Chickaloon tribe gets $742,993

August 16, 2005

DAWN DE BUSK/Frontiersman reporter

CHICKALOON - Jennifer McGill says the Chickaloon Tribal Village wants to develop industry, but on a small scale. She envisions a forestry business that would involve some of the residents making and selling furniture from locally harvested wood.

A $742,993 federal Administration of Native American Indians grant, to be distributed over the next three years, will help the village reach this goal by creating a comprehensive plan based on the local ecosystem, said McGill, environmental specialist for the tribe.

"We want something more sustainable than large-scale industry development. Also, it's what the community wants," she said. "Essentially, it's a land-use and economic-development planning grant that involves public input. There are lots of ideas out there. This plan will help coalesce some of those ideas, and move them forward."

The environmental protection office first heard about the federal money when KNPR-FM radio contacted McGill for an interview in late July, she said. At the time, McGill hadn't yet received the letter confirming the grant had been awarded. That letter arrived around Aug. 1, she said.

One of the initial tasks of the land-planning project will be to decide which area to focus on, she said.

"We want to include as much of the Matanuska River watershed as possible. That's a logical area. It's an ecological unit that makes sense," she said.

Upon release of the money, the tribe will go through the hiring process to find a contractor to conduct the study and create an all-encompassing land-use plan.

McGill said she's been working with the same group that assisted First Nations in Canada with a similar land-use plan.

The firm that gets the contract would design an ecological map with aerial photo analysis that shows, for example, what the vegetation looks like in certain areas. It would also map out tribal-owned acreage as well as what types of terrain exist in those areas.

Some of the entities invited to be involved in the public process are Sutton and Chickaloon community councils and the Mat-Su Borough.

When the Chickaloon tribe was applying for the grant, the borough offered its support and future funding to help with the land-use plan, McGill said.

The budget, approved a couple of months ago, includes some money for studying the Matanuska River watershed, according to Mat-Su Assembly Member Lynne Woods.

"I had the opportunity to attend a workshop on forest management in Chickaloon. The approach was to address the forest as an entire unit. Not only looking at economic issues, but at what the forest needs to sustain itself and how the community uses the forest," Woods said.

This week, ANAI Commissioner Quanah Crossland-Stamps will visit Southeast, the Chickaloon tribe and other Alaska tribes that have benefited from grants that are now being wrapped up.

At a later date, in Anchorage, Crossland-Stamps will host a round-table luncheon with current grantees, McGill said.

The Chickaloon Environ-mental Protection Program is finishing a three-year grant that helped develop a water-quality monitoring program. There are now nine sites where water quality is recorded, she said. That money also helped strengthen tribal environmental ordinances, McGill said.

If a land-use plan based on an ecological map had existed when the coal-bed methane issues came up, McGill said the tribe would have had something concrete to illustrate why drilling wasn't a good idea.

"We'll have a sound, scientific basis for why things should or shouldn't be done. The plan can help inform the decision makers," she said.

Contact Dawn De Busk at

552-2252, or dawn.debusk@ frontiersman.com.