Indigenizing the Tongass Economy

What does it mean to Indigenize the Tongass Economy? And, why is that important?

First, a little background: The Tongass National Forest is the largest National Forest in the country. It includes 90% of all lands in Southeast Alaska. No other region in the country is so overwhelmingly composed of public lands, or lands that are managed by the federal government.

These lands have been stewarded by those indigenous to the area for over ten thousand years – the Tlingit, Haida and Tsimshian peoples. Colonial history has been hard on the Indigenous peoples of this place. The taking of traditional homelands, the boarding school experience and the overall upending of the traditional way of life has led to inter-generational trauma for which there is no simple solution. Industrial development and boom-and-bust industry cycles in fisheries, mining and timber have also made it difficult to adapt to the cash economy and have stressed the lands and waters that indigenous people rely upon.

For us, Indigenizing the Tongass Economy is about learning from the past to adapt the regional economy to be more equitable, resilient, and prosperous than we have been able to achieve thus far.

Indigenizing our economy builds on our community and regional strengths, celebrates our ways of living, and fosters a new era of creativity and innovation that our children and their children will thrive in.

In early 2022, the SSP brought together a coalition that developed a 60-million-dollar proposal to the Economic Development Administration’s (EDA’s) Build Back Better Regional Challenge (BBBRC) to invest in our region’s ailing forest products industry. Over the course of three months and through an immense collaborative effort pooling ideas and resources from our community and regional partners, our coalition designed this proposal to catalyze a forest products industry rooted in our region’s tribal villages through six component projects:

Our BBBRC coalition was led by tribal organizations who already represent the vanguard of Indigenizing the Tongass Economy. For example, Spruce Root, Sealaska and Tlingit-Haida Regional Housing Authority have each been working for several years to align their economic development activities with traditional cultural values. With their leadership and collaboration with over 40 other partner organizations, we believe we built a model of how to indigenize our region’s forest product industry that we can apply to our region’s other core economic drivers in fisheries and tourism, as well as a budding mariculture industry.

Although our BBBRC proposal was not selected for funding, it was selected as one of only 60 finalists through the phase 2 process. The EDA knows our proposal is worthy of funding, but they did not have enough to fund everyone in the competition (Our region was awarded a BBBRC project for the mariculture industry via SE Conference). We are channeling ongoing support from the EDA and groups like America Achieves, the National League of Cities and others to reconfigure our coalition’s vision to be both more holistic (than EDA BBBRC constraints allowed), and more modular so that significant parts of the entire economic system we envision can be funded by different government, philanthropic and venture capital sources, especially the Bipartisan Infrastructure Law, the Inflation Reduction Act and funding made available through the Denali Commission. Part of this reconfiguration includes a rebranding of our vision as “Indigenizing the Tongass Economy”.

Indigenizing the Tongass Economy is an effort to shift away from exporting raw resources for short-term profits to a regenerative model of economic prosperity. This approach is intended to be highly inclusive to all people who live in southeast or are interested in moving here and learning the cultural values of sustainability practiced by the region’s indigenous peoples in the times before first contact. Our approach is based on three overarching principles:

We understand that these are lofty principles and that the challenges we face are significant, but we also understand that the times we live in demand a bold and optimistic approach to mitigate and adapt to the impacts of climate change, overcome the trend towards isolation for our rural communities and to see our democracy and economy fulfill their potential to be equitable, inclusive and just. We have been building toward this moment through the SSP for over a decade and our confidence comes from the resilience of the indigenous peoples of the Tongass, and the collaborations we have cultivated between indigenous and non-indigenous organizations and people over that time.

The SSP is a collective impact network with nearly 15 years of collaboration under its belt. Spruce Root serves as the backbone organization for the SSP and works to grow the network, maintain communications about our shared interests and goals and pool resources for endeavors that no one entity could accomplish alone. Indigenizing the Tongass Economy is great example of a shared goal that is going to require a diverse range of partners, including K-12 Schools, Vocational Training Centers, Universities, Tribal Governments, Tribal ANCSA corporations, City Governments, State Government Agencies, Federal Government Agencies, NGOs, individual representatives from the Business Community and some strategic national and global philanthropies and non-profits. The SSP is in a great position to bring such a group together.

The SSP is already working with regional partners to guide approximately 100 million dollars in complementary investments being made by our own Seacoast Trust, the USDA Southeast Alaska Sustainability Strategy and a large grant awarded to the Southeast Conference by the Economic Development Administration.

Additionally, we see immense opportunity in the Bipartisan Infrastructure Law (BIL) and the Inflation Reduction Act (IRA) for additional investments, and we implemented a complementary grant from the USDA RISE program that took a systematic look at community capacity, industry opportunity and the gaps that exist between the two that might be filled by those two bills.

We will continue the regional discussion about the why and how of indigenizing our regional economy by continuing to develop a sustainable vision for the forest products industry in our region (click here for mor info). We will also explore what this approach might look like in other economic sectors, including fisheries, mariculture and tourism. Each of our region’s tribal and rural communities has an opportunity to grow a sustainable economy from these four industries. For each industry, we are pulling together proposals for investments in:

We are very excited by the vision and stepped-up collaboration that was seeded by being selected as a finalist in the Build Back Better Regional Challenge. We feel confident that this work puts us on a path to a rich and sustainable society that is founded on principles of social justice, traditional ecological knowledge, conservation science and the application of principles of regenerative economic design – what we believe is a pathway to indigenizing the Tongass Economy.

If you would like to learn more about this initiative, contact us to get involved in our monthly coalition meetings, or keep informed on our efforts to Indigenize the Tongass Economy by subscribing to the SSP newsletter at the bottom of the page.