n a Friday in April, a brief, socially-distanced land transaction ceremony took place outside the Federal Building in downtown Anchorage.

John F.C. Johnson, Chugach Alaska Corporation’s vice president of cultural resources, attended to accept the most recent group of lands that the federal government promised the company in 1971 through the Alaska Native Claims Settlement Act (ANCSA).

April’s land conveyances were from a special category of ANCSA land designated for cemeteries and historical sites. Like other for-profit entities, Alaska Native corporations seek to return value to their shareholders, but they also serve the additional and unique role of acting as cultural repositories.

The Chugach historical sites range from a prehistoric seal hunting camp in northern Prince William Sound to the homesite of Paul Chimovitski, who settled in the area outside Cordova in the early 20th Century and took in orphans from the 1918 Spanish Flu.

“It’s impossible to put a price on these lands. What you can say is that without these lands, we as a people would not be whole,” Johnson writes in an article describing the recent land conveyance. “These historical lands are the basic building blocks of our culture; they provided a foundation for the future generations to understand and appreciate who we are and where we came from.”

Many Alaska Native corporations are—like Chugach—still in the process of receiving their share of the 44 million acres of federal lands promised under ANCSA, both the special historical/cemetery land and all-purpose land entitlements. In addition to Chugach, the federal Bureau of Land Management issued deeds in the last few months to the village corporations established for Angoon, Kipnuk, Emmonak, Scammon Bay, and Clark’s Point.

The federal government’s ANCSA land transfers are nearing completion. More than 96 percent of the land promised to Native corporations has been conveyed, says Erika Reed, the Alaska deputy state director for the federal Bureau of Land Management—the agency in charge of conveying ANCSA lands.

But as the number of remaining properties to convey wanes, the intricacy of the land transfers tends to increase.

“All the easy stuff is done,” Reed says. “We are working on some of the hardest things to adjudicate.”

Adjudicating ANCSA lands has taken so long due to the sheer number of acres involved and the complexity of the task, as Reed at the Bureau of Land Management describes.

The federal government has been in the process of administering formal land titles to Alaska Native applicants since the 1906 Alaska Native Allotment Act, which conveyed land parcels to individual Alaska Native applicants.

The federal land conveyance process accelerated with the 1959 Alaska Statehood Act, which committed a California-sized portion of Alaska’s land to the new state government. Like the Native corporations, Alaska’s state government is still waiting for about 4 percent of the land that was promised decades ago.

The Statehood Act left claims to the land from Alaska’s Indigenous people unresolved until 1971 when ANCSA promised a Washington-sized region of land to Native Alaskans through a network of new for-profit Native corporations. The law spelled out how land would be allocated among twelve regional corporations and 220 village corporations.

The scale of federal land distribution promised under both the Statehood Act and ANCSA was unprecedented and further complicated by the fact that most of the land in the new state had never been surveyed, says Reed.

ANCSA and the Statehood Act created a stack of competing claims on lands requested by multiple entities. When different parties request the same piece of land there’s a general hierarchy for who gets priority, says Reed: first comes Native Allotments, then village ANCSA corporations, then regional ANCSA corporations, and finally the State of Alaska.

In addition to determining which party is entitled to a piece of land, the BLM must review land restrictions that could prevent issuing the title.

“Think about when you buy a house. It usually takes about thirty days to do the title research on the piece of property that you’re buying,” Reed says. “Well, we have to do the same thing. But we’re doing it on 44 million acres.”

Issues that could delay conveyances include environmental contamination (which must be cleaned up before the land transfer) and the presence of a mining claim, which delays land transfers for as long as the mining claim is active.

One common thorny land conveyance issue is public access easements. Under ANCSA, Alaska Native corporation lands can’t cut off public access to public lands. The public must have a location to pass through the private ANCSA land to reach the public lands.

“In general, the State of Alaska always feels that more easements are necessary than a Native corporation does,” Reed says. “From a Native corporation’s perspective, it’s like letting someone have access from your front door through to your backdoor to get to a power right of way on the other side of your backyard.”

Chugach is still waiting for about 3,000 acres of land and about 30,000 acres of mineral rights.

But beyond the remaining acres, Chugach is waiting for an opportunity to exchange some of the company’s existing acres with federal government land containing better economic development prospects. A law that President Donald Trump signed in April 2019 (the John D. Dingell Jr. Conservation, Management and Recreation Act) requires the federal government to conduct a study about what that a land exchange with Chugach would involve.

Throughout its history, Chugach Alaska Corporation’s leaders have taken issue with the limited lands in its region available for conveyance because so much land was set aside for conservation before the regional corporation’s founding.

