History of the Katmai and Aniakchak National Park Units (Anchorage, NPS, 1996), 443-45.

⁸⁵ John Kauffmann interview, April 29, 1999; Williss, "Do Things Right the First Time," 166-67. As part of that agreement, NPS planners initially proposed that subsistence uses be banned in Lake Clark National Park. The Alaska Area Director, however, overrode that decision.

⁸⁶ Congressional Record 124 (May 16, 1978), 14009; "A Brief History; Why Alaska Has a Subsistence Law," Alaska Fish and Game 21 (November-December 1989), 11.

⁸⁷ Alaska House of Representatives, Special Committee on Subsistence, Draft Report of the Special Committee on Subsistence; History and Implementation of Ch. 151, SLA 1978, the State's Subsistence Law (May 15, 1981), 15-16.

⁸⁸ Mil Zahn, "Advisory Committees; a Report to the Boards of Fisheries and Game," November 18, 1981, 3, in "ADF&G Regional Councils through FY 86" folder, AKSO. Zahn's report suggests that advisory board funding began in 1974; initially modest, funding dramatically increased in the late 1970s and early 1980s.

⁸⁹ Alaska House of Representatives, Draft Report of the Special Committee on Subsistence (1981), 2-3, 10-12, 16; Morehouse and Holleman, When Values Conflict, 12.

⁹⁰ Alaska House of Representatives, Draft Report of the Special Committee on Subsistence (1981), 11; Morehouse and Holleman, When Values Conflict, 13. See State of Alaska v. Tanana Valley Sportsmen's Association, in Pacific Reporter, 2nd series, vol. 583 [1978], pp. 854-60. In issuing his opinion in the lawsuit, Chief Justice Robert Boochever noted that "many" Alaska Natives "eke out a livelihood by reliance on fish and game. A few non-Natives have adopted similar means of livelihood."

⁹¹ Alaska House of Representatives, Draft Report of the Special Committee on Subsistence (1981), 13-14.

⁹³ Alaska House of Representatives, Interim Committee on Subsistence, Final Report of the Interim Committee on Subsistence, Alaska Tenth Legislature, Second Session, n.d. (ca. January 1978), 3-7, 11.

⁹⁴ Such a user, it appeared, could be either a rural or urban resident; and as part of the bill's legislative history, Rep. Anderson assured Fairbanks residents that they would be protected by the subsistence priority.

⁹⁵ Alaska House of Representatives, Special Committee on Subsistence, Final Report on Activities During the 1979 Interim (January 25, 1980), 1, 16; Alaska Boards of Fisheries and Game, Proposed Regulatory Changes Governing Subsistence Use of Fish and Game Resources, Advisory Committee Bylaws and Regional Resource Councils, to be Considered in Anchorage, Alaska, from March 24 Through March 28, 1979. In February 1979, the House Special Committee on Subsistence submitted a bill (HB 199) intended to establish a Division of Subsistence Hunting and Fishing. A month later, it passed the House on a 24-15 vote. The measure stalled in the Senate, however, and was never enacted. The Subsistence Division was finally established, via administrative means, in July 1981 (see Chapter 5).

⁹⁸ Congressional Record 126 (November 12, 1980), H 10545. Udall followed up these remarks that day by noting, "We made good on that promise" by including "a detailed subsistence title," explained below.

⁹⁹ H.R. 39, January 4, 1977, in Public Law 96-487, Alaska National Interest Lands Conservation Act Legislative History, Vol. I, pp. 207, 222-25; Williss, "Do Things Right the First Time," 174-75.

¹⁰¹ As Udall noted in Congressional testimony, "We created a special new category, park preserves for the sole and only purpose of permitting sport hunting to continue." But some sport hunting groups remained unhappy. Alternative House bills in both the 95th and 96th congresses proposed that virtually all of Alaska's lands would be open to sport hunting, and at least one Congressman supporting those views chafed at language "giving priority in subsistence uses on public lands over the consumptive uses in the taking of fish and wildlife." Congressional Record, May 2, 1979, E 2013; May 4, 1979, H 2694.

¹⁰² Williss, "Do Things Right the First Time," 179; S. 1787, June 30, 1977, in ANILCA Legislative History, Vol. III, p. 75.

