ALASKA NATIVES COMMISSION
JOINT FEDERAL-STATE COMMISSION
ON
POLICIES AND PROGRAMS AFFECTING
ALASKA NATIVES
4000 Old Seward Highway, Suite 100
Anchorage,
Alaska 99503
TABLE OF CONTENTS
Witness List | PDF
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COMMISSIONER SEBESTA: Okay, thank you very much, and -- let's see, next I'd ask Gregg Capito from the State Village Safe Water Program to update us on some of the things that he has shared when we were in task force; but to update us on Chose things. And the next two in line would be Greg Nothstine and Myra Heaps.
MR. CAPITO: My name is Gregg Capito. I work for the State Village Safe Water Program. And I briefed the Joint Commission several months ago when you folks were at the -- I believe it was the Elks downtown here?
COMMISSIONER SEBESTA: That's correct.
MR. CAPITO: And, at that time, I explained that the sanitation problems that we know about from having lived in the Bush, and maybe if you haven't read in the paper, are serious and growing worse; but that in January -- last January, a group was formed, representing 40 or 50 different people from across the state to look at the problem, and not just to examine the broken pipe; but to try to find out why the pipe is broken -- the root causes for chronic sanitation problems: water, sewer, and solid waste in the villages.
And all the people working were purely voluntary, so you know their motives were good. Some were bureaucrats like myself, others came from villages like Napaskiak and Napakiak, and others were just interested people.
Well, we've come a long way since January; and what we've done is we have a. body of recommendations which were presented yesterday at a work group for AFN, and Mike and Bob Singyke have copies of the recommendations, and those are in draft form. And what those recommendations basically say is that there are many different aspects to the sanitation problems in the villages, and these different work groups have come up with ideas to solve the problem. Not all of the solutions, interestingly enough, involve money. And yesterday we discussed these recommendations for about three or four hours and entertained questions from the audience as to what they thought. What I wanted to share with you now briefly is what the progression is from this point on.
My fear has always been that when you try to solve any problem that the study becomes the product in the minds of many people. The paper becomes the currency, so to speak. And that scares me, because too many people worked for too long to have this happen, so we're coming up to what I call implementation now. Now that you've got the report done, what do you do with the thing? And why won't the report go sit on the shelf like hundreds of other reports in the past? So, what we're doing is the strategy for implementation began several weeks ago with talking to you folks about it in a preliminary way; then we met with the Alaska Native Health Board, Ann Walker's group, and went over some preliminary ideas that the group -- the work groups, the task force had promoted. Yesterday we went through an AFN workshop and tried to present these ideas in a more disciplined way to a broader range of people. And what we're looking for is endorsements from them -- the Native Health Board and the AFN; and then, once that's collected, if that happens, we're going to move into the Governor's Office and present these ideas to the Cabinet to try to get support at that level; so there is a sort of a systematic progression to try to garnish as much support as we can to move forward to implement some of these ideas.
While that strategy appears to be working, I've got to share with you that what I'm learning -- and I thought, since I've been doing this work -- kind of work for almost 20 years now in the Bush, I thought I'd learned about everything that there was to learn; but what I've observed in watching other people work on this problem: scientists, non-scientists, people that carry honey buckets, people that have pipe systems, and on and on, is that I don't think in this state that we're lacking money. A long time ago I learned that if someone told you that money is the solution to the problem, they probably don't understand the problem to begin with. And for a policymaker, a bureaucrat, to say that they have no money, that's just not the case. There's money. It's a question of how you prioritize the money. What I think we're really lacking is commitment; and the whole thrust of our task force has been to try to find that commitment.
And so that you don't get off on the wrong foot like I did at the beginning, the commitment and the responsibility for solving sanitation problems clearly rests with three different groups of people at three different levels of government. The tendency is to say:
"It's the federal government's problem;
let the federal government fix it. Or it's the state government's
problem; let the state government fix it."
And, clearly, both levels of federal and state government have responsibilities under law, as well as moral responsibilities, to help solve these chronic sanitation problems. But so do local people. So do people that live in the villages.
