Month: July 2017

By far the wealthiest tribe in North America are the Inupiat of Alaska’s North Slope.  They are the American equivalent of Saudi royalty.  Like the Saudis, their barely habitable land sits atop oceans of oil.

But their wealth isn’t only in oil.  Their Arctic Slope Regional Corporation is run well, and profitably.  It employs close to 4,000 people, and has paid $915 million in dividends.  It is an enterprise with many facets, most of them quite profitable.  The Inupiat are good businessmen, and capitalists.  They know the responsible development of the resources beneath their land, carried out under their watchful eyes, is good for the people.

To their south are the Gwich’in, an Athabascan tribe with a different attitude.  The small Gwich’in community of Arctic Village, population 152, is located just to the south of the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge.  They, like most of Alaska’s rural Natives, are among the poorest of all Americans.

These Indians oppose the Inupiat in their desire to develop ANWR.  The only actual inhabitants of ANWR are the Inupiats of Kaktovik, on the coast.  But the Gwich’in claim that the migrating caribou on whom they depend would be harmed by the use of Section 1002 of ANWR, a claim which has no basis in fact.

When the Trans Alaska Pipeline was proposed, the opposition centered on the caribou.  The migrating herds in the areas crossed by the pipeline would be harmed, somehow.  It didn’t happen.  The caribou have thrived.  The pipeline is warm in the winter, and sometimes they congregate around it.

But the Gwich’in are always Exhibit A in the campaigns to oppose any development of any part of ANWR.  The environmental community loves these Indians.  They are poor, and wish to stay that way.  They live as reservation Indians, just like the Indians on the reservations throughout the western United States.

The environmental community lost the last election, and their most ardent foe sits in the White House.  If he wished, he could say that the development of Section 1002 of ANWR was in the national security interest of the United States, and was a national priority.  The oil from ANWR seals the deal with Japan.  They will be our closest ally as long as the oil flows.

The President would have to choose between the Inupiat and the Gwich’in, wealth or poverty.  It’s an easy choice.

If Pakistan, India, Great Britain, France and North Korea can have nuclear weapons, why can’t Japan?  Unlike these nuclear powers, Japan is one of the five great powers of the world.  And it’s the only country these weapons have ever been used against.  If any country has been a more cooperative member of the world community in the last 72 years, I don’t know who that is.

The Norks are a puppet of China, and if China refuses to reign them in, they will be responsible for the nuclearization of their perennial geopolitical rival, and the remilitarization of East Asia.  Their choice.  And if Japan goes nuclear, the South Koreans will be right behind them.  China is playing a very dangerous game.  Japan could turn into a giant nuclear aircraft carrier permanently anchored off China’s coast.

Apparently, President Trump has given them a warning, so the ball is in their court.  Trump may be this, and he may be that, but on foreign policy every move he makes looks as though it’s been approved by former Secretary of State Kissinger.  There’s a tradition of “wise men” serving as a President’s informal strategic advisers.  Henry Kissinger seems to be President Trump’s wise man, and he couldn’t have chosen better.

Can we trust Japan with nuclear weapons?  In the past, they were the aggressor nation of East Asia, because they had so few natural resources of their own.  But now they’re rich enough to buy and import whatever they need, but they still want a secure and permanent source of energy.  Without a foreign supply of energy, they are no longer a great power.

Japan started World War Two in the Pacific in order to secure a supply of oil.  But they don’t ever have to do that again.  They’ve got Alaska as a ready and willing seller, on long term contract.  And in geopolitical terms, Alaska is a hop, skip and a jump away from Japan.  It a natural.

The fact that they invaded Alaska, and brave Americans died defending it, is an unfortunate historical fact.  But Alaskans are willing to put that behind them.  Alaska and Japan will be good partners.

The problem is, Alaska seems to be running out of oil.  The pipeline is running at 25% capacity.  So where does Japan get its oil?  From the Inupiat.   They can get the Inupiat oil that’s buried in what’s called Area 1002 of ANWR.

I think the Mayor of the North Slope Borough, the President of the Arctic Slope Regional Corporation, and the President of its subsidiary, the ASRC Energy Services Corporation, should go to Japan and talk to Prime Minister Abe about their oil.  I’m sure he’d be interested.

 

 

Unfortunately, it is all too true that many of our forefathers were racists, as were most white people all over the world.  Their enslavement of black Africans and the brutal treatment of America’s Natives are national scars that should not be forgotten.  But we have tried to make things right with American blacks, and are trying to make up for what we did to the Natives.

