A Bering Strait Native corporation will staff anti-trafficking work for the State Department

A subsidiary of Bering Straits Native Corporation has won a $647,186 State Department contract to fund a research analyst working on the department's anti-human-trafficking efforts, over one year beginning in September.

Bering Straits is the regional Alaska Native corporation for the Bering Strait and Norton Sound region of Northwest Alaska, headquartered in Nome and owned by more than 8,200 Alaska Native shareholders — Inupiaq, St. Lawrence Island Yupik and Central Yup'ik people from one of the most culturally diverse regions in the state. Like other Alaska Native corporations, it does business largely through federal contracting subsidiaries, and the earnings support its shareholders and the corporation's mission of economic development while protecting its lands and heritage. When one of those subsidiaries wins federal work, the money supports Native communities in the region.

For a contractor of this size, the analyst position is a small piece of business. Through its subsidiaries, Bering Straits has drawn more than $1.8 billion in federal work over the past two decades, and this one firm alone holds far bigger contracts — tens of millions of dollars for security-guard services, federal IT modernization and mail handling across several agencies.

The contract was awarded without competition, through a federal small-business program that lets Alaska Native corporation subsidiaries receive certain contracts directly, without bidding against other firms — a provision Congress created to direct federal dollars toward Native-owned companies.