thousands of miles. Only a small fraction of one percent have completed four or more years of college.

Largely due to lack of education and the seasonal work patterns, more than half of the Native work force is jobless most of the year; only one-fourth has continuing employment. These unemployment rates are the highest in the Nation. Permanent full-time village jobs at highest pay are typically held by non-Natives. State public assistance provides income to almost one-fourth of the village households; temporary relief programs are required to sustain about the same number, but usually for three months or less.

Ever shrinking resources for subsistence hunting and fishing and severe seasonal unemployment in the 178 villages-ranging in size from 25 to 5,000 population-have forced 25 percent of the Natives to migrate to larger population centers, there to try to find jobs in the white man's world as unskilled laborers. Overt discrimination has been illegal in Alaska since the passage of the so-called "equal treatment" bill in 1945. But, according to a recent report by the Federal Field Committee for Development Planning in Alaska, “If ranking of applicants is by years of experience, village applicants will probably fall to lower positions of preference. If written applications are submitted, the lesser education of the Native applicant reveals itself on the form. If aptitude tests or other screening devices are used . . . the Native may suffer the consequences of a cultural background different from that of the test writers. If accepted for work in the city, the rate of pay—given his lack of education and training -may condemn him and his family to a deeper poverty than if he had remained in the village."

In a State with one of the highest per capita incomes in the Nation (family incomes in 1967 averaged more than $10,000 or about $3,629 per person), median rural Native family income, excluding the few villages where incomes are high, is estimated today at about $2,000 annually. Actually, these figures understate the extent of poverty. Arctic climate, remoteness, sparse population, small volumes of ordered commodities, limited competition, and high wage and transport costs all contribute to giving Alaska the highest cost of living of any of the States. Basic commodities cost 23 percent more in Anchorage than in Seattle in 1963 and up to 74 percent more in northern villages.

Once upon a time the Alaskan Native-immortalized as the smiling, parka-clad, igloo-housed Eskimofreely ranged over all the land. It was a difficult existence that often skimmed dangerously close to the edge of survival, but subsistence living had always been a

way of life to the Alaskan Native. Then one day the white man appeared, bent on selfishly and carelessly exploiting the natural resources the Native had so lov ingly conserved, upsetting the delicate balance between the Native and his land, and tempting the Native with glimpses at another world through the glossy windows of a Sears Roebuck catalog and the infamous American movie. Along with the white man came strange ideas of private land ownership, titles, and tenures.

It is estimated that at the peak of the whaling years $14 million worth of whales were extracted from the Arctic. As the supply of whales was cut off, the popula tion of whaling villages sank. In one way or another, over 300 villages have completely disappeared. From 1799 to 1867, the Russian American Company stripped the coastlands of fur seals and other animals. The Nome goldrush brought with it not the white man's economic development, but the burdens of an alien culture-tuberculosis, gonorrhea, the BIA, the church, greed, and graft. Fishing interests depleted the salmon runs so that in many areas the Natives can no longer count on fishing as a livelihood. Indeed, fishing with traps a traditional method of fishing and the Native's only adequate means of gathering enough fish—is now illegal for Natives in virtually all Alaskan waters. The industrialists who did build village canneries too often hired outside laborers rather than Natives. The result is that today the land will not support subsistence living. The white man has substituted a Western wage economy for the Native subsistence economy without providing cash-earning jobs.

Some Natives think a partial answer to their depri vation is the Native owned and operated fishing cooperative. One such group, the Kuskikwim Co-op, made up of fishermen living on an average cash income of about $500 a year, last year contracted with a Japanese firm that agreed to buy their entire catch at an excellent price. After the Japanese ship had been cleared by Customs, Immigration, Agriculture, and Public Health agencies and U.S. consular authorities in Japan, the then Governor Walter Hickel intervened to force the Japanese to cancel their agreement on the grounds that the contract violated the North Pacific Fisheries Treaty -this in spite of Federal assurances that no violation threatened and the precedent of a similar arrangement in 1967. Left at the last minute without a means for disposing of their fish, a substantial volume spoiled and was seized by health officials.

Among those currently standing in the way of Native progress are the oil companies, titillated by a January 1968 oil find at Prudhoe Bay on the North

Slope. Already a 140-mile wide stretch has been divided for exploration by private oil companies.

Besides interfering with fishing rights and damaging Native family homesites, the oil companies employ almost no unskilled or semi-skilled labor and would rather pay hardship wages to outsiders than train easily available Natives for technical jobs.

The State, of course, would like to control as much potential oil land as possible in order to lease it and collect the approximately 16 percent royalties. Once the State or private industry has control, both the land and probably the revenue from it will be forever lost to the Native.

