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Authors: John McPhee

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The legislature, in the end, is to pick a name for the new capital. Meanwhile, astonishingly, almost no one shows interest in what the city might be like. I guess I have talked with several hundred Alaskans about the moving of the capital, and among them virtually no one has offered any concept, any vision, of how the new city might appear. Virtually no one but Harris. He had thought about it a lot—all through the Taku winds, the signature gathering, the days beyond the vote. “The capital should sit overlooking a lake,” he said. “The lake should be large enough for float planes. You dock and walk to the Capitol. It is a rustic Capitol that fits the setting of the country. It is a state capital and a sports capital—winter and summer sports. From it you can see Mount McKinley. There is no big gold dome. That's of the past. It should be built of concrete and natural rock—something that will blend in with wilderness. Industry and farming will be all around it. It should be west of the Susitna, on the projected road to McGrath.”
 
 
 
Willie Hensley, west of the Susitna, and high on the tundra of Little Peters Hills, looked down across the valley and said quietly that he hoped the work he was doing as chairman of the Capital Site Selection Committee would count for something, hoped the group was not wasting its time. Somehow, he made himself heard without raising his voice, despite the big helicopter standing by, shaking and muttering, a hundred yards away. “One wants to think that one's energy is concentrated on something worth doing,” he went on. If the people insisted on a new capital in a wild site, at least he meant to find a good one. Six possible sites were visible from the hill—six “footprints”—including one on Blair Lake (in the low ground between the Chulitna and the Susitna), one along Deep Creek (below the Peters Hills), and one on Peters Creek (among
swales of open spruce) right before him. Favorably impressed by this hill-and-river, rolling, forested land, he said as much, and added that, for all his travels, he had never been in this part of Alaska.
To borrow a term used by some Alaskans, Willie Hensley is a Brooks Brothers native. In recent years, a class of native has developed, or has at least increased, that has seen and experienced a much wider segment of the world than nearly everyone else in, say, Kivalina, Kotzebue, or Unalakleet. In an old military barracks below Mount Edgecumbe, across the harbor from Sitka, is a high school staffed by the Bureau of Indian Affairs, and that is where in Willie's time the qualified Eskimo children of Kotzebue would ordinarily be sent. That was far enough from home—eleven hundred miles—but Willie went off on an educational odyssey a great deal more exotic than that. Straight out of the sod houses and the riverine tent sites of Eskimo Arctic Alaska, Willie went to high school in Tennessee. To prepare him for the experience, he was indoctrinated—age fourteen, just off the plane from Kotzebue—in Myrtle, Mississippi. If he did not previously have what has become his outreaching sense of the absurd, he surely acquired it then. A town too small to be a crossroads, Myrtle was somewhere between Corinth and Oxford—in the northeastern corner of Yoknapatawpha. The first thing that struck him, of course, was the heat—the amazing, breath-stopping heat—and he wondered who could long endure such a climate. But before he had a chance to suffocate in that way he was smothered in another. He was given what he described years later as “a hell of a dose of Southern Baptist rural religious outlook.” It was a Baptist preacher in Kotzebue who had arranged Willie's travels. The preacher's parents lived in Myrtle. They had agreed to take care of this fine young Eskimo and show him the ways of America. Anxious to please, Willie became, in his own phrase, “a temporary Southern white.” “It was 1956. There was hardly a ripple of change yet—of desegregation. I
knew no history of the black problem. I knew nothing about slavery. I couldn't understand the situation. I couldn't believe that people would work for three dollars a day in a field. I wanted to talk to them, but I got the impression I should not.” Instead, he was exposed to a battery of preachers. Myrtle was “a preachin' center,” and foremost among its congested clergy was the celebrated Brother Ray, who went around in a Cadillac and wore overalls. Brother Ray's fundamentalism overwhelmed Willie, and in a religious sense he has never recovered. He does not customarily go to church. “No.” He grins. “But some of my best friends are preachers.”
He went to Harrison-Chilhowee Baptist Academy, in eastern Tennessee. (“It was in the foothills of the Smokies and it was very beautiful. I couldn't believe such sculptured hills.”) He saw Alaska—Kotzebue—only once in those four years. Then, in 1960, he entered the University of Alaska, in Fairbanks. Halfway through, he transferred to George Washington, in the District of Columbia, where he studied Russian (and managed to see Poland and Russia on a trip sponsored by the Experiment in International Living) and got his B.A. in political science. Doing summer work in Washington for the Bureau of Indian Affairs, he “met a lot of Lower Forty-eight Indians,” and became interested in their legal relationship to their aboriginal land. It was a subject that had already been much on his mind in regard to Kotzebue. In the nineteen-fifties, the federal government had ruled off land there in lots and sold it at auction. Eskimos did not have enough money or understand auctions. Doctors, nurses, teachers, and Civil Aeronautics Administration personnel bought the property. “Eskimos had owned the property communally for ten thousand years. Now the C.A.A. types owned lots. That is how I got interested. Everybody had a way to get property but the native people.” Missionaries, using church land, rented lots to the natives. “You are responsible for the hereafter, not profits,” Hensley said to them. “Turn the land over to the natives.” The missionaries had not acted on the suggestion.
