Commonwealth North gives Hickel award to former CIRI chief Carl Marrs

Commonwealth North presented its Walter J. Hickel Award for Visionary Alaska Leadership to Carl Marrs, the former chief executive of Cook Inlet Region Inc. and Old Harbor Native Corporation, at its Hickel and Egan Gala. Senator Lyman Hoffman and Senate President Gary Stevens jointly received the group's William A. Egan Award for Distinguished Public Policy Leadership.

Commonwealth North is a public policy forum founded in 1979 by former governors Wally Hickel and Bill Egan. Marrs spent more than three decades at CIRI, rising to president and CEO, and later ran Old Harbor Native Corporation from 2010 to 2024.

Sophie Minnick, who worked alongside Marrs at CIRI, said his most significant contribution came while he led Old Harbor: pushing for improvements to the law on Alaska Native settlement trusts. Congress let Native corporations create the trusts in 1988 to hold and manage Native land assets permanently and provide for the health, education and economic welfare of their beneficiaries.

"Today, because of Carl's tenacity, his grit, and his determination, Native corporations who have established settlement trusts and who are paying dividends to their shareholders are doing so on a tax-free basis," Minnick said.

A Senate hearing record shows Marrs testified in 2017 as Old Harbor's CEO before the Senate Committee on Indian Affairs, in support of the Settlement Trust Improvement Act introduced by Sen. Lisa Murkowski.

Minnick said CIRI's investment in a small telecommunications partnership that became part of VoiceStream Wireless, now T-Mobile, let the corporation make special distributions to shareholders, most of them tax-free. The first was $50,000, and car lots flashed signs welcoming CIRI shareholders. Marrs also led the effort to endow the CIRI Foundation with $53 million for education and career goals of shareholders, their descendants and other Alaska Natives, she said.

Gloria O'Neill, president and CEO of Cook Inlet Tribal Council and last year's Hickel honoree, said Marrs mentored her after she took over the council in 1998 at age 28. He knew how to pick people and help them grow, she said.

In the late 1990s, as the Legislature kept blocking a constitutional amendment to protect subsistence, O'Neill said Marrs blew up large photos of eight legislators and posted them before about 4,000 people at the Alaska Federation of Natives convention. She said he told the crowd, "Now you know who to vote against," and added, "It's not personal. Their position is bad for Alaska."

O'Neill said Marrs grew up in a Seldovia fishing family, served in the Marine Corps and later spent eight years as a University of Alaska regent.