Story by KNBA's Rhonda McBride
As the deadline for public comment approaches, the Alaska Federation of Natives is pulling out all the stops to block a national sport hunting and fishing group’s push to reform the federal subsistence board.
This comes after Safari Club International successfully petitioned the U.S. Interior and Agriculture Departments to review federal subsistence management policies.
Last month, the Interior Department announced a 60-day scoping period, or review, on federal subsistence management.
AFN will hold a webinar Tuesday afternoon to give Native hunters and fishers an update on the status of subsistence management in Alaska and explain why it believes the Safari Club proposals pose a serious threat to the Native subsistence way of life.
Attorney Jaelene Kookesh, a longtime legal counsel for the Sealaska native corporation, is one of the presenters. She currently is senior legal counsel at the Van Ness Feldman firm. Kookesh says many Alaska Natives were elated last week, when the U.S. Supreme Court decided not to take up the State of Alaska’s challenge of federal subsistence protections under the Alaska National Interest Lands Conservation Act, or ANILCA. But Kookesh says, the battle goes on.
“It's like you can celebrate for not even for a day, maybe, but then you can say, ‘Okay, we won that, but now we have to comment on this scoping at Department of the Interior,” Kookesh said. “And Safari Club also has draft legislation that they're pushing at Congress. to amend ANILCA. So, we're getting hit at every arm of government, so we can’t rest, even with the win at the Supreme Court.”
Kookesh says she worries most about the Safari Club’s campaign to limit the federal subsistence board to state and federal agency heads, a move that would undo recent efforts to diversify the board.
“So you had five federal agency representatives, who obviously are not subsistence users. And so, we worked very hard to have three tribally nominated members for the Federal Subsistence Board, with real concrete knowledge of these practices. And this just happened within the past year,” Kookesh said.
The Safari Club also wants to change the make-up of the Rural Advisory Councils to give sport hunters and fishers a voice in the process, as well as require federal wildlife managers to defer to the state’s regulatory decisions.
Regina Lennox, Safari Club International’s senior legal counsel, says it is seeking these changes to make ANILCA work as Congress intended.
“I don’t think anything that we have sought in any way diminishes the potential representation of Alaska Native voices anywhere,” Lennox said.
“We're working on behalf of hunters within the state, subsistence and non-subsistence alike, just to ensure that the federal agencies don't overreach,” she said. “Over 60% of Alaska is federal land, and so if you have agencies that are doing the wrong thing and, stepping on the toes of the state and closing down hunting opportunity, that's a lot of acreage that's potentially at risk.”
The Safari Club says one of its top priorities is to protect the resources, which benefits all hunters. It claims the federal government has ignored state data in some of its management decisions to the detriment of wildlife.
AFN and other Native groups say the federal government has done a better job than the state in balancing ANILCA’s rural subsistence priority with conservation.
Kookesh says AFN’s webinar will be a good Subsistence 101 on the decades-long fight to protect subsistence.
“It's been a battle going on for many years, but it kind of goes quiet every once in a while, and then it comes back up again,” Kookesh said. “So right now, we're heavy in the fight again. So, hopefully, we can take some steps forward and not some steps back.”
The deadline for public comment is February 13. AFN’s webinar is at 1:00 p.m., Tuesday, Jan. 20. It will be posted on AFN’s website after its conclusion.
