Audience member at Juneau lecture says Sealaska, not clans, has the say over Tlingit land

A Tlingit audience member at a Sealaska Heritage Institute lecture in Juneau on Tuesday said Sealaska, the regional Alaska Native corporation, now controls land that Tlingit clans once held. He asked that clan knowledge be recognized as "clan ownership intellectual property rights."

"Sealaska owns the land. Clans don't have any say on their land. Sealaska has the say," he said.

In Tlingit terms, he said, clans own the land and clans make the decisions. "We still haven't gotten over colonization," he said. He also said he was not trying to criticize the corporation and that it was doing a good job.

Sealaska was incorporated in 1972 under the 1971 Alaska Native Claims Settlement Act, or ANCSA. The law transferred about 44 million acres of traditional homelands to Alaska Native corporations statewide, according to Sealaska's corporate profile. Sealaska says it manages about 362,000 acres, mostly forest, for about 26,000 shareholders. It says that land is roughly 1.6% of the traditional homelands of its Tlingit, Haida and Tsimshian shareholders.

Sealaska founded the institute in 1980. The institute is a separate nonprofit, but two Sealaska directors serve on its board, according to SHI's institutional history.

The audience member said he was the youngest member of the Repatriation Committee in 1990. He said elders on the committee told him then that they never wanted a clearinghouse for returned items such as at.óow, sacred clan property. They wanted the items to go back to the clans.

The lecturer, Dr. Aandax̱joon Sabena Allen, is an assistant professor of Indigenous studies at the University of Alaska Fairbanks. She spoke on Tlingit climate resiliency. One of her case studies was a 2024 planning process that wrote possible futures for Southeast Alaska. She said one draft scenario had no Tlingit people in the region by 2050. The group quickly judged it not plausible and left it out.

In her response, Allen said one of her next steps is passing clan knowledge and protocol to younger generations. That work, she said, "really needs to be rooted in community and not so much for, you know, the larger academic discourse."

At an institute panel on the Tlingit-language opera on Aug. 28, SHI President Rosita Worl said clan ownership of land is something the institute holds dear. "We say we don't care who owns Western title to our lands. We still own these lands. We own our stories," she said.