At The Aleut Corporation, a promotion is a window into how a Native corporation works

When The Aleut Corporation promoted Theresa Cross to vice president of operations and support services, the announcement read like routine corporate housekeeping. At an Alaska Native regional corporation, though, the people who run day-to-day operations are stewards of something more specific than a balance sheet: a shareholder trust whose beneficiaries are the Unangax̂ people of the Aleutian and Pribilof Islands.

In the new role, Cross takes direct oversight of four of Aleut's Alaska-based subsidiaries while keeping charge of the corporation's internal administration and information-technology functions. She joined Aleut in March 2024 and has moved through a series of operations and shareholder-services roles since, including leading the overhaul of the system that manages the corporation's shareholder records.

To understand why that matters, it helps to know what Aleut is. It is one of the twelve land-based regional corporations created by the Alaska Native Claims Settlement Act of 1971, the sweeping federal law that extinguished aboriginal land claims across Alaska and, instead of reservations, handed Native Alaskans a for-profit corporate model. Each enrolled Native received 100 shares of stock that cannot be sold or traded on any market; ownership passes down through families. Incorporated in 1972 with 3,249 original shareholders and a $19.5 million settlement, Aleut today counts more than 5,000 shareholders and descendants, one of the smaller regional corporations by shareholder count but the steward of some of Alaska's most strategically placed ground.

Its revenue comes from a spread of businesses: government contracting above all, along with real estate, fuel sales, port services, and energy. The signature asset is Adak, at the far western end of the Aleutian chain, where Aleut took over roughly 47,000 acres and the facilities of a former U.S. military base through a 2004 federal land transfer. Adak holds the westernmost ice-free deep-water port in the country, and Aleut has worked for years to turn it into a trans-shipment hub for Arctic and trans-Pacific shipping, an ambition that would put a Unangax̂-owned corporation astride some of the busiest sea lanes of the coming decades.

For shareholders, the point of all this is dividends, jobs, scholarships, and cultural support. A nine-member board elected by shareholders sets the direction; the operations staff turns it into results. That is the machinery an operations vice president helps run.

It is also worth remembering whom the corporation answers to. The Unangax̂ have lived in the Aleutians for roughly 10,000 years, were the first Alaska Natives to feel the force of Russian colonization, and during World War II were forcibly removed from their villages to internment camps in Southeast Alaska, where 82 of the 881 who were interned died before the survivors were allowed home. Congress formally acknowledged the injustice with reparations in 1988. **The corporation that grew out of ANCSA is, in part, an instrument for that people to hold and build wealth on their own terms**, the quiet significance behind an announcement that, on its surface, is just a new title.