¹⁰⁴ "Statement of Hon. Jay S. Hammond, Governor of the State of Alaska," August 20, 1977, in ANILCA Legislative History, Vol. XV, 18-21; Donald Mitchell interview, May 13, 2002.

¹⁰⁶ Ibid., 187, 197-98; H.R. 39, October 12 and October 28 (1977) Committee Prints, in ANILCA Legislative History, Vol. I, 288, 544. Newly-appointed NPS Director William Whalen, during this period, commented that H.R. 39 was generally sensitive to subsistence. He felt, however, that mechanisms included in the bill were too specific and should instead be established through departmental policy and regulations.

¹⁰⁷ The exact language pertaining to the various park units differed slightly; the Kenai Fjords proposal, for example, offered "to provide opportunities for continued subsistence uses," while at Kobuk Valley, the bill proposed "to protect subsistence resources to assure continued viability of resources for continued subsistence uses."

¹⁰⁸ H.R. 39, October 12 and October 28 (1977) Committee Prints, in ANILCA Legislative History, Vol. I, 288, 544.

¹⁰⁹ H.R. 39, October 28, 1977 Committee Print, in ANILCA Legislative History, Vol. I, 627-646.

¹¹¹ Congressional Record 124 (February 23, 1978), H 1483. Udall later repeated a similar notion, stating that "for the first time in the history of the Republic, Congress would grant to a State the right to manage fish and wildlife on public lands of the United States." Congressional Record, May 4, 1979, H 2697.

¹¹² Congressional Record 124 (January 31, 1978), H 450. Also see Congressional Record 124 (May 15, 1978), 13780. Later that year, Udall noted that "the language of Title VII of the House bill represents a very carefully balanced compromise of the views of the two Committees, the State of Alaska, and rural Alaskans. Any significant alteration could be extremely unsettling and have far-reaching consequences." Congressional Record 124 (August 8, 1978), H 8124.

¹¹³ H.R. 39, February 15, 1978, in ANILCA Legislative History, Vol. II, 13-25, 81-97; Williss, "Do Things Right the First Time," 199.

¹¹⁴ As noted below, the version of H.R. 39 that was issued in mid-February 1978 expunged all reference to race; as a result, the three criteria—none more important than any other in this version—were "customary and direct dependence upon the resource as the mainstay of one's livelihood, local residency, and availability of alternative resources." H.R. 39, February 15, 1978, Sec. 704(c)(3)(C).

¹¹⁵ Congressional Record 126 (November 12, 1980), H 10545-46. Also see George C. Coggins and Robert L. Glicksman, Public Natural Resources Law (Environmental Law Series), Release No. 14 (October 1996), 18-37 and 18-38.

¹¹⁷ Congressional Record 124 (May 17, 1978), H 4103. Morris Udall made a similar promise, as noted in the Congressional Record 124 (June 21, 1978), E 3361. After Congress passed its final (1980) bill, Udall stated that "although the Federal and State subsistence management system is racially neutral, it is important to recognize that the primary beneficiaries ... are the Alaska Native people. ... The subsistence title would not be included in the bill if non-Native subsistence activities were the primary focus of concern." It was "included in recognition of the ongoing responsibility of the Congress [which is] consistent with our well recognized constitutional authority to manage Indian affairs." Congressional Record, November 12, 1980, H 10545.

¹¹⁸ Later versions of HR 39 would clarify the rural priority; section 701 of the House-passed bill in May 1979, for example, stated that "the taking of fish and wildlife ... by rural residents shall be the first priority consumptive use...." By December 1980, the word "rural" had become even more firmly entrenched; it is found in sections 801, 802, and 803 of the Alaska National Interest Lands Conservation Act.

¹¹⁹ Williss, "Do Things Right the First Time," 200-04; H.R. 39, May 19, 1978, in ANILCA Legislative History, Vol. II, 432, 521-39. This bill, somewhat restrictive, allowed sport hunting in national preserves only by specific action of the Interior Secretary.

¹²¹ Protecting "the viability of subsistence resources" in the three proposed park units was a far cry from stating that subsistence was an avowed purpose in them (as H.R. 39 had done). See the Congressional Record, November 12, 1980, H 10547.

