A tiny Copper River village corporation is quietly renovating federal courthouses across Tennessee

A company owned by one of Alaska's smallest Native village corporations is building a steady business fixing up federal courthouses — nearly 3,000 miles away, across Tennessee.

Chitina Diversified Services just picked up a roughly $129,000 job to renovate offices at a federal courthouse in Nashville, work that runs through late November. It's the latest in a growing run of Tennessee courthouse contracts for the firm: a $7.5 million repair job at the federal courthouse in Knoxville, smaller work in Memphis and Jackson this month, and at least two more orders at the Knoxville courthouse earlier this year, fixing water damage in January and a basement corridor in June.

The company behind that streak is a long way from a courtroom in Nashville. Chitina Diversified is the federal-contracting arm of Chitina Native Corporation, a village corporation with roughly 260 shareholders based in Chitina — a tiny community at mile 34 of the Edgerton Highway, in the heart of Wrangell-St. Elias National Park. Once a copper-railroad town that emptied out to near-ghost-town status after the mines closed in 1938, Chitina today is known mostly as one of the best dipnetting spots in Alaska, where the corporation runs an RV park and a campsite along the Copper River. The federal contracting is a different line of business entirely — construction and project management for government agencies, much of it done through the Small Business Administration's 8(a) program for disadvantaged firms — with the earnings flowing back to the corporation's Native shareholders.