Chickaloon members refuse to sign pact

MAT-SU — Representatives from more than 80 federally recognized tribes met Wednesday in Anchorage to sign a so-called Millennium Agreement with the state of Alaska, but Chickaloon tribal members attended with protest signs, not pens, in hand.

"What they're asking from the tribes makes no sense, except to feel that they've got to be in control," Athabascan Chief Gary Harrison said Friday.

Harrison was a member of the State-Tribal Relations Team (STRT) whose members worked together to come up with the Millennium Agreement in a process that was often wrought with arguments about certain points, he said.

One of the primary arguing points, Harrison said, was over what seems to be an innocuous line in the agreement's preamble.

The preamble, in section three, states, "Each party to this agreement acknowledges the sovereignty of the others."

Sovereignty is the key word in that phrase. Harrison, along with other tribal leaders opposed to this portion of the agreement, argues that the state has no sovereignty, while the tribes have sovereignty that was given to them directly through the federal government.

Harrison said he asked the state officials participating in the negotiations to produce evidence showing they had been given sovereignty, but none was produced, so he began researching on his own what powers had been given to the state.

"In none of those documents (the U.S. and state constitutions and other documents discussing the rights and powers of states) do I find that there was any sovereignty turned over to the state," Harrison said.

Tribal administrator Nick Begich said he believes the state, by claiming it has sovereignty, is mirroring the actions of the southern states during the Civil War. The southern states, he said, asserted they were sovereign entities and, therefore, could hold slaves and otherwise do as they chose.

"It would be inappropriate to recognize a state in a way that even the federal government has not recognized a state," Begich said. "We just can't do it."

"They say you're sovereign on one hand, but we're still not going to let you fish?" Harrison said, bringing up subsistence — an issue that has long been a point of contention between the state and several Alaska tribes.

Bruce Botelho, Alaska's attorney general, said Harrison is using sovereignty in a different manner than it was intended in this agreement. Sovereignty, Botelho said, is simply the right to govern.

"The use of the term sovereign does not define the breadth of powers any individual government has," Botelho said.

Local governments, he said, are given some measure of sovereignty, although their sovereignty is more limited than the sovereignty bestowed upon a state. Likewise, the sovereignty of Alaska tribes is limited, Botelho said.

He added that Harrison had been provided with several documents verifying the state's sovereignty, including U.S. Supreme Court decisions related to the sovereignty of individual states.

Local tribal leaders are not the only ones opposed to the agreement.

Faye Ewan, who was chosen as a representative from the Kluti-Kaah Native Village near Copper Center to serve on the STRT, happened to be visiting with Harrison Friday and agreed to speak about the issue as well.

Ewan said she was very upset by the wording of the agreement in its final draft.

She served with Harrison on the Accord Committee, which had made significant changes to the wording of the document, but those changes disappeared.

"We argued all the way ‘til the end that we don't recognize their sovereignty," Ewan said, "but they still put it in the document. They went to Juneau and they just revised the heck out of it."

"That's not true," Botelho responded. He noted that Ewan did not attend every meeting and some of the changes she saw in the final document may have happened in those missed meetings.

"No one played a fast one," he said.

Ewan said she had suggested to her tribal council that it wait to sign the agreement until after seeing how the tribes signing it were affected by it.

Others from her village attended the conference and decided the document should be signed, however, and Ewan reluctantly added her signature.

"I was the last one to sign," Ewan said.

She said she still feels guilty for signing the agreement.

"I don't feel comfortable with it," Ewan said. "I feel like I just betrayed my people."

Although the document states it is not admissible in any court of law, Ewan said it is a legitimate document at the United Nations level — and the document will say the tribes who have signed recognize the state as sovereign — which is not what Ewan or other dissenters would like to see put forward.

Botelho said he did not know whether the document would be of any interest to the United Nations, but wording in the agreement does not allow the state any more power than it already has — nor does it allow any power to be taken away from the tribes.

"I think we've done everything we can to dispel that," Botelho said.

Harrison said although he didn't sign the document, he felt some good has come from the negotiations between state and tribal officials.

Talking about the agreement, he said, resulted in increased communication between tribes and with state officials.

"There [were] a lot of things, I think, that came out of it," Harrison said. "A lot of us did get to talk to [state officials] on a human level. Before it was just in court and no one would talk to us. It was crazy."

He added that he wasn't completely opposed to the agreement — just that he couldn't sign it in its present form.

At the gathering to sign the agreement, 65 tribes agreed to sign. Botelho said he had heard bad weather had prevented around 20 tribal representatives from the Bush from traveling to Anchorage for the signing.

He hoped those tribes and others, in the future, will sign the document to help open lines of communication.

"My hope is that what we are able, as a state, to do with tribes that did sign on, that other tribes will look back and see the value and want to sign on," Botelho said.