¹²² U.S. Senate, Designating Certain Lands in the State of Alaska as Units of the National Park, National Wildlife Refuge, National Wild and Scenic River, and National Wilderness Preservation Systems, and for Other Purposes; Report of the Committee on Energy and Natural Resources, Report No. 95-1300 (October 9, 1978), 26-32, as noted in ANILCA Legislative History, vol. XXXIII, 582-88. This was the first committee-passed bill that contained the term "traditional." The bill did not, however, define "traditional" or specifically suggest how it might be applied.

¹²³ U.S. Senate, Designating Certain Lands in the State of Alaska, Report 95-1300 (October 1978), 124, 134-37. All of the drainages named in the Senate report were more accessible to Anaktuvuk Pass than any other settlement; almost all flowed north out of the Brooks Range.

¹²⁴ U.S. Senate, Designating Certain Lands in the State of Alaska..., (Senate Report No. 95-1300), October 1978), as noted in ANILCA Legislative History, Vol. XXXIII, 582-88. Subsistence management provisions in H.R. 39 in the 95th Congress had consistently been included in Title VII, but S. 9 as reported by the Senate committee in October 1978 included these provisions in Title VIII because the bill contained a provision (Title IV) for BLM conservation units that H.R. 39 had not considered.

¹²⁷ Congressional Record, January 15, 1979, H 32-40. The proclamations for the various monuments where subsistence uses were sanctioned contained nearly identical verbiage on the theme: "The land withdrawn and reserved by this Proclamation for the protection of the ... phenomena enumerated above supports now, as it has in the past, the unique subsistence culture of the local residents. The continued existence of this culture, which depends on subsistence hunting, and its availability for study, enhance the historic and scientific values of the natural objects protected herein because of the ongoing interaction of the subsistence culture with those objects. Accordingly, the opportunity for the local residents to engage in subsistence hunting is a value to be protected and will continue under the administration of the monument."

¹²⁸ H.R. 39, January 15, 1979, in ANILCA Legislative History, Vol. III, 757-69.

¹²⁹ H.R. 39, May 24, 1979, in ANILCA Legislative History, Vol. VII, 24, 96-110. As Udall noted, Title VII of this bill was "based on the concepts originally developed in October of 1977. The major change is the elimination of a required priority for Alaska Natives." Congressional Record, May 4, 1979, H 2698.

¹³⁰ H.R. 39, May 24, 1979, in ANILCA Legislative History, Vol. VII, 24, 99. It could be argued that a major function of the "regulatory subsistence boards" (as noted in the January 1977 version of H.R. 39) and the local and regional subsistence boards (noted in Committee Print No. 2 on October 28, 1977) would be the regulation of activities in the various subsistence zones. These proposed zones, however, were not limited to NPS-administered areas, and the NPS was never specifically identified in Title VII of either bill.

¹³¹ Hammond's 1971 bill was SB 36; the bill Egan vetoed in 1972 was a variation of HB 185. See Anchorage Daily Times, March 1, 1979, 43, and Ronald O. Skoog to Division Directors and Section Chiefs, September 2, 1977, in "Regional Boards, 1977" file, Series 537, RG 11, ASA.

¹³² Hammond testimony, August 20, 1977, in ANILCA Legislative History, vol. XV, 20. In an August 1977 memo to his department heads, Hammond warned that "it is imperative the State structure a legislative proposal to counter [federally-directed] alternatives. ... Accordingly, I am not asking to be told why the Satellite Board System cannot work but rather how we can make it work. ... [We must get] some of the Natives to back off supporting the ethnic subsistence councils and federal management proposed in the Udall bill." Jay Hammond to Ron Skoog, et al., August 25, 1977, in "Regional Boards, 1977" file, Series 537, RG 11, ASA.

¹³³ Alaska Department of Fish and Game, 1978 Annual Report, 6; RuralCAP, What Happens Next? A Special Conference on Subsistence, December 6, 7, and 8, 1978 (Juneau?, the author, c. 1979), 13-15. Nunam Kitluksisti, based in Bethel, was an environmental program of the Association of Village Council Presidents.

¹³⁴ Alaska House Bill History, 1979-80; Anchorage Daily Times, March 1, 1979, 43; March 16, 1979, 53. Neither HB 193 nor HB 304 were acted upon after March 15, 1979.

¹³⁵ Alaska House of Representatives, Special Committee on Subsistence, Interim Committee Newsletter No. 4 (September 1979), 22.

