Alaska Dispatch

This past weekend I learned that a great friend had passed away at the age of 90. After recovering from the sad but not unexpected news, I promptly remembered the last time I saw him in 2004 in Washington, D.C.

Bedecked in my sealskin vest, I had just walked into the Civil War-era Pension Building with its soaring Corinthian columns to help celebrate the opening of the Museum of the American Indian. The building was packed with a thousand chiefs, senators, congressmen, governors, Native Americans, ambassadors and bureaucrats, and the air was abuzz with chatter. The museum occupied the last open space on the Mall, and finally the United States had a monument to the indigenous people from whom the land had been wrested over the past 400 years.

My friend of almost 50 years, Tlingit Byron Mallott, of Yakutat, came dashing up to me and said, "A friend of yours wants to see you and insists you come with me." We wended our way through the crowd and suddenly there stood a handsome white-haired gentleman with the face of a chief. It was Stewart Udall, Secretary of the Interior under President John F. Kennedy -- the president's first and youngest pick for his new cabinet and someone I came to know during the most pressure-filled time I experienced in my young political career starting in 1966. His arms were outstretched, and we shook hands and hugged. I had not seen him since Nixon took over the presidency in 1969.

Stewart Udall had deep roots in the West and among the Indians of Arizona. His father was a Mormon bishop and a self-taught lawyer. Udall followed in his father's footsteps as a lawyer after serving as a tailgunner during World War II. He was elected to Congress, and when he moved to the Cabinet, his brother Morris succeeded him in the family tradition of public service. Now his son Tom is the new U.S. senator from New Mexico.

In 1966, during a class in constitutional law taught by Justice Jay Rabinowitz in Fairbanks, I had researched the origins of Alaska Native land rights going back to the beginning of our country and the Treaty of Cession with Russia in 1867. I was convinced that our rights had survived the Statehood Act but unless the 104 million-acre conveyance was stopped, our claims were in jeopardy. Secretary Udall, as head of the Interior Department, was authorized by the Alaska Statehood Act to convey millions of acres to the new state -- land that Alaska Natives believed was theirs through 10,000 years of use and occupancy. Before his term as Interior Secretary was up, Udall was faced with Native claims covering the entire state of Alaska. The big question was -- will he tilt in favor of the new state and let it take the land, or will he carry out his role as trustee of Native American interests and protect Alaska Native land rights? He was on the horns of a monumental dilemma that would determine the future of Alaska and its Native people for all time to come.

Stewart Udall was reviled by those in Alaska who would have bulldozed away Native claims -- especially after billions of barrels of oil were found at Prudhoe Bay in 1968 on land that he had allowed the state to select. His instincts were to help Alaska Natives have their case brought before the United States Congress for resolution. I have a picture of the two of us -- he, with his buzz haircut and me with my new Fu Manchu mustache -- in his office just days before his term was up, reviewing his press release announcing the withdrawal of all of Alaska under the Taylor Grazing Act. Without that "super land freeze," Alaska Native claims to ancestral land would have been dead in the water.

The beauty of America is that citizens have an opportunity to bring their issues to a forum for disposition. Congress could have sidestepped Native claims, but it did not. Stewart Udall, with his sense of fairness, used his power to help establish the most generous land settlement in American history. It boosted free enterprise, discarded the overlordship of the Bureau of Indian Affairs, and provided 40 million acres of land and nearly a billion dollars for Native Alaskans to manage, invest and utilize for all time to come. His generosity of spirit, fair-mindedness and love for the land will never be forgotten.

William L. Iggiagruk Hensley served four years in the Alaska House and six years in the Alaska Senate. He is a past president of the Alaska Federation of Natives and has worked with the NANA Regional Corp., the United Bank Alaska, the Alaska Department of Economic Development, and Alyeska Pipeline Service Co. Hensley is the author of "Fifty Miles From Tomorrow: a Memoir of Alaska and the Real People." In 1966, when he was a college student in Fairbanks, he drafted "What Rights to Land Have the Alaska Natives: The Primary Issue." Shared with people throughout Alaska, this paper catalyzed a movement of many, and helped shape Alaska as we know it. Hensley is retired and lives in Anchorage with his wife Abbe.