AFN rallies against Safari Club International federal subsistence management proposals

image from: knba.org

As the deadline for public comment approaches, the Alaska Federation of Natives is pulling out all the stops to block a national sport hunting and fishing group’s push to reform the federal subsistence board.

This comes after Safari Club International successfully petitioned the U.S. Interior and Agriculture Departments to review federal subsistence management policies.

Last month, the Interior Department announced a 60-day scoping period, or review, on federal subsistence management.

AFN will hold a webinar Tuesday afternoon to give Native hunters and fishers an update on the status of subsistence management in Alaska and explain why it believes the Safari Club proposals pose a serious threat to the Native subsistence way of life.

Attorney Jaelene Kookesh, a longtime legal counsel for the Sealaska native corporation, is one of the presenters. She currently is senior legal counsel at the Van Ness Feldman firm. Kookesh says many Alaska Natives were elated last week, when the U.S. Supreme Court decided not to take up the State of Alaska’s challenge of federal subsistence protections under the Alaska National Interest Lands Conservation Act, or ANILCA. But Kookesh says, the battle goes on.

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U.S. Supreme Court declines to hear case that could have upended Alaska subsistence fishing

image from: alaskabeacon.com

The U.S. Supreme Court has rejected the state of Alaska’s latest attempt to alter Alaska’s decades-old system of subsistence fishing management.

In a one-sentence order Monday, the court said it will not review a decision by the 9th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals, which ruled in August that Alaska cannot manage fishing on a stretch of the Kuskokwim River that flows through the Yukon Delta National Wildlife Refuge.

If the Supreme Court had taken up the case, it could have redefined Alaska’s unique system of hunting and fishing management, which allows the federal government to restrict subsistence hunting and fishing on federal land to rural Alaskans. The state is forbidden by the Alaska Constitution from offering the same preference.

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