Perhaps the most flagrant violation of Native rights and land claims can be laid to the Federal Government. As an old Alaskan patriarch said in field hearings on land claims before the Senate Interior Com

mittee, “Did it ever occur to you that maybe you were buying some stolen property when you bought the lands from the Russians?"

The Northwest Ordinance of 1787 provided that: The utmost good faith shall always be observed towards the Indians; their lands and property shall never be taken from them without their consent; and in their property rights and liberty they never shall be invaded or disturbed.

Yet the Government's first official action upon purchasing Alaska from Russia in 1867 was to provide in the treaty that U.S. citizenship, and implicitly land rights, should be withheld from "the uncivilized native tribes."

In the Alaska Organic Act of 1884, Congress hedged the all-important land issue by declaring that while the Indians (all Alaskan Natives are legally classified as

cestral hunting grounds.

While such "robbery" will continue until the land ims issue is settled, in 1935 Congress passed a landrk act providing that the Tlingit and Haida tribes of itheast Alaska could sue in the Court of Claims for yment for lands taken from them by the Federal vernment. Thirty-three years later the Court did leed award the Tlingit-Haida Indians $7.5 million the 18 million acres of lost land.

The only other group that has successfully enlisted e courts in their cause is the Tyoniks, living across >m Anchorage on Cook Inlet. A few years ago the lage was so close to famine that Anchorage pilots

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rescue missions to aid them. Then in 1962 they eived a Court of Claims settlement for $14 million. e Tyoniks hired outside consultants and have proded decent housing for all their people, built a far tter school than BIA funds alone would have alSwed, set up a sanitary, convenient water supply, and >ntracted with private physicians in Anchorage to beat the village people. They have even set aside funds r land investments in Anchorage and for high school holarships.

The Alaska Statehood Act of 1958 provided that the Mate keep hands off any land, the right or title to hich is held by Natives or by the United States in ust for them. This provision, however, is of little help za people whose aboriginal rights have never been Formally recognized.

Also of little help to the Native is a provision that ɔting is contingent upon an ability to read and write nglish. While this law has not been enforced, it repains a potential threat to native voting.

The Act also permitted the State to select approxiately 103 million acres from the public domain over 5 years. As of now the State is in the process of electing about 12 million acres, and about six million ave already been patented to the State or to private dividuals, including the North Slope oil strike areas nd areas where there are major transportation faciliies, railroad or highway systems, and good access by hip. As usual, the Natives are frozen out of all Stateelected land.

The land claims issue has been the rallying point for merging Native awareness and activism that in 1966 esulted in the joining together of eight separate Native Associations into the statewide Alaskan Federaion of Natives (AFN). Other groups such as FAN, nore aggressive and mistrustful of the "system" than s the AFN, have also emerged. Such groups are waiting to take over the Native cause if the land claims

issue is not resolved quickly and equitably.

State officials admit that up until the emergence of visible activism, the plight of the Native was invisible to Alaska's white population. Officials in Juneau evidently knew the BIA and Public Health Service were pumping millions of dollars into Alaskan villages—-43 million in 1968-but no one was investigating the re

turns.

As Natives awoke to the dangers threatened by State land selections and were encouraged by the success of the Tlingit-Haidas, they accelerated their protests against land selections. Native land claims today cover virtually all of the State-overlapping both federallyheld public domain as well as State-selected land. Two years ago, Secretary of the Interior Stewart Udall, unable any longer to deal with the conflicts among State selections. Federal withdrawals, and AFN-backed Native claims, froze the processing of additional State land selections.

Alaska's continued economic development, now strait-jacketed by conflicts over the title to three-quarters of the land, as well as the welfare of her Native people depends on a fast, fair claims settlement and a lifting of the freeze. Settlement in the courts is far too long a road. Furthermore, there has never been a land award in an aboriginal suit. The solution lies with Congress.

Hunting and fishing sportsmen fear giving the Natives too much land, oil interests want to exploit as much of the State as possible, and the Agriculture and Defense Departments blanch at the prospect of turning over national forest or petroleum reserves to Natives. But the vast majority of the State's population favor officially recognizing Native rights. Indeed, it is now the official policy of the United States, as stated by President Lyndon Johnson in March 1968, that our goal must be full participation for the Indian in the economic, political, and social life of modern America.

It is not likely that Congress will rule on Alaska land claims before next year. Spurred into action by pressure to lift the freeze, however, Congress held hearings on the issue both last year and this year. The outline for settlement has already been roughed in:

• The Field Committee, author of a new 565-page blueprint for settling land claims and providing for economic, social, and educational benefits, suggests that the Natives receive title to 47 million acres, a cash settlement of $100 million initially in Federal monies plus participation in Federal and State oil and mineral revenues over the next 10 years up to a maximum $1 billion, and a single, statewide management corpora