[Congressional Record Volume 170, Number 126 (Thursday, August 1, 2024)]
[Senate]
[Pages S5758-S5760]
From the Congressional Record Online through the Government Publishing Office [www.gpo.gov]



                         Tribute to Julie Kitka

  Mr. SULLIVAN. Mr. President, you know what time of the week it is, 
and I think our pages are learning. But it is a special time of the 
week here in the Senate because it is Thursday, and Thursday is when I 
usually come out and talk about the Alaskan of the Week.
  Now, look, the press--where are they? I am not sure they are around 
right now, but they love this speech. They call it probably the most 
important speech of the week in the Senate, regardless of what is going 
on. The Presiding Officer is a big fan and the pages are because I like 
to tell stories about what my constituents are doing back home to earn 
them this very prestigious title--very prestigious, by the way--the 
Alaskan of the Week.
  I like to begin this speech, as you know, talking a little bit about 
what is going on back home in Alaska.
  Here in the Senate, we are all getting ready to go on a recess work 
period, we call it. We are all going to be going home, seeing our 
constituents. Speaking of things in Alaska, I just happened to host our 
Senate lunch. On the Republican side of the Senate on Thursdays, one of 
the Senators hosts lunch every Thursday. Today was my day to host, 
which is kind of exciting.
  I am not going to brag, but I think a lot of the Senators like it 
when Senator Murkowski or I host because we bring in great salmon, 
halibut. So we had a feast for lunch today. My wife Julie was here, 
which was really special.
  We brought in peonies. A lot of people don't know Alaska is now 
becoming a huge peonies flower producer. I didn't even know what a 
peony was a couple of years ago, but now we are big into that. So if 
you saw these peonies all over the Senate today, they were from Alaska.
  What I like to do at the lunch is talk a little bit about Alaska. I 
have this fact sheet with these great facts about Alaska. And during 
the lunch, we have a video cam going, literally a live feed video of 
what is happening in Alaska in the Katmai National Park, Brooks Falls. 
That is the real famous place in Alaska where all the big brown bears 
gather by the falls because the salmon are trying to jump up through 
the falls, and the brown bears are literally catching them in their 
mouths and eating them right there. So that is a live feed in the lunch 
that we just had, dozens of bears. It is awesome.
  If you are interested in watching it, just go on Brooks Falls, live 
feed. It is awesome to watch. So there is a lot going on in our to 
State.
  It is kind of dangerous right now. One of the things that I showed to 
my colleagues is this slide. It is going to be hard to see, but this is 
a slide of Russian and Chinese strategic bombers--not good. That is a 
Bear bomber, Russian. That is a Chinese bomber. It is the first time in 
history they were working together to push into our airspace, Alaska 
airspace--Russian-Chinese strategic bombers coming into Alaska 
airspace. Our brave military men and women in Alaska jumped them. Over 
10 fighters, fully armed to the teeth, said: Hey, China, Russia, get 
out of our airspace. Go back to your countries.
  So up in Alaska, we are on the frontlines of a lot of this great 
power competition. These authoritarians are on the march pushing. We 
are not going to let them push in our State. So there is a lot going 
on. And I was talking about that at lunch.
  By the way, I was talking about this, too: My wife Julie and I were 
recently up in Utqiagvik, Barrow. That is the highest point of North 
America. These are too hard to tell, but we were able to see some polar 
bears, beautiful polar bears in the wild. We took some photos--
magnificent, beautiful animals. So there is just a lot going on.
  I always like to make the pitch to people watching here in the Senate 
or on TV: Come up to Alaska. You will have the greatest trip in the 
world. It is an incredible place, a lot of fun. Especially now, it is 
beautiful. You would just love it.
  So a lot happening there, as I was talking about to my colleagues at 
lunch today. But I want to talk about the people.
  Today, we have a really great Alaskan of the Week who I know super 
well. I just want to talk about what a great job she has done. Her name 
is Julie Kitka. She has been, for over three decades, the president of 
a really important organization in Alaska called the Alaska Federation 
of Natives--the Alaska Federation of Natives, AFN, as we call it, in 
Alaska.
  I also want to give a shout-out to Ben Mallott. He is actually 
related to my