But the charge that early Americans, in any way, mistreated their women is preposterous.  Women were the most valuable import, highly prized and courted.  The reason English is the language of North America is because of the English women who first settled this country.

Their only European competition were the few thousand brave French women who emigrated to New France between 1608 and 1760.  The French men came mainly from northwestern France, but most of the women were recruited from orphanages in Paris and Rouen.  They were marvelous wives and mothers, and are the ancestors of the 3.5 million French Canadians alive today.

Unlike a lot of the French and Spanish, the Englishmen who first came here were not interested in marrying Native women, for the most part.  They wanted to start Christian English families, and start an Christian English community, which could only be done with English wives.  The trick was, how in the name of God do you convince a woman to live in a savage wilderness, and found a nation?

Getting young men to run off to the middle of nowhere is not that hard, especially if they’re escaping a life of drudgery and submission.  But what was it that lured these young English girls to come to Virginia?  What was it about them that found the idea appealing?

In many cases, as far back as 1618, they came in ships designed specifically for them, 200 at a time.  They were responding to advertisements by the Virginia Company, which promised them their choice of husbands, each of whom would be a property owner.  Their fare would be paid by the man who they selected, and paid with pleasure.  It was the best bargain in American history.

They were eagerly awaited in Jamestown, and when they arrived they quickly paired up with their choice of the men who waited on them.  For those who couldn’t decide, lodgings were arranged, and they could take her sweet time picking the man who would be their life partner, and the father of their children.

I think, above all, it was the lure of land, in fee simple, which could be bequeathed to her children, which brought these poor women over.  They knew that if they worked hard, and God’s good grace shined on them, they could start a family which would extend on, generation after generation, far into the future.  And their sons and daughters would be free, far freer than they had ever been.  And these children would be able to have not just the land they would inherit, but their own new land, that they would settle themselves.  A whole continent awaited.

Unlike the Spanish and the French, the English woman’s culture was that of the Absolute Nuclear Family.  This family structure was taken from the Anglo-Saxon immigration, and is the family system of Scandinavia, the Netherlands, and England.  It’s the American family structure of today.

In this culture a woman has absolute control over her body.  She mates, and marries, who she chooses. Once she’s married she and her husband are not subject to the control of his or her parents.  Her husband is expected to provide a home for her, apart from his own family.  She has no legal obligations to her parents or his, and she is not obliged to leave her own estate to her children, if she chooses not to.

It’s a system of, by, and for women.  It’s why many patriarchal societies hate us.  But it’s as American as apple pie, baseball and the 4th of July.

One of those women was the mother of James Pettyjohn, born in Northampton County, Virginia, in 1635.  She’s the ancestor I’m most proud of on my country’s birthday.

 

Where in the Constitution is the authority for the federal government to own the land within the states?  The grant of authority by the states to Congress and the central government is in Article I, Section 8.  Owning and managing lands within the several states is not there.

The men who drafted the Constitution wanted the federal government to have limited power.  If a power wasn’t expressly granted, it was denied.  And who can argue that it is necessary or proper for the federal government to own today 623 million acres, or 27.4%, of this country?

Jefferson was a strict constructionist, and he knew very well that the Louisiana Purchase was not authorized by the Constitution.  But he did it anyway, and was never challenged.  No American at the time opposed this doubling of our territory.  But that didn’t make it constitutional.

The first 30 states of the Union had no federal land to speak of within their borders at the time of their admission.  But when California was admitted in 1850 it was barely ready for statehood, and there was so much land, and so many Mexican-American land claims to settle, that title to vast portions of the state were retained by Washington.

Oregon was underpopulated when it was admitted in 1859, as were most of the far western states that followed.  So the federal government retained title to vast regions of the west, which it owns to this day.  The question, at this point, is why?

To protect the land from the people who live, work, and play there?  The people of Idaho care a lot more about their beautiful environment than you or I do.  It’s where they live, and where they want their families to live.  The day of the robber timber baron is over.

So the real question is, why doesn’t the federal government surrender the western lands it doesn’t need?  That’s a question for Congress, but Congress is dysfunctional.  But there’s a higher power than Congress, the concerted power of the states, as set forth in Article V.

This should be the subject of the next Convention of States.  If the Phoenix Convention is as successful as expected, Commissioners will ask “Why don’t we do this again?”  That question will be answered when a state legislature calls the next Convention.