So what these recommendations try to do is try to say:
"We need commitments from local people to
make this a priority, from the state government to make it
a priority; then, of course, from the federal government."
And
talk comes cheap. It's the action; it's the things that people
do that make a difference to solve any problem, not just
sanitation, but drug problems, or problems on the streets,
and so on. And
so we're grappling right now with commitment. Now that we've
got all of these recommendations, and we've got the report
done, we're really just beginning. And so what I'd hoped
is that, to strategize, not right here maybe, but a little
later
with Mike Irwin's staff, about from a public policy standpoint,
how can we in the Commission turn these fairly sound recommendations
into action. Again, not just at the federal and the state
level, but at the local level, so that we can sort of turn
the corner
on these ongoing sanitation problems, and keep people focused
on it long enough that we can solve it.
I'm a Viet Nam-Era veteran, and I remember
very, very well that the country has no stomach -- we as a
nation have no stomach for long-term commitments. We lost that
with our forefathers, I guess. We want quick fixes. We want
the black box. We want the magic bullet. Well, this task force
has shown that there's no magic bullet. There’s no technological
fix. It's not that simple. So we -- how do we keep people focused?
These newspaper articles that were done has helped heighten
people's attention, especially in the urban places; but how
do you maintain that over time; because you've got to be very
patient and very methodical when you're trying to solve a problem
that's as basic as sanitation. So it's not going to be solved
completely in four or five years. It's going to take probably
a generation of concerted effort to systematically eliminate
honey buckets and replace the honey buckets with more -- with
safer waste disposal methods, for example. So, the commitment
question keeps coming back to me again and again and again;
and I think about all the council meetings I've been to in
Emmonak, for example, where people wanted to eliminate the
honey bucket and did, and emulating that example across the
state to other villages so that same focus, that same fire
is there to push and solve the problem. To push the bureaucrat
to solve the problem. I think that's the real challenge. So,
we're going to move forward, like I said; and we're going to
do everything that we know how to do to bring this attention
-- to bring the solutions to the problems of the policymakers.
And that's Senator Stevens, Senator Murkowski, Don Young, or
their successors, the state policymakers, and local people,
too. But we can't make commitment; you can't buy commitment.
You can't write a check and call it commitment. You've got
to want to fix what's broke. And the hope is that since that's
-- since there's no physical law that says we can't fix this
problem, that we will. I mean, there's no law of physics that
says we can't fix sanitation problems. But the commitment needs
to be there and needs to be sustained.
And I think that's the overall thing I've learned so far, in watching 40 or 50 different people from different backgrounds work on the sanitation problem. So I have a personal commitment to see to it that their ideas are carried forward, right in the face of the policymakers. I also have an equal commitment that Village Councils, IRA Councils; Traditional Councils, Elders Councils, City councils understand the same -- that the same level of commitment is needed from their end.
And this strategy has to be thought about carefully where we go from here; and I'm hoping that, as far as the federal policymakers are concerned, that the Joint Commission will take some of these ideas under their wing and move through the federal system.
This partnership stuff seems to be the buzzword these days. We need partnerships, you know. That's sort of true. We can't do it by ourselves. Villages can't do it by theirselves. And in the few examples where we've had -- where things have changed in a positive sense in a village, where sanitation is concerned, it's -- it ough -- it comes down to not necessarily what a bureaucrat did or didn't do, it's that in the case of Emmonak, and Huslia, and some other places -- Nulato, for example, people there were so committed to the change that they'll let nothing stand in their way. It didn't matter what council there was, and how many City Managers you went through, the focus was always there. So government needs to be equally committed at the state and federal levels to hold up our end of the bargain; and once that's done, I think we can begin to begin solving the problem. And maybe the next generation will make their contribution.
So that's the status of where we're at; and if you want to see copies of these recommendations, I can get you copies. Mike Irwin's staff already has copies. Bob Singyke's got copies, --
COMMISSIONER SEBESTA: Okay.
MR. CAPITO: -- and we had a three-hour workshop yesterday to dispense two or three hundred of these things.
COMMISSIONER SEBESTA: Then would you make sure that a copy of this -- of those recommendations get into the record also?
