{"id":16800,"date":"2015-10-12T18:31:38","date_gmt":"2015-10-13T01:31:38","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/spijue.wpengine.com\/news\/afn-convention-to-kick-off-in-anchorage\/"},"modified":"2015-10-12T18:31:38","modified_gmt":"2015-10-13T01:31:38","slug":"afn-convention-to-kick-off-in-anchorage","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.juneauempire.com\/news\/afn-convention-to-kick-off-in-anchorage\/","title":{"rendered":"AFN convention to kick off in Anchorage"},"content":{"rendered":"

ANCHORAGE \u2014<\/strong> Alaska\u2019s largest gathering of indigenous people is scheduled to take place in Anchorage this week, giving participants a forum for discussing crucial issues, including the state\u2019s ongoing fiscal crisis.<\/p>\n

The annual conference of the Federation of Alaska Natives will open Thursday and continue through Saturday at the downtown the Dena\u2019ina Convention Center. The convention draws up to 5,000 people from around the state each year.<\/p>\n

\u201cThe whole point of the convention is to get people together, get them engaged in issues and sharing information and strengthening the Native community to deal with the challenges that are ahead,\u201d said AFN president Julie Kitka.<\/p>\n

As always, the event will be preceded by the three-day Elders and Youth Conference that is hosted by the First Alaskans Institute.<\/p>\n

The theme of this year\u2019s AFN convention is \u201cHeroes in Our Homeland.\u201d Planned panel discussions and work sessions include the Alaska\u2019s economic woes amid low oil prices, substance abuse, and the justice system and Alaska Natives.<\/p>\n

The theme of the elders and youth conference is \u201cNot in Our Smokehouse!,\u201d which organizers say represents the love and protection people feel about their way of life.<\/p>\n

Scheduled participants for this year\u2019s convention include keynote speakers, Haida weaver Delores Churchill, and her grandson, Donald Varnell, a Haida carver. Kitka said the pair and other speakers represent the theme as people who are well esteemed, but just not as well-known by the general public.<\/p>\n

Other scheduled speakers include U.S. Census Bureau director John H. Thompson., Alaska Gov. Bill Walker, Alaska\u2019s three-member congressional delegation and Lt. Gov. Byron Mallott, a Tlingit who was born in the Southeast Alaska village of Yakutat.<\/p>\n

The federation was created in the mid-1960s in when Alaska Natives gathered for a three-day conference to focus on indigenous land rights, according to the AFN\u2019s website. The organization said its main focus the first several years was to work on obtaining a fair land settlement, which materialized in the form of the 1971 Alaska Native Claims Settlement Act.<\/p>\n

The law compensated Alaska Natives for loss of historic lands. It led to establishment of regional and village Native corporations with the right to select 44 million acres of land and appropriated $962.5 million to them. Thirteen regional Native corporations and scores of village corporations were created under the law.<\/p>\n

Next week\u2019s convention comes on the heels of President Barack Obama\u2019s three-day visit to Alaska that began Aug. 31 and focused almost entirely on climate change. During his tour, Obama became the first sitting president to set foot in the Alaska Arctic when he visited the largely Inupiat Eskimo regional hub of Kotzebue, telling residents who gathered to greet him that their plight should be the world\u2019s wake-up call on global warming.<\/p>\n

None of the scheduled work sessions or panel discussions in the upcoming convention deal outright with climate change, however, according to the event agenda. But aspects of the environmental changes taking place have been dealt with in past convention workshops, formal resolutions and through convention guest speakers over the years, according to Kitka.<\/p>\n

\u201cThese are not new things coming out there,\u201d she said. \u201cWhat is new is the historic visit by the president raising the visibility and putting a greater sense of the urgency for people all to work together.\u201d<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

ANCHORAGE \u2014 Alaska\u2019s largest gathering of indigenous people is scheduled to take place in Anchorage this week, giving participants a forum for discussing crucial issues, including the state\u2019s ongoing fiscal crisis. The annual conference of the Federation of Alaska Natives will open Thursday and continue through Saturday at the downtown the Dena\u2019ina Convention Center. The […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":107,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_stopmodifiedupdate":false,"_modified_date":"","wds_primary_category":4,"footnotes":""},"categories":[4],"tags":[230],"yst_prominent_words":[],"class_list":["post-16800","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-news","tag-state-news"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.juneauempire.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/16800","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.juneauempire.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.juneauempire.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.juneauempire.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/107"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.juneauempire.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=16800"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.juneauempire.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/16800\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.juneauempire.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=16800"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.juneauempire.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=16800"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.juneauempire.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=16800"},{"taxonomy":"yst_prominent_words","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.juneauempire.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/yst_prominent_words?post=16800"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}