A brief history of
The Council of Athabascan Tribal Governments
page 4

The best either law managed to come up with was the ANILCA rural subsistence priority, which today is under strong attack by some sport hunters and their legislators who loudly proclaim their “equal rights” to the traditional resources of Native peoples.

Determined to exercise as much management over their traditional lands as possible, the CATG village tribal governments have been organizing Natural Resource Departments. The effort got off the ground when CATG received a $30,000 dollar pilot-project grant from the First Nations Development Institute Eagle Staff Fund in 1995. Prior to ANCSA, Stevens Village had petitioned the Federal Government to protect one million acres traditionally used by them as tribal trust lands. Instead, ANCSA removed title of 80 percent of those lands from Native ownership, and placed all but 600 acres of the remaining 20 percent not in the tribe, but in ANCSA corporations.

The Trans-Alaska Pipeline was constructed through the Stevens Village homeland, along with the highway built to service it. As a result, Stevens Village has felt the impacts of increasing numbers of people using their traditional lands and resources, and trespassing even on village corporation lands. In response, village leaders had been consulting the elders, and had already drafted a traditional land management plan.

Stevens Village Leads

All the CATG tribes agreed Stevens Village should receive the first $30,000. With it, they bought a boat and funded a Natural Resources director, who attended training sessions and set up the department. A year later, the Eagle Staff Fund awarded CATG a $450,000 grant. By now, the Stevens Village tribal government was operating Natural Resources on its own, through P.L. 93-638 funding. Other tibes soon followed the lead of Stevens Village and formed their own Natural Resources Departments.

Working closely with CATG’s Natural Resources department, the tribes conduct their own surveys regarding the local harvest of fish and game. CATG has hired its own biologists. Information gathered is digitized, entered into a Gerographical Information System and output in maps that can prove vital to the management of traditional resources.

Much of the traditional land of the CATG villages lies within the Yukon Flats National Wildlife Refuge, which encompasses 8.5 million acres of federal lands and 2.7 million acres of selected and conveyed lands.

Citing the appropriate federal regulations, CATG has entered negotiations with USFWS with the goal of entering into an agreement with that agency that would allow CATG to oversee Refuge functions.

This would not only create jobs for local people, but would improve fish and game management on the Yukon Flats. Currently, most of the USFWS jobs are held by people living in Fairbanks. It makes sense to fill as many of those jobs as possible with people who call the Yukon Flats home; people who know their way around the country. Oftentimes in the summer, college students from far away places come up to take on temporary jobs that could just as well be filled by the youth of the Yukon Flats.

History, page 5