MR. CAPITO: Sure.
COMMISSIONER SEBESTA: And, Gregg, thank you very much. What I hear you saying may extend even to other areas, and that is if people want something bad enough and organize and leave no stone unturned to get it, they'll get it.
MR. CAPITO: Yeah, and --
COMMISSIONER SEBESTA: That type of commitment.
MR. CAPITO: -- government's got to be smart
enough to recognize where chose -- where that’s occurring and
then take advantage of the local enthusiasm and the commitment
to make the change. Government also has to be mature enough
to recognize that where that's lacking, we really can't do
much as government bureaucrats. And these rec --
COMMISSIONER SEBESTA: Do you have any suggestions in how to, let's say, excite people to that level of commitment which you're talking about?
MR. CAPITO: I've never solved that particular riddle, and I've thought about it. Let me give you a quick anecdote. When I first went to Huslia, beautiful log-cabin village on the river, like Alaska looks in books to people, I'm walking through the village with a lady -- with a City Counci -- with the City Manager, and I'm looking around, and I said:
"Gee, how come there's no stick houses here?"
Her name was Elsie. I said:
"Elsie how come there's no stick houses
here?"
She said:
"What do you mean?"
I said:
"I don't see any HUD houses in this villages."
And
she said:
"There aren't any."
I said:
"They're all log."
She said:
"Yeah, we know how to do logs here. We
have our own mill down the river, and we square the logs,
and chip
'em up."
I said:
"But where's the HUD houses?"
She said:
"I told you, we don't have any HUD houses."
I said:
"Well, HUD goes everywhere. Why, when HUD
came here -- they must have come here to make these houses
available -- what did you say to HUD?"
She said:
"We told them that we wanted log houses."
And I said (laughing):
"What did HUD say?"
And she (laughing) said:
"HUD said, they can't do logs. They got
to do stick-built houses."
I said:
"So what happened?"
She said:
"We told HUD to hit the road (laughing)."
I
said:
"You told HUD, the federal HUD, the big
white father in the sky?"
And she said:
"Yes, we told them that we wanted the houses
to look like this. And they wouldn't do that."
And I was so stunned by that, I thought:
"This place has got thunder. This place
has got lighting in their hands. They won't be pushed around."
And to bring that story to full circle,
I never forgot that; and so a couple of years ago, the Environmental
Protection Agency made money available on something called
the Indian Set-Aside Program to help villages solve sewer problems.
And they wanted a demonstration project in Alaska. And we wanted
it to work right, 'cause we wanted to show the EPA we could
spend their money correctly, and have as project, and all this.
The first place that came into my mind was Huslia, because
I remembered that thunder. So we go back up to Huslia, and
there's Elsie still there. That continuity's there. And Elsie
still had the fire. So that project got designed, planned,
and built with local people -- force-account construction it's
called, just like Emmo did. Turned out beautifully, under budget,
on time, every dime accounted for. No more failed septic tanks;
no more pit privies. You go to Huslia tomorrow afternoon, and
you'll see people that have basic services in their home. Now,
I don't know why or how Huslia got oriented that way. It sure
as hell wasn't me. I mean, I didn't go in there and inspire
people to do great things. It's not what I do, and I'm not
good at it anyway. They were inspiring us (laughing) in sort
of an odd way. The village was showing, gee, if they can do
that much locally, we ought to be able to go out and help them.
And the same thing in Emmo. It was from them to us, not from
us to them; but how you duplicate that, I don't know. And as
you probably already know, there are pl-aces in this state,
unfortunately, where I call places where there's nobody home;
where you go and you can't find that no matter how hard you
scratch the ground. It is not there. And those are the places,
unfortunately; with the most serious health problems, the most
chronic hepatitis A, the most severe honey bucket disposal
problems. And those are the most tragic. Those are the ones
where you bleed and you worry about, because of kids playing
in the waste, and on and on. But I don't have an answer to
that question. If I did, it would be really fun, you know.
COMMISSIONER SEBESTA: Okay, well, thank you very much, Gregg.
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