The Koyukuk River ties Allakaket, Alatna, Hughes, and Huslia together as K’oyitl’ots’ina Limited, also called K Corp. And where the river meets the Yukon, the villages of Koyukuk, Galena, Nulato, and Kaltag are “friends together,” which is the meaning of Gana-A’Yoo.

Merging made sense in the ’70s. “At the time, a lot of our people didn’t have a business background and had never participated in the business world, creating an uphill learning curve,” says Gana-A’Yoo CEO Dena Sommer-Pedebone.

Additionally, the overhead to maintain multiple village corporations was dauntingly expensive. Rather than go it alone, many villages chose to merge by creating joint corporations. Sommer-Pedebone says, “They knew we would be stronger together and be able to do more for our shareholders and descendants.”

Judging by its name, Alaska Peninsula Corporation (APC) sounds like one of the big regional twelve. But it’s not; its five component villages are all within the Bristol Bay Native Corporation region.

From the the shore of Iliamna Lake to the coast of Bristol Bay, the villages of Kokhanok, Newhalen, Port Heiden, South Naknek, and Ugashik formed APC in 1978.

“My grandparents and their friends worked closely together to get everything set up with the corporations after ANCSA was established,” says APC COO Adrianne Christensen. “With ANCSA requiring each village to form a corporation, they quickly realized it would be beneficial for all of the villages to work together as one corporation.”

APC now has more than 1,000 shareholders and is one of the largest landowners in the Bristol Bay area with more than 400,000 acres of the world’s most remote and undeveloped country. The land is a premier destination for outdoor recreation enthusiasts. Adventure seekers enjoy camping, fishing, river floats, and hunting on this treasured land.

Headquartered in Anchorage, APC specializes in administrative services, environmental consultation, management services, and remediation. By bringing the villages together as one corporation, APC has successfully developed six subsidiaries.

• APC Federal serves as the administrative management entity for the government services lines of business.
• APC Construction Services builds in coastal areas of the North Pacific, Bering Sea, Prince William Sound, Eastern Aleutian Islands, and the North Slope.
• APC Services offers environmental consulting and resource exploration.
• Wētaviq, Limited is a transportation maintenance, logistics, and equipment leasing company. Customers include Alaska Native corporations, resource developers, and the US military.
• Yukon Electric, Inc.’s experience includes residential and commercial service calls, vertical construction, power distribution, and power generation.
• Talarik Research and Restoration Services is an environmental remediation company which was recently awarded an Indefinite Delivery, Indefinite Quantity contract with the Alaska Department of Environmental Conservation to provide planning and environmental restoration from contamination. The company is currently remediating contaminated soil, collecting groundwater samples, and restoring the land at Johnstone Point in Prince William Sound to its natural state.

APC’s stated mission is “to preserve and enhance the quality of life of Alaska Peninsula Corporation shareholders and to protect our culture while managing our assets in a manner which enhances their value.” The corporation continues to accomplish this mission by utilizing the strength of unity.

“With our shareholders as a top priority, Alaska Peninsula Corporation focuses on providing dividends first and foremost,” says Christensen. “We strive to provide jobs and opportunities in the region and throughout Alaska.”

Before merging into TKC on April 25, 1977, the villages of Aniak, Chuathbaluk, Crooked Creek, Georgetown, Lower Kalskag, Napaimute, Red Devil, Stony River, Sleetmute, and Upper Kalskag operated independently as ten small companies each with a separate board of directors and staff—a costly burden for the small villages.

“We merged in 1977 fairly early after ANCSA was enacted,” says TKC President and CEO Andrea Gusty.

The merger of the villages has proven to be a tremendous success. “We had 1,100 shareholders in 1977 and today we have more than 4,300 worldwide,” shares Gusty. “We steward nearly a million acres of land—a responsibility we take very seriously.”

TKC began diversifying in 2005 and started developing a portfolio across Alaska and the Lower 48. “We continue growing those businesses year over year and bring the funds back home to the middle Kuskokwim and our shareholders,” explains Gusty.

In addition to meeting the expectations of shareholders, the corporation focuses on sustainable land management, scholarships, energy workforce development, and direct payments relative to the cost of living. “We’re working on what we call stewarding our homelands,” says Gusty. “Working on the infrastructure in our villages is a constant focus.”