¹⁴⁰ Ibid., 34-40. A full description of the differences between the House-passed version of H.R. 39 and the Senate committee bill is included on pp. 232-35 of this document. The Congressional Record for August 4, 1980, S 10659 noted that the committee amendment, as it appeared that day, differed from the May 1979 version of H.R. 39 in two ways: how it related "to subsistence hunting by local residents within national parks and monuments," and "the means for enforcement of the subsistence preference." The Congressional Record for August 19, 1980, S 11199 largely repeats this discussion.

¹⁴¹ U.S. Senate, Alaska National Interest Lands, Report No. 96-413, 233, 235. Two years later, in clarifying remarks subsequent to the bill's passage, Senator Stevens provided additional details on these concepts: "It is well recognized that habitat manipulation and predator control and other management techniques frequently employed on refuge lands are inappropriate within National Park or National Park Monuments. Section 815(1) recognizes this difference by providing that the level of subsistence uses within a National Park or National Park Monument may not be inconsistent with the conservation of 'natural and healthy' fish and wildlife populations within the park or monument, while within National Wildlife Refuges the level of subsistence uses of such populations may not be inconsistent with the conservation of 'healthy' populations. Nothing in the phrase 'in their natural diversity' in Title III [the Fish and Wildlife Service title] is intended to disrupt the well-defined and long-recognized difference in the management responsibilities of the National Park Service and the Fish and Wildlife Service." Congressional Record 126 (December 1, 1980), S 15131. These and other concepts stressing the NPS's higher standards are included in Roger J. Contor, "Remarks to the Alaska Board of Game," December 2, 1984, in "State Subsistence Management Activity, 1981-1986" folder, AKSO-RS.

¹⁴² Williss, "Do Things Right the First Time," 232-35; Congressional Record, August 18, 1980, S 11116; August 19, 1980, S 11185, 11188-89. Sen. Stevens voted against the final bill; at the same time, however, he told other senators that "It is my hope now that "the Members [of the House] who have worked long and hard on this subject will see fit to seek approval by the House of the bill that will pass this body today."

¹⁴⁴ It may be recalled that back on October 12, 1977, Committee Print No. 1 of H.R. 39 stated that Bering Land Bridge, Cape Krusenstern, and Kobuk Valley were the same three units for which subsistence was sanctioned.

¹⁴⁵ P.L. 96-487, 94 Stat. 2377-83, 2426; Congressional Record 126 (November 21, 1980), H 11114-15; December 11, 1980, H 12351-52. The Senate's committee bill and the bill that became law were virtually identical in their approach toward subsistence; as Sen. Jackson noted after passage of the Senate bill, "While some technical changes have been incorporated, ... the subsistence title ... is taken almost entirely from the committee reported bill." Sen. Gravel agreed, noting that the latest substitute had "several minor changes to clarify traditional state and federal fish and wildlife management responsibilities." Congressional Record 126 (August 18, 1980), S 11118-19, S 11138.

¹⁴⁶ Congressional Record 126 (August 18, 1980), S 11135. Mathias's report, from which this paragraph was quoted, was based on the Senate Committee report, supplemented by material from the Interior Department. The "Subsistence Council" to which Mathias referred did not survive into the final bill.

¹⁴⁸ Congressional Record 126 (August 19, 1980), S 11185; September 9, 1980, H 8638.

¹⁴⁹ As Frank Williss noted in "Do Things Right the First Time", p. 169, Ted Swem had served as Assistant to the NPS Director for Alaska until his retirement in February 1976. William C. Everhart, a career NPS historian, replaced Swem on an interim basis until November 1977, when Contor assumed the position.

¹⁵⁰ Roger J. Contor, "Remarks to the Alaska Board of Game," December 2, 1984, in "State Subsistence Management Activity, 1981-1986" folder, AKSO-RS. It is unsure which "weeks when Title VIII was being formulated" Contor refers to; perhaps these were in October 1977 and January 1978. The Senate Report on ANILCA and the Congressional Record resume of the bill's provisions were written in November 1979 and November 1980, respectively, and are repeatedly referenced above. In an April 11, 2001 interview, Contor noted that while conservation groups were strong supporters of NPS proposals to establish park units with large acreages, they were less enthusiastic about guaranteeing traditional "park values" within the park units. According to Contor, conservation leaders were willing to sacrifice these park values in order to obtain large park units; they evidently hoped, by doing so, that they would be able to tighten up the subsistence provisions at some later date.