Afognak Native Corporation buys majority stake in Weaver Bros. trucking companies

Weaver Bros. has been moving freight around Alaska since 1946, thirteen years before statehood. Heavy haul, fuel, dry bulk, refrigerated loads, the specialized work that does not fit on a normal trailer. The Doyle family has owned it since 1978.

As of this month a majority of it belongs to Afognak Native Corporation, through a subsidiary called Afognak Commercial Group. The deal also covers Doyle's Fuel Service and Doyle Transport. The parent company becomes Afognak-Weaver Logistics, but the three businesses keep their names, their operations and their president: James "Jimmy" Doyle stays on to run them.

Doyle said he wanted the next chapter to be with "an owner who is rooted in Alaska and here for the long haul."

Afognak is rooted in a specific place, and a hard piece of history. It represents more than a thousand Alutiiq shareholders descended from the village of Afognak on Afognak Island, where people have lived for some 7,500 years. The 1964 Good Friday earthquake and the tsunami that followed destroyed the village. Survivors relocated and built Port Lions. The corporation formed in 1977 out of the merger of two village corporations created by the Alaska Native Claims Settlement Act, and it now holds 248,000 acres in the Kodiak Archipelago.

Most of Afognak's business has been federal contracting, through its subsidiary Alutiiq. Buying a trucking company is a move in the other direction. "We're investing in a proven Alaska business, not changing it," said Dan Corbett, Afognak's chief executive, who described the purchase as expanding the corporation's commercial work alongside its government services.

Terms were not disclosed. The companies announced the deal themselves, and nothing beyond that announcement is on the record yet.