The state issuing the call need not host the Convention.  The Annapolis and Philadelphia Conventions were called by Virginia.  The St. Louis Convention of 1889 was called by Kansas.

Who will heed the call?  It can’t be partisan, or it won’t work.  The state issuing the call should be, at least partially, under the control of a different party than the host state.  To get the Democratic states to come it can’t just be about the rights of the states to their land.  It has to be about the rights of the people in those states, in particular the Alaska Natives.

50 years ago a young Alaska Native from a remote arctic village asked, what rights to land have the Alaska Natives?  It’s time to turn that question around.

 

None of Alaska’s Native peoples are properly called Eskimo.  They are, instead, the Inupiat of northwestern and northern Alaska, the Yupik of western and south central Alaska, the Athapascan Indians of the interior, the Aleuts around Kodiak, and the Haida, Tlingit and Tsimshian tribes of southeast.

Inupiat is derived from the word for person, inuk, and the word for real, piaq.  Yupik is from yuk (person) and pik (real).  Like many indigenous peoples, they call themselves the real people, or real men.

After the war my Uncle Fritz went to Alaska and lived with the Natives in different parts of the state.  He went by Pettyjohn, as in the army, with no first name.  Fritz is a family nickname.  When I came to Alaska to meet him in 1969 he told me many stories about the Native people he had met, a people he had studied extensively, and loved.

He said the Inupiat word for white was hussuk, and it was said dismissively, with a lack of respect.  Hussuks were not real men, as far as they were concerned.  The few blacks they saw they called black white men.

The political leadership of Alaska’s Natives can be white or Native, Democrat or Republican.  The only thing that matters is their first political allegiance, which is the best interests of the Natives.  I served a term in the State House with old Henry Springer, a German-American who had settled in Nome, Inupiat country.  He was so politically incorrect he used to celebrate Hitler’s birthday, just to annoy people.  The only speech he gave in two years, with his German accent, was a description of what it was like to have a honey bucket for sanitation.

When I brought Babbie to Anchorage in 1974 I intended to win a seat in the United States Senate.  The only way I figured I could do it was by becoming politically active in the Republican Party.  I didn’t figure to have a lot of money behind me whenever I ran, so my appeal would have to be ideological.  I would be the most conservative politician in the state, as conservative as you can be without being a nut.

So I volunteered for Reagan for President in 1976, and got to know a few people.  One of them was Bill McConkey, who would be managing Republican Governor Jay Hammond’s reelection campaign in 1978.  He asked me to help out, which I was eager to do.  If I did Jay Hammond some good, he could be my ticket inside the world of Alaska politics.

The few people who knew me were surprised I wasn’t supporting Hammond’s principle opponent, hard core conservative Wally Hickel.  But my Uncle Fritz had told me that Hickel looked down on Alaska’s Natives, so I could never support him.

As far as I know, I was the only conservative in Anchorage who supported Hammond.  Some people didn’t like Hickel, so they all supported former Speaker of the House Tom Fink, who was just as conservative as Hickel, but normal.  I got to know Tom Fink, and think he would have been a good governor.  But he didn’t have a chance against Hickel.

Hickel had been elected Governor in 1966, then quit to become Nixon’s Secretary of the Interior.  He was crazy in his ambition, and might entertain thoughts of running for President, if he could get elected Governor again.  This was common speculation, but no one would come out and accuse him of it.  He was a wealthy and vindictive man, and anyone who crossed him might pay a price.

So, naturally enough, McConkey and the Hammond campaign asked me to do it.  I knew what my Uncle Fritz thought of Hickel, so I was happy to do so.  They made me chairman of Hands for Hammond, an imaginary volunteer group, and I issued a press release.  I came right out and said it.  The only reason Hickel is running again is so he can run for President.  He quit the job once, and he’ll quit it again.

The pro-Hammond Anchorage Daily News ran a big story about it, and Hickel was asked to react.  He was very temperamental guy, and he just blew up.  It was an ugly side of him that a lot of people knew about already.

Hammond won by 97 votes, and after reapportionment I was rewarded in 1982 by a vacant State Senate seat in a district designed specifically for me.  It was in south Anchorage, an area formerly represented in the Senate by a national board member of the John Birch Society.  But I wasn’t that good of a candidate, and only won 52-48.

I represented the conservative Republicans in my district, and was the most conservative legislator in the state.  But as far as my Alaskan identity went, I was a Hammond man.   And Jay Hammond was the finest leader the Native people of Alaska ever had.