[[Page S5759]]

wife. He is going to be the next president of AFN.
  So great job, Ben.
  He has already been working at AFN for a long time. But what we 
really want to talk about is Julie Kitka's legacy and what she has done 
to help literally tens of thousands of people in our State.
  Now, I have talked about this a lot in my speeches here, but the 
history of Alaska is very epic. But one of the big elements of our 
history is who owns our lands, who manages our lands. Sometimes it is a 
fight, sometimes it is cooperation, but it is a really important issue.
  One of the largest, most important parts of that history, after 
America purchased Alaska from Russia in 1867, was what rights to the 
lands would the Native people have? By the way, it was their lands to 
begin with, right? So what kind of rights do the Native people of 
Alaska have to lands?
  This question has been going on since the purchase in 1867 of Alaska 
from Russia.
  (Ms. HIRONO assumed the Chair.)
  And believe it or not, Madam President, this issue is still in limbo 
into the late 1960s, when the Alaskan Native people from across the 
State organized and formed the Alaska Federation of Natives--AFN, as we 
call it--to push for the rights to their lands.
  This fight got turbocharged in the late 1960s when oil was discovered 
on Alaska's North Slope during a crisis in terms of a worldwide 
shortage of oil. And the Congress was like: We need to produce energy 
in Alaska, and we need to produce energy fast.
  Well, wait a minute. The Native people are saying: Hey, these are our 
lands. What about the settlement?
  So Congress came together and passed a lot of really important 
legislation relating to these issues in Alaska. One was called the 
Trans-Alaska Pipeline Act, the TAPS Act; but the most important was in 
1971, and it was called the Alaska Native Claims Settlement Act--ANCSA, 
as we call it back home.
  This is the largest and certainly the most innovative indigenous land 
settlement in U.S. history, probably in the history of the world, to be 
honest. It is no exaggeration to say that: 44 million acres of land 
going from the Feds and the State to the Native people to own it--fee 
simple, by the way. Very innovative. Very different from what happened 
in the lower 48 with Indian reservations, a very different system. 
Congress did that.
  And it created AFN, the Alaska Federation of Natives. Actually, if 
you look at the AFN symbol, it has kind of a three-ring symbol that has 
Aleut, Eskimo, Indian--the symbol of everybody working together. And, 
trust me, in Alaska, the history of different groups wasn't always so 
cooperative. There was a lot of conflict between different Native 
groups.
  And AFN came together. As a matter of fact, at lunch today, I was 
telling a story about Alaska. I even told a story about my mother-in-
law, my wife's mom, Mary Jane Fate, who is a great Alaska Native civil 
rights leader. She was one of the leaders, when AFN was being formed, 
who came to Congress and lobbied Senators on ANCSA. And she actually 
got a very conservative Senator, James Buckley, a great Senator from 
New York, to be a cosponsor of ANCSA because it was so innovative: a 
private sector approach to Native ownership of land that created Alaska 
Native corporations--all done right here in the U.S. Senate. And the 
AFN, Alaska Federation of Natives, pushed that and made it happen. 
Great leadership.
  So now AFN represents about 140,000 Alaska Natives, hundreds of 
Alaska Native corporations. And for 34 years, Julie Kitka has been 
leading AFN--such an important organization to our State--and Julie has 
done a great job. Now she is stepping down. We are going to miss her. I 
am going to talk about that.
  But let's talk about Julie's life. She is the second of five 
children, born to a Chugach Native father and a Kansas German mother. 
Growing up, she alternated between living in Cordova, AK, her father's 
hometown, and Washington State, where she started college at Western 
Washington University in 1971.
  By 1973, Julie returned to Cordova to work in a cannery there and 
later was hired by the Bureau of Indian Affairs, their enrollment 
office and their adoption division. By the way, she processed over 
12,000 adoption applications for Alaska Natives during that time.
  And it was during this time she first became acquainted with the 
Alaska Federation of Natives, which, again, as I mentioned, was pretty 
new. Julie began taking grad school classes. She is very smart. Like I 
said, I have known her for many, many years. And she later dropped them 
to help take care of her sick daughter.
  And then AFN said: Hey, this woman is really smart. We are going to 
hire her in kind of an accounting-bookkeeper position. They saw her 
really smart brilliance when it came to her business acumen and her 
business degree. And that was in 1984, just 6 years before she would 
begin her tenure as the AFN's longest serving president. So AFN made an 
early, very smart investment in Julie Kitka.
  She moved up the chain quickly. She sat in on meetings with 
intelligence, curiosity. She was hired as a special assistant to the 
president. And Julie remembers the next few years at AFN as one of huge 
possibilities.
  As I said, Madam President, this was an amazing settlement. Congress 
did great work--the House, the Senate--very innovative, hundreds and 
hundreds of pages. And Julie said: ``There were [enormous] 
opportunities left and right. During those first meetings,'' after 
ANCSA was passed, ``folks would show up with briefcases like `business 
people,' and they'd be full of smoked salmon and seal oil.''
  That was Julie talking about the early days.
  While unprecedented, the structure of Alaska Native corporations--
again, created by this body, Congress of the United States--through 
ANCSA, opened up incredible possibilities for the State. Julie said: 
``It is beyond our imagination how successful things turned out'' with 
that legislation.
  Now, look, it wasn't perfect. We are always trying to amend it and 
fix it.
  She goes on to say: What Congress did by doing this settlement, land 
settlement experiment, with ANCs gave us a pathway to engage with the 
economy, to strengthen self-determination. The corporate model was an 
innovative tool which could be modified easily.
  Now, pivotal changes began to happen at AFN. Workshops, conventions 
began to roll out across the State to help people prepare to implement 
this really far-reaching legislation.
  And part of the legislation said: All right, this is going to pass 
in--it passed in 1971. Twenty years later, the Alaska Native 
corporations would essentially be open to the public, enabling 
outsiders to buy into ANCs. And this, to be honest, Madam President, 
was a challenging time. It was a scary time.
  Julie remembers it as challenging and scary. A lot of corporations 
back in those days--ANCs--were losing money. This legislation, after a 
20-year period--the 20-year period in 1991 really loomed large.
  So she and the other Alaska Natives, working with the Congress and 
the Senate, worked hard to ensure continued Native ownership of ANCs. 
This was really important work. And they did this work. Julie came to 
Congress in Washington, DC, with AFN many, many times to serve as a 
lobbyist, advocating for ANCs in this legislation, this period in the 
early--late 1980s and early 1990s.
  And with the help of her great persuasive talents, AFN was able to 
include key provisions in legislation here in the Congress that have 
resounding impacts today, including land bank protections preventing 
the taxation of undeveloped Native lands, special benefits for our 
Alaska Native elders, and the designation of ANCs as small or 
disadvantaged businesses.
  Madam President, as you know, these relatively small changes grew 
later into really, really important changes for our ANCs and have 
created important legacies for the success that we have seen in so many 
of these Alaska Native corporations.
  By January 1990, Julie had done such great work that AFN said: Hey, 
you are going to be our president. You are going to be our leader.

