I was listening to a couple of Native leaders the other day. (I won't refer to them as elders because, hey, they are my contemporaries).
"Molly Hootch was the biggest mistake the state ever made."
"Yup. Complete disaster."
Just a few years ago this would have been heresy. Molly Hootch was the named plaintiff in a lawsuit filed by Natives around the time oil started flowing in the pipeline. At the time rural Alaskans had to either send their kids off to boarding school or raise them as illiterates. Basically, the settlement required the state to build and operate schools in almost every village.
So we have built and operated tiny schools for tiny villages. By and large these schools are way too small to deliver an adequate education. Thousands of Alaskan children are still "left behind," and we are still litigating over the solution.
I have been a planning and economic development consultant throughout rural Alaska. I think Molly Hootch has become a metaphor for the way the state deals with issues in the Bush. Billions of dollars and 37 years after the Alaska Native Claims Settlement Act, life in many small villages is still not viable.
A village of 200 or 300 people, only half of whom are adults, cannot offer adequate education or health care. It can't provide law enforcement or effective local government. There are few social services, minimal intervention for drug and alcohol abuse, domestic violence and sexual assault.
Most villages are so small that food, fuel -- anything shipped in -- is unbelievably expensive. There are few jobs and no real prospects for the future. Some villages are eroding into the sea.
As a result, many Natives are leaving the village for the city, where they face a different set of problems. Despite all the state has done, and all that rural Alaskans have done, most small villages will probably not be around after another generation or so.
There is a better way. Out of 270-some villages, the state has identified 18 that would be viable centers for new boroughs. We should be concentrating our resources in those communities.
Let's start with a regional magnet school that fosters the local Native culture while fully preparing its graduates for college, the military or a good job. Open an Internet learning center for vocational programs from the university.
Set up a borough government, even if the state has to cover the cost for a while, and empower local people to make their own public decisions. Encourage the Native regional corporation and nonprofit to move some jobs back home, so shareholders can make money and still participate in their subsistence lifestyle.
Get the Native Health Service to put in a clinic, one with a doctor and a dentist. Station a trooper. Concentrate social services like alcohol and drug programs. Get the Denali Commission to focus its spending for water, sewer, power and other utilities in these communities, and then build good solid housing.
These will become magnet communities where rural Alaskans can get the education, services and jobs they need for a successful life, surrounded and enriched by their own culture and natural environment.
There are already precedents. Barrow, Kotzebue and Bethel have become magnet communities, though not yet in all the respects I'm proposing here. On their own initiative, the King Island Eskimos relocated their whole village to Nome back in the '50s. They're still King Islanders.
A program like this would use carrots, not sticks. It would not require more financial and human resources, just a focus on the goal and a concentration of our existing resources. It would be less expensive and more effective than our present scattershot efforts.
Alaska probably cannot guarantee to its Native peoples that their cultures will remain viable for another century, or even another generation. But if we focus our efforts we will maximize the possibility of success.
Kirk Wickersham is a lawyer and real estate broker in Anchorage. He can be contacted at kirkwickersham@aol.com.
By KIRK WICKERSHAM