A sacred Athabascan site stranded inside Denali for 47 years moves closer to return

For nearly half a century, a place sacred to the Athabascan people has sat inside Denali National Park, owed to Alaska Natives but never handed over. On Wednesday, the effort to return it cleared its first real hurdle in Congress.

Geese House is not a building. It's a natural rock formation — a deep chamber ringed by slabs of red stone, in the remote northwest corner of the park near Lake Minchumina — used for generations and woven through the oral traditions of the Upper Kantishna region. After Congress passed the Alaska Native Claims Settlement Act, Doyon, Limited, the Interior region's Native corporation, worked with Alaska Native Elders to identify culturally significant sites it was owed under the law. Geese House was one of them, formally selected in 1978.

Then the land was drawn away. In 1980, the Alaska National Interest Lands Conservation Act established Denali's modern boundaries and swept the site inside the park before the conveyance was ever completed. It has been under federal management ever since. Doyon later tried to reclaim it administratively, but the National Park Service determined it lacked the authority — only Congress could finish what ANCSA started.

The Senate Energy and Natural Resources Committee took that step Wednesday, favorably reporting S. 4399, the Geese House Site Conveyance Act, sponsored by U.S. Sen. Lisa Murkowski. It would transfer about 21,750 acres to Doyon, to be managed by and for Athabascan people, with mining prohibited and the land barred from passing to anyone but the United States. The parcel's size drew questions, but Murkowski said it is deliberate: the surrounding acreage is a buffer, sized to keep the exact location of the sacred site from being revealed. It amounts to about 0.36 percent of the six-million-acre park and preserve.

The measure advanced on a party-line vote, which Murkowski called disheartening for what she considers a noncontroversial correction. The objection, she said, was not to the conveyance itself but to removing land from the federal estate without pairing it with other conservation measures. Sen. Dan Sullivan is a cosponsor, and Rep. Nick Begich has introduced a companion bill in the House. Murkowski said she hopes for agreement before this Congress ends — closing, at last, a claim that has outlasted many of the Elders who first identified the site.