- Wally Hickel invented Alaska and told me he regretted
it. He also invented Sarah Palin, and I was hoping, when I travel to Alaska
next month, to ask him whether he also regretted that second creation.
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- Hickel wanted to be President; of what nation, well,
that changed. First, he wanted to be President of the United States. That
required that his home, Alaska, become united with the States, a task he
accomplished in 1959 with the help of his buddy, and later enemy, Richard
Nixon.
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- "That was a mistake," he said, referring to
US Statehood. "We should have been our own nation," which, I
pointed out, would have made him President instead of Governor.
-
- Hickel grinned and took me over to a globe. As he massaged
and caressed the planet's crown, he talked about his long-held dream to
create a circumpolar resource cartel linking Siberia, Alaska, sub-polar
Scandinavia and northern Japan, tied together by a rail tunnel under the
Bering Sea. Alaska was too small; his plan was for a Confederation of the
North, an Arctic Empire that circled the top of the planet. Benevolently
ruled, he made clear, by Emperor Wally.
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- Mad, yes, but all of Hickel's plans were nuts, and usually
successful. When I met with him in 1997, he had already prodded the Governor
of Sakhalin Island, Alaska's twin in population and minerals, to declare
its independence from Russia. (That didn't last.)
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- Walter Hickel, elected Governor of Alaska twice over
twenty-five years, was one strange Republican. Nixon expelled him from
the Cabinet in 1970 for publicly opposing the invasion of Cambodia. Hickel
was a Huey Long-style populist socialist. "Private property,"
he told me, "is an artifact of the temperate zone; it just won't work
for most of the planet."
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- But for a man averse to private property, he owned lots
of it and hungered for more. He was undoubtedly Alaska's richest man and
how he got it, and how he maneuvered to get more, with Nixon's help, and
later, Palin's, was the reason I have been investigating him.
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- Indian Giver
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- I first met Hickel in his office at Hickel Investments
atop his Captain Cook Hotel, the tallest building in Anchorage (by a regulation
crafted by Hickel).
-
- Thirty years ago, Hickel realized that his arctic dreams
lay in Alaska's vast reserves of gas, oil, coal and lumber. But extracting
and shipping those resources required removing a large obstacle: the land's
ownership by Indians and Natives.
-
- The US Congress recognized Native land rights in the
original agreement to purchase Alaska from Russia and, in 1959, again acknowledged
those rights, albeit reluctantly, when Alaska became America's 49th state.
-
-
- Eyak Chief-for-Life Agnes Nichols, one of the Natives
who negotiated the land deal with Hickel. Photo©1997 James Macalpine
PIF
- Hickel, elected Alaska's second Governor in 1966, was
driven crazy by the Natives' ownership of the land. He told me, "You
can only claim title to land by conquest or purchase. Just because your
granddaddy chased a moose across some property doesn't mean you own it."
-
- However, Secretary of Interior Stewart Udall (who served
both Kennedy and Johnson) protected Native land from Hickel and the oil
companies. But then, in 1969, newly-elected President Richard Nixon gave
Hickel Udall's job.
-
- Unless the Natives ceded or sold their territory, billions
of barrels of crude oil on Alaska's North Slope could not get to port through
a pipeline proposed by a consortium led by British Petroleum and its junior
partner, Exxon.
-
- From inside the Nixon Cabinet and outside, Hickel successfully
lobbied Congress for the Trans-Alaska Pipeline. But the BP/Exxon pipe required
getting those Natives out of the way. And that required passage of the
Alaska Native Claims Settlement Act.
-
- ANCSA contained a clause unique in US history: Rather
than create reservations in which there would be a sovereign territory
held for Natives in perpetuity, Alaskan Natives would be given shares of
stock in a dozen or so corporations. The corporations, not the Natives,
would own the land.
-
- Most important, Because the land was corporate real estate,
not reservation property it could be sold. And guess who was ready to buy
it?
-
- I met with Hickel the day Chenega Corporation of the
Prince William Sound sold 90% of its land to Exxon and its Oil Spill Trust.
I asked Hickel, seeing the Natives give up their land, if he had regrets
about the Settlement Act and Chenega's sale.
-
- "Yes," he said, "I made them an offer
for that property myself; but I wouldn't pay them anything like what they
are getting from the Exxon money."
-
- Today, most of the Native Alaskan corporate land of the
Prince William Sound is owned by people who don't live in Alaska. The remaining
Natives are now tenants of the land their ancestors have lived on for 3,000
years.
-
- Native leader Gail Evanoff told me, that was the plan
from Day One. "They set it up for us to fail. They put it in a form
they could take away."
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- Palin's Pipe
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- In 1973, the United State Senate authorized the Trans-Alaska
Pipeline by a single vote.
-
- To get that controversial law passed, R.O. Andersen,
Chairman of ARCO Petroleum, now a part of British Petroleum, testified
under oath that North Slope Alaska resources would be shipped exclusively
to the US market, not Japan.
-
- He and Governor Hickel also swore the oil pipe would
not be followed by a gas pipeline on the same route.
-
- Yet today, Yukon Pacific Corporation has begun work on
that gas pipeline designed to ship liquefied fuel to Japan. For Sarah Palin,
whose rise to Governor was engineered by Hickel, this was her greatest
accomplishment in office: requiring the major oil companies to participate
in Yukon Pacific's gas pipe project.
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- Yukon Pacific's founding investors were R.O. Andersen
...and Walter Hickel.
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- On Saturday, Governor Walter Hickel passed away. He was
90.
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-
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- *******
-
- Greg Palast investigated the Exxon Valdez grounding for
the Natives' Chugach Alaska Corporation. Palast is author of the New York
Times bestsellers, The Best Democracy Money Can Buy and Armed Madhouse.
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- The not-for-profit Palast Investigative Fund is seeking
your support for the Palast team's travel to Alaska as part of our investigation
of British Petroleum. For your tax-deductible donation, the author would
be pleased to sign and send you a gift book or DVD.
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