Committing to future generations of Alaska Natives: a conversation with Alana and Kaylah

At the Russell Family Foundation, we put our investment portfolio, grants and influence to work through our Catalytic Climate Finance program, backing planet-positive solutions for people, places and nature. An important part of this work is listening to and learning from the wider network of organizations advocating for these goals. No single organization can shift systems alone.

Spruce Root has spent more than a decade building a patient, place-based, and community-governed approach to capital through its program, the Sustainable Southeast Partnership (SSP), funded by the Seacoast Trust – set up for this purpose. Together, these programs provide Southeast Alaskans, particularly Indigenous communities, with access to business development resources like loans, coaching, workshops and more

This approach has been successful beyond imagination: An independent study found that for every dollar invested through the Sustainable Southeast Partnership, the region saw roughly seven dollars of benefit, where about $40,000 invested returns close to $292,000 in community value. 

We spoke with Alana Peterson, Executive Director of Spruce Root, and Kaylah Duncan, Spruce Root’s Development Manager, about the motivation behind Spruce Root and its Seacoast Trust, a sovereign trust designed to outlive everyone working on it today.

Sovereignty Without Land

Understanding the necessity of Spruce Root and its outsized impact on its community requires understanding Alaska’s unusual Native governance landscape.

“Our history as Native Nations is very different here than the rest of the US,” Alana explains. There are almost no reservations to speak of, even though roughly half of all federally recognized Tribes are in Alaska. Sovereignty and land are uncoupled in a way that exists almost nowhere else: the Tribes hold sovereignty but no land base. 

Instead, Alaska Native corporations, created by the Alaska Native Claims Settlement Act in 1971, hold land and subsurface rights as for-profit entities owned by their shareholders. The result is a layered, sometimes contradictory architecture, with tribal governments, Native corporations, and traditional clan structures all operating across the same lands but each with a different form of authority. 

“A lot of what we’re working through as a region is trying to navigate these complex traditional structures and Western structures that are sort of layered on top of each other. None of this is what was originally designed. It’s what we’ve inherited, and we’re trying to figure out what it looks like moving forward,” Alana says.

Around 2009, Southeast Alaska was coming off yet another collapse in the boom-and-bust cycle of the timber industry, Alana and Kaylah explain, complicated by this layered governance structure. For decades, big industry arrived with the same promises—jobs, capital, prosperity—and left after extracting wealth from the region, leaving communities floundering. 

The decades of conflict that preceded that moment, called the timber wars by local communities, had left conservation groups, the private sector, and Indigenous people deeply distrustful of one another. But by 2011, the thing they had been fighting over was largely gone.

“There wasn’t really an industry here to be fighting about as much, but we didn’t trust each other and we didn’t work together,” Alana recalls of the prevailing mood. 

As fisheries permits and timber jobs disappeared, families faced an impossible choice between staying in an economically-unfriendly situation or leaving their homelands. “If we lose our connection to our homelands as Native people, we lose our culture, our language, what makes us Indigenous,” Alana explains. “So we had to really put down the war kind of mentality and figure out how we actually create solutions so that our people can continue to exist in this place.”

This combination of factors informed the creation of Spruce Root as a localized economic solution grounded in Indigenous values, designed to be good for the economy, the planet, and the communities at once. The model is centered on first asking community members what matters to them, and then finding the capital and capacity to drive those needs. 

A Different Definition of Risk

Most of what Spruce Root does runs through capital, deployed on different terms than the conventional financial system.

Where traditional capital strictly evaluates credit as a measure of risk, Spruce Root backs entrepreneurs who are traditionally left out of the financial system and lack access to capital at all.

“We are taking exceptional traditional financial risk on these businesses, and they’re proving to be good investments,” Alana says. Spruce Root focuses on lending to its community: people harvesting local foods and building enterprises aligned with what local economies need.

These efforts have been wildly successful: for every dollar invested through the Sustainable Southeast Partnership, the region saw roughly seven dollars of benefit, or a 7x regional multiplier. Some of that benefit was straightforward financial leverage, but much of it goes far beyond what ledgers show.