  And she has done that for 34 years. She presided over AFN. By the 
way, the Alaska Federation of Natives Conference, the AFN convention, 
as we call it, every year in October in Alaska, is the biggest, largest 
meeting of indigenous Americans each year in the country. And, by the 
way, it is a great

[[Page S5760]]

event. It is a great event. I love going every year. It is a lot of 
fun. So many Alaskans, Native and non-Native, are there. It is 
fantastic.
  So Julie has built all of that. AFN is one of the most important 
organizations in our State.
  Thirty-four years later, Julie talks about some of the seminal 
programs and initiatives created during her time. AFN helped establish 
the Job Corps center, which is still thriving in Palmer, AK--a 
beautiful campus there--training Alaskans in their jobs. It is 
fantastic work they do.
  AFN worked to establish Alaska Native education equity, the growing 
recognition and importance of Tribes.
  Julie Kitka also did a great job working with our military and Alaska 
Natives and AFN. Alaska Natives, like Native Hawaiian and lower 48 
Indians, serve at higher rates in the military than any other ethnic 
group in the country. Special patriotism, I like to call it. That is 
what they do.
  Julie Kitka did a great job focusing on those issues and forming 
dozens of joint Federal and State partnerships that have lasted for 
decades. Julie said that none of this would have been accomplished 
without bridge building:

       It was always about partnerships--nothing was ever done 
     alone. We had conferences all the time to break down barriers 
     and self-limiting silos.

  Partnerships--what a great way to focus on leadership, Madam 
President. That is what she did.
  So after 34 years as the president of AFN and 40 years as an employee 
of AFN, Julie has now decided to step down. What a career. What an 
impact on Alaskans.
  And, by the way, she shows no sign of slowing down yet. This April, 
the full Alaska congressional delegation, myself included, selected 
Julie to lead the Denali Commission, an independent Federal Agency, to 
work on economic development and infrastructure issues in rural Alaska. 
So we certainly have not seen the last of her incredible work or work 
ethic on behalf of Alaska and all of our fellow Alaskans.
  Julie, to you, congratulations. It has been an honor working with you 
on some of these critically important issues. I know that everybody at 
AFN, all Alaskans, Native and non-Native, send their congratulations. 
You have built an incredible legacy. You have worked so hard for our 
State and our communities. And now you have received one of the most 
prestigious awards in Alaska: being our Alaskan of the Week. 
Congratulations on a job well done.
  I yield the floor.
  The PRESIDING OFFICER. The Senator from New Jersey.
  Mr. BOOKER. Madam President, before I start, it is an unfortunate 
position speaking after the Senator from Alaska. I want to thank him 
formally for his ``Alaskan of the Week.'' I am very far away in New 
Jersey, but I do enjoy that I often get to preside when he speaks about 
the extraordinary Americans. I know they are Alaskans, but they are 
extraordinary Americans. I have appreciated that on a regular basis.
  I do not understand why the Gallery is not full of journalists, but 
your colleagues do recognize the wonders of the people of your great 
State, and I want to thank you for that, in all seriousness.