As the overlay shows, there is a rationale to the organization of Alaska's hundreds of Native communities into regional Native development companies. Roughly, the company regions correspond to traditional territories of the tribes. See (if willing to wait for slow load) slightly different territories on an an Alaska Native Education program languages map.

Five Landless Tlingit Tribes These tribes were left out of the Alaska native Claims settlement. They have no land, no right to subsistence fishing and hunting. Well-known Tlingit artist Jesse Cooday helped to design these pages, which contain a real (not as told to bzabytalk) traditional story by an elder. Don't forget the "What you can do" section.

Alaska's Towns and Villages Ingenious database where you can look up much (all text) info. Not limited to Native villages, but there are so many of those they dominate the database. Get the names of the towns at this mapsite, look up info about them here.

Alaska's Native Cultures Once-over shallowly, by a tourist agency. No pix.

The Arctic National Wildlife Refuge -- a calving place for the last remaining large herd of caribou -- barely escaped being opened for oil and gas development by U.S. Congress in the fall of 1996. The issue will continue to arise, one presumes until permission is conferred and the wildlife refuge is invaded. Most of the environmental deiscussion of this ignored the viewpoints of those who will be most affected by disturbances to the herd's calving ground. For these people are the Vuntut Gwich'in, who live above the Arctic Circle in Canada.   International boundaries are meaningless to the animals, who make a great circle migration between the U.S. and Canada seasonally, every year.

• Old Crow -- Land of the Vuntut Gwichin This traditional tribe uses Internet to make a plea -- especially to U.S. citizens, the only ones who can do anything about it -- to protect the Porcupine herd's calving groud (the Arctic national Wildlife Refuge) from oil and gas development. Their plea takes the form of a personal, obviously unprofessional website showing how their lives still depend on these caribou.
• Arctic National Wildlife Refuge -- An Introductiion Arctic Perspectives has a good collection of document,s historical survey, and maps. Unlike most of the environmentalists who covered this issue, Perspectives takes a look at Native viewpoints. This is a much slicker presentation (with better maps).
• Tanana Chiefs -- whose people are on one path that the returning caribou take -- oppose ANWR development, in a 1990 resolution
• Jacob Adams, Inuipiaq Arctic Slope regional development corporation native head, is in favor of development. We want our share, he says.
• ANWR -- CASE STUDY #! by Arctic Circle, a support group for Native and environmental issues of the far north
• Time to Permit Drilling in ANWR sez a right-wing think-tank. Just a tiny handful of Indians stand in the way of progress here, and anyway, that oil-gas development that already went down in the Beaufort Sea was good   for the smaller Central Caribou herd. His statistics about this are flat-out lies; elsewhere the herd was scientifically monitored, found to be decimated.

Point Hope is a historic Native community in Alaska. In the late 1950's, the Bureau of Land Management issued the Atomic Energy Commission (AEC) a license for a cockeyed and enormously dangerous scheme to use 1600 square miles around Point Hope to blast out a deep water seaport with nuclear exposives. No one ever consulted the village residents who would have to have been movd away for the blast (no environmntal considerations either). In 1961, the president of the Point Hope Village Council wrote to the Association of American Indian Affairs (AAIA) a private foundation formed to help Indians. AAIA provided funds and coordination for inter-village meetings at which rights were explained, and common solutions agreed upon. 12 regional associations of Alaska Natives were formed and began the legal process to pursue their land claims (resulting in the Alaska Native Claims Settlement of 1971). The small group of Native people of Point Hope, a remote and isolated Arctic village, played a very important role beyond the start of a land claims process for all the treatyless peoples of Alaska. Nuclear blasting in the seas of the fragile north, where currents circulate betwen the continents would have had incalulably dangerous environmental effects, probably much broader than on the ecology just of the far north, affecting the oceans, and perhaps worldwide weather and climate patterns. Point Hope began the action that stopped this -- but the area was then used as a dumping ground by the AEC for hazardous nuclear wastes. There are many indications this was an intentional experiment to try to discover the effects (i.e. how bad the effects would be) on the biota, including the Native people OF the area.