PRESERVING CULTURE,
PROTECTING HABITAT
Native Conservancy was established in 2003 as a 501(c)(3) non-profit organization to empower Alaska Native peoples to permanently protect and preserve endangered habitats on their ancestral homelands. We strive to maintain and secure titles to Native lands in conservation trusts to strengthen our inherent rights of sovereignty, subsistence and spirituality.
Our Vision is to create resilient futures for Indigenous peoples by:
Preserving culture and protecting habitat.
Restoring and repatriating ancestral homelands, traditional food sources and subsistence practices to revitalize Native culture, habitat, health and spirituality.
Recovering Living Memories Of Pristine Habitat
Native Conservancy is rooted in ancient memories of deep blue water and a traditional way of life where wild salmon and silver shimmers of herring returned every year to their primordial river origins. These memories called to us from beneath the black oil of the Exxon Valdez spill and took form as a Will-to-Action.
"The day the Exxon Valdez oil spill happened, was the day the water died - yet it was also the day that something inside of me was ignited. I realized that this is not how it ends; this is how it began for me, for us.
We had to dig down deep inside our beliefs and our dreams to face our fears, to find the courage and strength to step up and be louder than everything else, yet remain a voice of reason, while we take on the powers that be, that got us into this mess in the first place." Dune Lankard, Founder and President, Native Conservancy
Native Conservancy, along with its sister organization, the Eyak Preservation Council (EPC), helped preserve more than a million acres of wild salmon habitat along 3,500 miles of the Gulf of Alaska coastline. By doing so, we are shaping movement towards building resilient communities and regenerative economies that will protect endangered habitat, species and cultures that depend on the wild.
Led by Dune Lankard, the Native Conservancy and EPC spearheaded campaigns that resulted in one of the largest, protected subsurface conservation easements in the history of the United States, and the preservation of a thin green band of coastal temperate rainforest habitat surrounded by one of the largest roadless wetlands and some of the tallest coastal glacier-topped mountains in the world.
In 1989, the Exxon Valdez oil spill in Prince William Sound devastated our subsistence resources and wildlife as fisheries and wild salmon markets crashed, leading to the loss of fishing income while the value of fishing permits and boats plummeted. Our coastal wild salmon way of life has yet to fully recover.
After the creation of the Exxon Restoration Fund in 1991, Alaska Native corporations, established under the Alaskan Native Claim Settlement Act (ANCSA, 1971), began to negotiate with state and federal government agencies that governed the Restoration Fund for permanent habitat protection agreements on their private land inholdings in the Exxon Valdez oil spill zone.
The Exxon Valdez Oil Spill Trustee Council that oversaw the Restoration Fund then proceeded to purchase land, development rights, and conservation easements from Native corporations. The fund enabled tribes to save their subsistence way of life and their forests from clear-cuts that would have leveled over a million acres along the parallel path of the nation’s worst oil spill at the time, the Exxon spill. This started to reverse a trend of planned deforestation by Native corporations in the spill zone.
Nothing will erase the memory of the spill, nor should this be the ultimate sign of recovery. Recovery will have occurred when the people of these communities have a strong and viable future that builds upon their past; a future they themselves must help to shape. Alaska Department of Fish and Game
Yet, Alaskan Native’s paid dearly for conservation: As part of their conservation agreements, they were forced to surrender part of their ancestral lands by selling fee title to protect the land from clear-cuts.