Last year, TKC worked on the Connect TKC Project to bridge the digital divide while pursuing grants to improve broadband infrastructure. “We wanted to positively impact connectivity for all of our shareholders anywhere in the world,” says Gusty. “We provided all shareholders the opportunity for access through installation of Starlink hardware and paid for that out of TKC profits.”

Before the project, 49 percent of TKC shareholder households didn’t have connectivity. “These were not just rural locations; there were even parts of Anchorage where our shareholders didn’t have connectivity. Through our program efforts, these shareholders were able to realize immediate savings for these services,” shares Gusty. TKC plans to apply for the State of Alaska Broadband Equity Access and Deployment program to build broadband fiber optic infrastructure in the Middle Kuskokwim region in early 2025.

The corporation provided similar assistance with its TKC Brighter Futures Lightbulb project. “In one month, we changed out 10,000 light bulbs in everyone’s homes from incandescent to LED while we continued to work on infrastructure issues,” explains Gusty. “The money we make in the Lower 48 has a direct impact on our shareholder homes, and we believe in delivering the needed services to our villages as soon as possible. We aren’t waiting around for someone else to do the work.”

TKC became one of the first ANCSA corporations to vote to enroll descendants who were born after 1971. “Through merging and opening enrollment to our descendants, we were successful in growing our shareholder numbers,” says Gusty. “While we remain focused on the continued growth of our programs, we also focus on growing our profits to make certain we are maintaining our commitment to our shareholders.”

To accomplish this, TKC’s board of directors created a permanent dividend within its TKC Settlement Trust. “Our dividend is growing year to year as our shareholder base is growing,” shares Gusty. “We continue the work necessary to meet the challenge of our shareholders’ expectations of always growing and always doing more for them—because there’s always more to be done in rural Alaska.”

Miranda Wright, an original Gana-A’Yoo board member familiar with the early days of ANCSA, shared her insights in the corporation’s winter 2022 annual report. “For the village corporations, those early days were hectic, scary, confusing, and required a lot of work educating our people on how to navigate a foreign system. When I ran for election to our village corporation board of directors, I had already been in business for a number of years. I had established a corporation for the construction company my husband and I ran, so I had a good understanding of how a corporation works.”

Wright shared her business experience as a board member for Nik’aghun, Limited, which at the time was the village corporation for Nulato. “Other village corporations were struggling with this new concept called corporations,” she recalled. “A couple of villages had populations of less than 100 residents… After many meetings, it was decided that unity and support was necessary to keep our land intact and under Native ownership. By merging, we could share expertise, cut administrative costs, and pool our financial resources to help grow the company.”

Nearly forty years later, “friends together” continues to serve the Gana-A’Yoo villages well as the corporation pursues its primary purposes of preserving its lands while creating shareholder opportunities through the success of its business ventures.

Gana-A’Yoo has assembled a family of companies in the fields of construction, logistics and camp services, manufacturing, technical services, and facility services.

As the steward of 438,000 acres, the corporation strives to balance protection of cultural resources with management of natural resources. Subsistence remains the highest priority use of the corporation’s lands, which are managed to preserve important historic and cultural aspects of the Gana-A’Yoo heritage.

Village needs also remain a major focus of Gana-A’Yoo. “The board of directors is very mindful of the needs of each village,” says Sommer-Pedebone. “There is a huge need for infrastructure development. Some of the villages have more systems in place than others to meet their ongoing needs, but the needs are very similar in each community.”

In each case, the joint corporations have succeeded to a degree they might not have achieved as isolated villages.

Christensen credits the success of APC to its unified approach to business opportunities. “We have people that live throughout the region, and we utilize our combined ability to grow our business in a more efficient way,” says Christensen. “I think the benefits are that we are stronger together and we have a more diverse board because of our merger.”

Of TKC’s early decision to merge, Gusty says, “Our elders knew we were stronger together than apart. We were always closely connected, so it was an easy decision to combine our initial funds and work together to build our corporation.”

And Gana-A’Yoo continues to work as a team. “I think it is combined talent and perspectives that allowed us to be able to build a more robust business and ultimately provide more to the people from our area,” says Sommer-Pedebone. “We also know we are stronger with our four villages working together.”