“A family that’s now participating in cultural activities that maybe wasn’t before,” Alana offers as an example. “Or harvesting from the local garden, feeding the elders. There’s not a dollar transaction, so it’s hard to quantify, but there is real economic benefit there.”

Bringing The Fish Home

Of all the work underway, one of the stories most meaningful to Alana and Kaylah was how their work is reviving traditional fisheries. 

For generations, Southeast Alaska’s Native communities have watched their fisheries migrate away from them as they increasingly lost not the fish, but the right to catch them. 

In the 1970s and ’80s, nearly every community had local commercial fishermen, many of them Alaska Native. Under a limited-entry permit system, the permits and quota share held locally were steadily sold off.

“The majority of it is owned by non-local people,” Alana explains, with fishermen coming up from Washington State and elsewhere and economic value leaving the region with them. “The majority of those small Native communities just don’t have any commercial fishing activity at all anymore.”

The Southeast Village Fisheries Collective is the answer Spruce Root and its partners devised. Federal rules allow a Community Quota Entity (CQE) to purchase and hold fishing quota, which it can then lease out. Spruce Root helped design a regional CQE that buys quota shares and allocates them to participating communities, each of which can then lease access to fish. 

Critically, the quota can never again be sold outside the community. “It will always remain an opportunity for that community,” Alana says.

The collective is roughly two years old, and this season marked a milestone: it purchased its first quota, and its first two fishermen came aboard in Yakutat and Kasaan, two communities with minimal remaining active halibut fishermen until now.

A Fund Built To Outlive Its Founders

This idea of rights and prosperity in perpetuity is where the Seacoast Trust comes in, and where Spruce Root’s defining idea–patience–becomes a financial structure.

Seacoast Trust is intended as a sovereign, permanent fund to sustain this work in perpetuity and free future generations from the cycle of chasing grants and federal appropriations that consumes so much of the present. A significant portion of the fund’s principal is deliberately locked away.

“This isn’t to fill the gaps that we have now,” Kaylah explains. “We want whatever we’re doing now to be sustained. We want people to be in this work, and we also don’t want them to have to rely on the federal government or private individuals to keep it going.”

On the investment side, the fund applies Indigenous values as a screen across its portfolio as much as possible. The decade-plus of building local enterprises has created something most impact funds lack: a pipeline. 

“We now are looking at how we use this sovereign fund to invest in the things locally that we think are values-aligned and that can return an investment,” Alana says. The goal is a circular loop, where the community invests in itself.

The Value of Indigenous Climate Knowledge

It would be easy to read all of this as Indigenous-led economic development, but Alana insists the climate stakes are the whole point.

Southeast Alaska is home to the Tongass National Forest, the largest intact temperate rainforest on the planet and one of the US’s most significant carbon sinks, but funding and attention from the rest of the country ebbs and flows, surging when the Tongass is under political threat, then vanishing. 

Her job, she says wryly, has been to “follow the wave.” The alternative she’s asking for is a longer clock, with care for and conservation of the land in Indigenous hands.

She tells a story about her father, who used to joke that Southeast Alaska was “the future tropics of the world.” She thought it was a bad joke, until the climate began to shift. When she asked why he’d said it, he explained simply, “It’s been said. It’s been in our stories. We know this. I was told this from my grandparents, and they were told it.”

“Indigenous peoples actually have a lot of scientific knowledge and a lot of understanding about this place that Western science, unfortunately, doesn’t have a lot of confidence or belief in,” Alana says. Too often that knowledge is treated as a hypothesis awaiting Western validation.

The opportunity, she argues, is hiding in plain sight: “The people who’ve been stewarding these lands since time immemorial still live and exist here, still have the knowledge of this place. That is an asset.” Ask those communities what they want to prioritize, she says, and their projects will protect not only the community but also the natural landscape. 

Looking To The Future

When asked to picture Southeast Alaska two generations from now, Kaylah answers by looking two generations back.

Her great-grandmother could not speak her native language on her ancestral lands. “Now I’m here, and I get to work for a Native nonprofit community development financial institution, and our board is all Indigenous,” Kaylah reflects. 

That, Kaylah finds, is what the Seacoast Trust ultimately is: “a commitment to the next generation, and, honestly, to the next seven generations and beyond.”