North Slope mayor: 'Nothing about us without us'

North Slope Borough Mayor Josiah Patkotak used the borough's 54th Founders' Day message to press a demand: that the region get a real voice in the federal, state, and industry decisions made about its land. "What we ask of our federal, state, and industry partners is simple: Nothing about us without us," he said.

Patkotak tied the appeal to the borough's origins.

Iñupiat leaders incorporated the North Slope Borough in 1972 specifically so the communities most affected by development on their homeland would have a hand in shaping it — and he framed the message not as opposition to development but as a claim to be at the table for it, noting the region has partnered with government and industry on major projects for decades.

He pointed to the borough's own wildlife management work as evidence, in his telling, that resource development and environmental stewardship can coexist.

The demand carries more weight at this particular moment. Much of Alaska's oil wealth originates on the North Slope and flows outward — funding schools, services, and the Permanent Fund statewide — yet the region doesn't control the federal permitting or the state tax decisions that govern it, a tension sharpened by the current gas-line negotiations in Juneau.

Patkotak's "nothing about us without us" is a bid for leverage the borough doesn't formally hold: the land is federal, the revenue decisions are made elsewhere, and a Founders' Day message is one of the few public platforms a borough mayor has to argue the region deserves more say than its legal position guarantees.