The Haines Borough plans on speaking with the state’s Division of Parks about its plans to close Portage Cove campground.
Don’t expect much. Borough manager Annette Kreitzer already has said the borough doesn’t have the money to operate a campground, even one as puny as Portage Cove. The state already has abandoned its campground at Mosquito Lake and can’t seem to find a park ranger for its three others parks and eagle preserve here.
All five of these gems have suffered years of underfunding, absentee management and neglect at the hands of our state government.
What we’re witnessing is elected leaders abandoning some of the prettiest parklands in North America, perhaps the world, because they are too cowardly to ask taxpayers for the money to maintain them.
Assuming our borough and state governments continue on their hapless trajectories, let’s consider another option: Turn over Chilkoot state park to the Chilkoot Indians. That might free up enough of the parks budget to continue operating Portage Cove and maybe put some effort into Mosquito Lake.
In addition, revenues from campsite fees, tour permits and other functions at Chilkoot would go to the Haines-based Chilkoot Indian Association, rather than the State of Alaska, and that money would stay in town instead of to bureaucrats in Juneau.
This is not some crazy idea. Indian tribes already manage provincial campgrounds in the Yukon Territory, just north of here.
By all rights of decency and justice, the Chilkoot people own Chilkoot Lake. The lake is the site of their ancestral village, which was inhabited as recently as the late 1800s. Gravestones and house sites of Chilkoot Natives who lived in that village can be found out there today.
The State of Alaska owns Chilkoot only because of a hitch in the Alaska Native Claims Settlement Act that excluded Natives in Haines, Tenakee, Ketchikan, Petersburg and Wrangell from preserving their historic village lands because they could not point to an existing village there.
Of course, Native people in Juneau and Sitka couldn’t point to an existing village either, but there were just too many Natives in Sitka and Juneau to be denied, so the Native claims act created “urban Native corporations” Goldbelt and Shee Atika to represent those folks and entitle them to land.
John Borbridge, a Juneau Native leader who helped craft the claims act, told the Chilkat Valley News 20 years ago that he knew the five tribes were being left out of the act, but that he and other negotiators ran out of time to address this question.
Bluntly, the Chilkoots were stiffed. Alaska’s three representatives in Washington, D.C. regularly submit legislation on behalf of the “landless Natives,” and it never goes anywhere. That’s because ANCSA was a giant piece of legislation that required years of work and re-opening it would require years more and politicians are lazy by nature.
But what Congress can’t do, the State of Alaska could, simply by turning over the current area of Chilkoot park to the Chilkoot Indian Association. To be fair, the river corridor would also go to the tribe, as the historic village was located along the river.
Such a gift would be a win-win for the state. Alaska could divest itself of a park that it has shown, by its chronic neglect, to not want, and that would save the agency money it could use to keep its other campgrounds open.
The Haines Borough would be wise to get behind such a land grant, which would be a win-win-win for it: All our parks would stay open, more park revenue would end up in local cash registers, and our assembly could score some points for giving a damn about our valley’s Native people.
Think about it.