“Chugach was only allowed to select lands that were primarily comprised of ‘mountain tops and glaciers,’ which were not ideal locations for potential development to meet the goals and promises of ANCSA,” the corporation wrote in a 2019 pamphlet outlining the case for a federal land exchange.

Chugach negotiated a settlement with Congress in 1982 that gave the corporation access to more favorable land, but the economic realities of the Prince William Sound region changed following the Exxon Valdez Oil Spill.

In the short run, the oil spill devastated Chugach’s fisheries business and contributed to the company’s Chapter 11 bankruptcy protection filing in 1991.

After emerging from bankruptcy, the company encountered a new problem with its ANCSA lands caused by the spill: surface land purchased for conservation from the oil spill settlement fund left Chugach with mineral rights to lands that the corporation could not develop.

Chugach argues it needs to exchange lands with the federal government because, according to its 2019 pamphlet, much of the corporation’s current lands are locked in a conflict “between Chugach’s responsibility to its Native shareholders for economic development and self-sufficiency of ANCSA land and the [Exxon Valdez Oil Spill Trustee Council] agenda of conservation.”

Not all Alaska Native land transfers take place through ANCSA, although the landmark law affects most Alaska Native land issues.

Two non-ANCSA land transfers that have been in the news recently are the Gulkana Village cemetery land transfer and the ongoing King Cove Road saga.

It took decades of pressure on the state government before the residents of the village of Gulkana were given back a cemetery on land that became part of the Richardson Highway corridor.

The federal Alaska Highway Commission built a section of the Richardson Highway through the village of Gulkana as part of a highway realignment in the midst of World War II.

Unlike the case with the Chugach burial sites, ANCSA didn’t provide a direct way for the Native community to regain control of its cemetery. In 1971—the same year ANCSA passed—the federal government deeded the land to Alaska’s Department of Transportation, which built a parking lot and Gulkana River access point on the site.

In 2016, then-governor Bill Walker visited Gulkana Village and made a commitment to returning the former townsite to the village. But the issue lingered because it was legally linked to a separate land dispute in the region involving public access on a road to Klutina Lake that passes through Ahtna land.

In June, Governor Mike Dunleavy announced a resolution of the Gulkana Village land issue. The governor signed a memorandum of understanding with leaders from the Gulkana Village Council and Ahtna that outlines the state’s plans to deed the former Gulkana townsite land to the village council. As part of the deal, Ahtna will pay the state $300,000 and the state will build a Gulkana River boat launch in a new location.

Aspects of the Klutina Lake land use conflict linger in the Alaska Supreme Court.

On the Alaska Peninsula, both Alaska’s government leaders and an Alaska Native corporation support a land exchange to facilitate a road connecting the town of King Cove and the Cold Bay airport.

But the King Cove land exchange has been blocked for years because it would allow construction of a road through what’s now a federally-designated wilderness area, potentially damaging waterfowl habitat and setting a precedent for construction in federal wilderness.

King Cove municipal and village corporation leaders have fought for the road to Cold Bay to facilitate medical evacuation flights to Anchorage that are too dangerous to attempt from the much smaller King Cove airport on stormy days.

To build this road, the King Cove Corporation has offered the US Fish and Wildlife Service some of its ANCSA lands in exchange for an equal value stretch of land along a 12-mile proposed road corridor through the Izembek National Wildlife Refuge.

During the Obama administration, the US Department of the Interior rejected the King Cove land swap, citing concerns about damage to waterfowl habitat that would be caused by road construction.

But under the Trump administration, the Interior Department supports the land exchange and has signed agreements with the King Cove Corporation twice in the last year and a half.

Federal judges have struck down the agreements both times in the course of lawsuits from conservation groups.

In its June rejection, US District Court of Alaska Judge John W. Sedwick ruled that the parties rushed the agreement. The judge found they failed to follow procedures required by the Administrative Procedures Act as well as the 1980 Alaska National Interest Lands Conservation Act, the law that created the wildlife refuge.

As land conveyances wind down for the Alaska Native Claims Settlement Act, a new application window—while a very narrow one—has opened in the 1906 Alaska Native Allotment Act.

The opportunity for individual Alaska Native people to apply for up to 160 acres of federal land under the Native Allotment Act ended with the passage of ANCSA in 1971. But a law passed in 1998 created a new window to apply for allotments for a subset of Alaska Native people, those that were serving in the armed forces during the Vietnam War—when ANCSA was being written and the Native Allotment application window closed.

A new extension for Native Allotment applications passed into law last year. The law broadened the lands available for selection and broadened the qualifications for applicants to now include the heirs of Vietnam era veterans. The application period is expected to run through 2025.