A Hoonah Corporation Quietly Builds a Cruise Empire

A pair of routine alcohol-license applications filed in Fairbanks this month are, underneath the paperwork, another small step in one of the more remarkable business stories in Southeast Alaska: a village corporation steadily building its own cruise empire on the water it has always called home.

Icy Strait Adventures, the vessel arm of Huna Totem Corporation, has applied to serve alcohol aboard two of its Southeast cruise vessels, Three Kittiwakes and Three Wolves. The detail worth noticing isn't the license — it's the owner. Huna Totem is the Alaska Native village corporation for Hoonah, formed under the 1971 land-claims settlement to benefit more than 1,850 shareholders with ties to Glacier Bay and the Huna Tlingit homeland.

What began in 2004 as a single revitalized salmon cannery — Icy Strait Point, on Chichagof Island — has grown into one of the most respected Native-owned tourism destinations in the world, welcoming more than four million cruise travelers and collecting global port-of-the-year honors along the way. From that anchor, the corporation has pushed outward: new cruise ports at Klawock and Whittier, a downtown Juneau waterfront development, and a tourism joint venture with the Interior's Doyon, Limited that has reached as far as glacier cruises near Portage.

Owning the vessels themselves extends that reach one more link down the chain. For most of the modern era, the cruise business in Southeast was something that happened to Native communities — ships owned elsewhere, passengers passing through. Huna Totem's trajectory inverts that: the dock, the destination, the excursions, and increasingly the boats are owned by the people whose ancestors fished these same waters. A liquor license for a Tlingit-named vessel is a modest thing on its own. As a marker of who now owns the experience, it's the whole story.