By Dominic Salvato
February 18, 2013
History speaks for itself, as we see social scientists documenting cause/ effect relationships of ANCSA's legacy of its terrible impacts on native villages. These villages have the highest rates of domestic abuse, suicides, rape, unemployment, and are direct consequences of native corporate practices failing to achieve sustainable economies and functional village dynamics. Sealaska bill simply allows this to occur on areas never agreed upon and it is no surprise there is much conflict over this outrageous bill. ANCSA has re-created native village life into those who have plenty and those who have very little and force marginal families with limited access to subsistence resources out of villages. This was never the way it was for thousands of years in Raven House. ANCSA was supposed to create economic prosperity for all, but instead, it created economic prosperity for a relative few. This is precisely why thousands of Tlingits, Haidas, and Tsimshian shareholders are against this bill: it represents a continuation of the same tragic failures of the past. Dr. Kirk Dombowski sums this up in his dissertation, "Against Culture: Development, Politics, and Religion in Indian Alaska"- "Alaska natives having borne the brunt of hundreds of years of colonial extraction, have been placed at the margins of the Western world and have borne a particularly heavy portion of the burden of reproducing Western culture." The bill is morally indefensible, people don't understand or are personally profiting from it. Dominic Salvato About: "I have a page on facebook called Sealaska Shareholders Underground. We have over 780 members, and we oppose the Sealaska bill." Received February 17, 2013 - Published February 18, 2013 Related:
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