[GATOR NAVY]

Long story worth the read. Some of the folks that brought us the pro-Murkowski Super PAC "Alaskans Standing Together".

[SWAMPSNIPER]

Carpetbaggers are drawn to money like flies to poop!

[kbennkc]

Old story with all the minority preference programs. The same contractors who had been bidding and competing in the market place for years found it made sense to reconfigure there business model to have a minority figured head. The result? Cries of fraud and more victim-hood and identity politics. I know the tribes in Utah, Colorado,and Idaho have had plenty of members willing to lend their name and protected status to a real business entrepreneur in return for what amounts to a shakedown. You can't con an honest man.

[liberty or death]

In 1982 I worked around the newly founded SeaAlaska corp and the native bosses. All dressed to the nines and driving the best at that time. By the late 80’s these sames bosses were walking to work in the same suits now extremely faded so they could vote in new management. Most of it was white executives with oil and timber experience. These executives turned this bankrupt corp into a gold mine again and then the same guys who sucked it dry wanted it back and were crying racism. No idea what happened because we left but Murkowski and Stephens were in the middle and playing both sides for votes.

[PIF]

Actually, the opening premise of the story is variously wrong or misleading.

The 19th century white settlers (one is lead to believe by omission) not were Americans, but were actually Russians from Russia.

The 1971 law was not "intended to right the historic wrongs and compensate natives", but passed at Nixon's behest to settle the legal questions surrounding the status of the Indians in AK, since, unlike their Lower 48 counterparts, were not under Treaties with the US government. There was at the time Treaty Law, but Aboriginals (as the AK tribes were called ) had no extra legal rights, but claimed them.

Nixon's aim, as I recall, was to bring all the scattered tribes in the US fully into citizenship, ending their separate ward status, reservations, and the Treaties. That is, he wanted to make them all equal in law to everyone else.

I cannot recall how (in case law) the former Aboriginal tribes came to their present Native Corporation status, but the upshot was that for certain compensations, they would make no further claims in law concerning their "rights".

Like all good intentions foisted off on us by the government, no good came out of it for anyone:

The native corporations were managed by the same families which had ruled the bands under Aboriginal status, leading to the abuses related in the story. They were simply either unprepared or unwilling to manage;

The Lower 48 Treaty Tribes ceased on the rulings to further their own interests, and so we got the legal concept that Indians were "created" in the US by the Great Spirit (upon which rests ALL their claims), casinos (whose funding and revenue remains secret), Special Masters (governing use of natural resources), Treaty "rights" trumping Constitutional Rights, continuation of the nontaxable reservation income, and so on.

All of this lead to widespread abuse by the ruling families, inter-tribal battles for control of the windfall monies, wholesale destruction of natural resources (salmon and timber) for individual profit, the destruction and criminalizing of the West Coast commercial salmon fisheries and fishermen (and their families as well as the lose of many lives), the continued use of non-ruling family tribal individuals as examples of poverty (requiring still more money to pour into the tribes to be use by the ruling families as they saw fit - new houses and such for themselves). The list of abuses goes on and on...

We all lost.

PS: all of this "wonderfulness" was brought to you and me by the same people who run the Democratic Party today: G. Soros, Peter Lewis, the Tides Foundation, the Pew Foundation, the Ford Foundation., the Audubon Society, the Sierra Club, various land preservation groups, and other NGOs.