U.S. Sen. Lisa Murkowski, R-Alaska, in an effort to ensure that the Alaska Native Claims Settlement Act continues to serve Alaska, introduced S. 3004, the Alaska Native Claims Settlement Improvement Act. The bill would settle both new and old issues with implementation of the 45-year-old law and other federal statutes affecting Alaska Native communities.

“This bill will help Alaska Native communities through common-sense solutions to real issues,” Murkowski said. “Ensuring that the federal government lives up to the promises made to Alaska Natives is a top priority of mine and I look forward to working with my colleagues in advancing this legislation.”

Murkowski’s bill would:

• Allow the Ukpeagvik Inupiat Corporation (UIC) to obtain gravel to be used in construction in Barrow from underneath its other surface estate;
• Grant Shishmaref a 300-foot easement to allow a road to be built between Shishmaref and Ear Mountain, Alaska;
• Further U.S. Forest Service acquisition of lands at Cube Cove from Shee Atika (surface) and Sealaska (subsurface) so that 22,890 acres will be protected inside the Admiralty Island National Monument;
• Help Cook Inlet Region Inc. have options from which to select the outstanding land owed to it under ANCSA;
• Allow Kaktovik to select its remaining lands, Canyon Village to select lands at its original northeast location, and Nagamut’s Southwest Natives to select lands closer to their traditional hunting sites;
• Provide urban corporations for the five towns – Ketchikan, Wrangell, Petersburg, Tenakee, and Haines – and more than 3,400 shareholders in Southeast that were unjustly left out of being represented by the terms of the original act;
• Allow Alaska Native corporations, as corporations, to benefit from specified existing grant programs for historic, tribal, and grave preservation so they can better maintain the historical and cultural sites they selected under ANCSA;
• Improve the selection process so that Alaska Natives who served during the Vietnam War are eligible to select land allotments to help make good on a 1998 commitment by the government to provide them 160 acres to honor those who served their country in war. So far, because of the complexities of the 1998 act, only 432 Alaska Natives have received land, representing just 13 percent of those who served during the war; and
• Provide for the Secretary of the Interior to convene a meeting of the shareholders of the 13^th Regional Corporation for the purpose of the election of a board of directors, thereby providing a process for Alaska Natives who had given up their aboriginal land claims and moved to the Lower 48 to reconstitute the 13th Regional Corporation, which was dissolved under state law when it lapsed into insolvency.

More information on S. 3004, the Alaska Native Claims Settlement Improvement Act, is available on the Senate Energy and Natural Resources Committee website.