Sustainable Southeast Partnership

Marina Anderson asks herself this question everyday: “What would our ancestors have done?”

Anderson is a leader in her federally recognized tribe, the Organized Village of Kasaan. She’s a professional with varied roles and wide-ranging ability: Good with a sharp knife. Adept at manipulating columns on a spreadsheet. Always ready to respond. Willing to lead on policy matters. Runs an effective meeting. Has an open door. Operates a 32-quart pressure cooker.

She lives on the Alaska coast, as her Haida and Tlingit ancestors did: Think lush forest of towering trees, wisps of mist and fog woven through. She picks berries in the forest, as they did. She nets wild salmon and butchers deer for the table. As she learned from her father, she shares it all. It’s a way of life.  

Anderson also represents Kasaan in the Sustainable Southeast Partnership (SSP), a regional collective impact initiative supported by the Indigenous-led Seacoast Trust in the mostly rural panhandle of Southeast Alaska. The SSP focuses on four core issues:

• forestry and fisheries
• energy independence
• food security
• localized economy

Collective impact is a model for addressing complex problems through collaboration between multiple organizations based on shared goals and a strong foundation of trust.

Sustainable Southeast Partnership in Action

The SSP concept arose out of the struggles of four decades of natural resource conflicts in Southeast Alaska, in which the timber industry and conservationists were the two main adversaries. Alaska Native communities were largely left out of the decision-making process, even as some of the logging was conducted on lands belonging to Alaska Native corporations.

Solutions from Within Communities

Now more than 10 years old, the Sustainable Southeast Partnership has successfully nurtured a new kind of collaboration to support conservation within its network. Today it includes seven tribes and 10 other entities such as businesses and non-profits, including TNC.

“Collaborating as communities gets us even farther,” Anderson says. “And being able to talk with other communities that are in a similar economical state that we are, I think, is extremely helpful because a lot of times in the middle of rural Alaska, we feel like ‘Oh, that would be a great idea if I wasn’t in this remote village.’ But a lot of these ideas that are being planted around Southeast Alaska through the Sustainable Southeast Partnership are ideas that will work in the village.”

For the Indigenous leaders, the SSP was born from the imperative of cultural renewal. As Anderson says, “It’s about keeping the balance, remembering who we are…going out in the world to gather tools and experiences, and to come back and lift up my community with these new tools.”

The Ecology and History of the Tongass Forest

Anderson, now in her 20s, grew up on Alaska’s Prince of Wales Island, a rugged and remote tract of mountains and meandering coastlines the size of Delaware in the Tongass. It has a feel different from most anywhere else on Earth. It’s a place where trees—cedar, spruce and hemlock draped heavy with moss—grow all around. They’re up on steep mountain slopes, down along cascading salmon streams and right up to the bouldered edge of the roiling sea.

This is the Emerald Edge, a coastal rainforest that ranges from Washington, British Columbia and Alaska. As much as 200 inches of yearly precipitation makes it incredibly lush. These forests, with their big trees and living soils, do double duty as a major carbon storehouse for the planet. There are bears here, and wolves, and whales, seals and sea otters in the ocean’s bays and inlets. Tucked between forest and sea are Indigenous villages, like Kasaan.

Two centuries of colonization left scars in the many communities where the 70,000 people of Southeast Alaska live. It’s visible in the forest and in the waters of a place that abounds with plenty and should have enough resources to sustain communities and livelihoods. After all, Southeast Alaska salmon streams produce a quarter of the entire U.S. West Coast wild salmon harvest.

In this Tlingit, Haida and Tsimshian territory, decades of industrial-scale logging without opportunity for local or tribal consultation, and a period of overfishing, have taken a toll. In the early 2000s, North America’s timber industry battled for rights to log the old-growth forests here and left behind a changed forest. The fight left no clear winners, but it did succeed at fueling a generation of discord.

Anderson went far away to college, though if anything it may have only lent more immediacy to Prince of Wales Island’s ancestral tug. When she returned, for good this time, she signed on to help lead her tribe. Some will know Kasaan, pop. 60, for its art and history – the historic Náay Í’waans longhouse of carved cedar dates back to the 1880s. It’s a living work of architecture that, now restored, stands tall and proud with its giant beams and totem poles. Commonly known as Chief Son-I-Hat's Whale House and Totems Historic District, it was named to the National Register of Historic Places in 2002.

Making a New Way Forward

“I want to be that ancestor that our future ancestors are proud of,” says Anderson. “I want them to think back about their ancestors in 2019 and be proud of what we were doing.”

The SSP is at the leading edge of making that future for Southeast Alaska by starting close to home in small ways that add up to make an impact. A sustainable timber harvest that draws from today’s young-growth forests while sparing old-growth trees can support smaller sawmills and provide jobs. A more diverse regional economy can draw from the triple-bottom line of ecology, social equity and economic well-being—rather than the conventional single bottom line of financial profit.

“Local priorities can and should guide conservation in places where people and nature need a strong future together. This begins with relationships and building trust. This is how the Sustainable Southeast Partnership works, and it represents the best way forward for The Nature Conservancy as we pursue our mission,” says Christine Woll, Southeast Alaska program director.

In the Olympic coast of Washington, through coastal British Columbia, and through the remote panhandle of Southeast Alaska—the vast region where TNC’s Emerald Edge program is at work—this is what collaboration in the name of people and nature can look like. Trust comes first. Building and renewing communities able to withstand incoming forces of change comes next.