AFN presents subsistence listening-session findings that will guide its 2026-2030 plan

An attorney working with the Alaska Federation of Natives laid out options Friday for changing how subsistence is governed in Alaska, and asked the group's members to help decide which ones AFN should pursue.

The options Jaeleen Kookesh described at AFN's convention in Anchorage range from asking Congress to repeal the 1971 provision that ended Aboriginal hunting and fishing rights, to rewriting federal law to create an Alaska Native priority, to working with the state on a constitutional amendment.

Kookesh said AFN's board decided to hold listening sessions around the state this year after Gov. Mike Dunleavy asked it to help appoint a task force to amend the state constitution to align with federal subsistence law. The board decided it was time to be more proactive and hear from communities, she said.

AFN Vice President Nikki Stoops summarized what those sessions heard. Participants called for greater tribal authority, co-management, stronger tribal representation on boards and commissions, and use of traditional knowledge. The findings will inform AFN's subsistence plan for 2026 to 2030, she said.

Kookesh, an attorney with the law firm Van Ness Feldman, walked delegates through how Alaska got its split system. The 1971 Alaska Native Claims Settlement Act replaced Aboriginal land title with 44 million acres of land, but "it extinguished our Aboriginal hunting and fishing rights. And it didn't specifically replace that with clear legal rights to our hunting and fishing," she said.

In 1980, the Alaska National Interest Lands Conservation Act, known as ANILCA, created a subsistence priority on federal land for rural residents, Native and non-Native. Congress had trouble adopting an Alaska Native preference, Kookesh said. The state managed the rural priority from 1982 until 1989, when the Alaska Supreme Court ruled that it violated the state constitution, which says fish and wildlife are "reserved to the people for common use." Since then, the federal government has managed subsistence on federal land and the state everywhere else.

More than 30 attempts to amend the state constitution to bring it in line with ANILCA have failed, Kookesh said. Kookesh is the daughter of the late state Sen. Albert Kookesh, a longtime AFN co-chair. Kookesh grew up in Angoon but now lives in Juneau, so under the rural priority she has none.

In Congress, she said, the options include repealing the 1971 extinguishment clause, amending ANILCA to create "an Alaska Native priority or a rural plus Native priority," and bringing land owned by Alaska Native corporations, now treated as private and managed by the state, under the federal priority. Federal agencies could also order co-management or change the definition of rural, she said, though that would take "an administration that's willing to work with you."

At the state level, a constitutional amendment "might work if we worked with the state," she said. She also raised state management, with conditions such as keeping a federal board to oversee it. "I know a lot of people are very opposed to state management, but just, just food for thought," she said.

AFN is asking communities to help it narrow a broad subsistence resolution it adopted a couple of years ago into priorities.