Hensley did graduate work in business and took a course in Constitutional law at the University of Alaska. For the law course he wrote an extensive paper on who owned Alaskan land. Specifically, it was called “What Rights To Land Have The Alaska Natives?” and it traced from the Alaska purchase onward the uncertain title and unrealized claims of his people. The root question was, do the Alaskan natives, by dint of aboriginal use and occupancy, have special claim to Alaskan land, and, if so, how much land, and in how wide a range around their established villages? The 1867 purchase treaty and subsequent acts of the United States Congress did not ignore the point but left it in shadow. Now, in 1966, the Eskimos, Aleuts, and Indians of Alaska were increasingly demanding a settlement. Hensley wrote his paper in May of that year, and, drawn more than ever to the subject, inevitably became drawn into politics. He helped form the Alaska Federation of Natives, a group whose efforts were dedicated to a settlement of native claims. And that fall—age twenty-four—he ran for the state legislature and was elected.
Stewart Udall, Secretary of the Interior, reacted to the native-claims situation by suspending until the question was settled all transactions in land that was under his control. He controlled nearly all of Alaska. The U.S. Constitution and several hundred treaties made with natives elsewhere in the country tended to suggest that Congress was liable if native property was abridged. In order to be free of liability, Congress would have to extinguish native title, specifically and consciously. In days gone by, the way to do that was to extinguish the native. The treatment of Indians in the Lower Forty-eight was hardly forgotten, and among the factors that were gaining momentum in the Alaska natives' favor white guilt was not the least. Other points intensified, too. The State of Alaska, having been promised a hundred and three million acres of land in the act that made Alaska a state, needed the money that would be derivable from the land. The state wished to get on with the process of selection, but what land could it select with the
native claims unsettled? Oil companies, pending native-claims settlement, had nine hundred million dollars' worth of questionable leases, cloudily titled. Moreover, to protect the native interest a court granted an injunction against the building of the Trans-Alaska Pipeline pending a settlement of native claims. Pressure for settlement then came from labor unions looking toward pipeline jobs. Conservationists got into it, too, because the matter of preservation of lands in Alaska was so close in nature to the native-claims question that it more or less had to be dealt with at the same time. These combined pressures, kept at the highest levels possible by the maneuvering of Willie Hensley and his native colleagues, yielded the Alaska Native Claims Settlement Act of 1971.
When the natives settled for one billion dollars and forty million acres of land—much of it likely to contain gold, silver, and other minerals, and oil and gas—their claims were thus extinguished. This was perhaps the great, final, and retributive payment for all of American history's native claims—an attempt to extinguish something more than title. The settlement suggests not only principal but interest as well on twenty decades of national guilt. The natives of Alaska were suddenly, collectively rich. Along tribal and cultural lines, the state was divided into twelve aboriginal regions, and in each a native corporation was established to hold and invest the new wealth. The Sealaska Corporation, for example, would handle the share of the Tlingit-Haida tribes, in the southeastern archipelago. Doyon, Ltd., would be the holding company for the Athapaskan interior. NANA Regional Corporation, which grew out of the Northwest Alaska Native Association, would direct the funds of the people of Kotzebue and of ten other villages in the Kobuk Valley. In the Alaska lexicon, a new synonym for “native” was “stockholder,” and NANA'S five thousand stockholders would receive in incremental payments sixty-two million dollars and 2.3 million acres of land. The jets of Alaska Airlines and Wien Air Alaska were soon a third to half full of natives zipping around the state on business—for nothing, of course,
prevented one corporation from investing or operating in another's region. The corporations were, as Hensley put it, “miniconglomerates.” NANA, for example, set up a development corporation that started, among other things, a protection agency and a construction firm. They won a contract for all pipeline security north of the Yukon, another to supply labor to pipeline pumping stations, another to build a high school in Kivalina (on the coast of northwest Alaska), another to build a new control tower at Anchorage International Airport. Willie Hensley, it seems almost needless to say, became a founding member of the NANA board of directors, a member of the executive committee, and president of two of NANA'S principal companies. That is what is meant by Brooks Brothers native. John Sackett, of Doyon. Roy Huhndorf, of Cook Inlet. They do not travel just in Alaska. They are often in San Francisco, New York, the District of Columbia. Needing expertise beyond the attorneys of Anchorage, they use the finest and dearest of Wall Street and Washington law firms to construct and straighten their affairs.
Jade Mountain, in the Kobuk Valley, belongs to NANA. Jade Mountain is a mountain of jade. One day in Anchorage, Hensley had strewn some before me on his desk in NANA'S offices. It was exquisite stone (the state gem), polished, viridian, in blocks and wafers, from the NANA Jade Products Division. “I hope that this jade will be used liberally in the new capital,” he said, and he added, with a subtle smile, “because it is so beautiful, not just because we own it.” And now, as he stood on the hilltop looking east toward Talkeetna and places where his Alaskan jade city might rise, it occurred to me that Willie Hensley—sooner or later—might live in the new capital, in a jade-columned mansion near the center of the town.
 
 
 
If you order a glass of beer in Alaska, it is likely to be modest in all ways but cost, which can run upward from a dollar. If you
order a couple of eggs with toast, the bill may be three dollars and fifty cents. If you order a new capital, just the choosing of a site for it will run you a million and a half dollars, but the price is in line with the beer and the eggs, and seems on the whole accepted. Words are what the money has bought, in the main—words by the troy ounce, delivered in Consultaspeak.
BOOK: Coming into the Country
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