AFN. Alaska Federation of Natives. And one Finn.

Top of the morning gents,

I undertook a long drive last week. Bun wanted to attend AFN since it was the first in-person convention in years. She also wanted to visit with friends and family from way back, stating that she, "wanted to go see natives." I'm cool with that. I miss seeing and visiting folks from both Kotzebue and Barrow. At this convention, I only saw a couple souls from Barrow because two large native corporations were a no-show. ASRC and Doyon both declined their attendance after a tiff with the poorer native corporations and tribes over global whining and sea level rising finger pointing from shit-poor, soggy diapered coastal and river rats.

At the AFN convention a couple years ago, the delegates overwhelmingly voted to divest all of Alaska's native business activities away from mining and fossil fuel extraction. Yup, real dumb. Doyon has numerous mining, shale oil and hydro-logical fracturing start-ups in the works and ASRC is the largest revenue earner and oil field operator in the state. The mining Doyon is working in similar to NANA's hard-won efforts opening the Red Dog Mine.

We all remember the doom and gloom letters to the editor of the Arctic Sounder, and you may recall numerous suits from under-toilet-water villages like Kivalina taking NANA and Teck Cominco to task. None of these efforts succeeded and Red Dog has in turn paid our property and school taxes and employed thousands of our friends and children for decades. God loves a borough that works with resource extraction and creates a PILT (payment in lieu of taxes) scheme that saves it's residents of burdensome residential property taxation. Very few boroughs have achieved this. All my homes in the Mat-Su and Kenai Peninsula boroughs were billed a painful property tax bill. If our Barrow house was a single residency, I would've been spared a property tax bill, but duplexes are a dead giveaway rental real estate and taxed heavily.

In the lobby, me and bun ran into Cheryl Edenshaw and chatted with her about the two big native corporations that didn't show. She wasn't pleased seeing the seating sections empty and I made the comparison that it's like Tiny Tim's empty crutch abandoned in the corner. We sure miss those member delegations and we miss their gold standard sponsorship. I rudely pried Cheryl why AFN voted to divest away from our life's blood resource and hydrocarbon extractions. She dodged my pointed question, but stated that politics requires letting nay-sayers get their point across. I mentioned the battle to open Red Dog Mine and she wholeheartedly agreed that in any venture, you'll get non-participants on the sidelines throwing stones. She further stated that we have to let all these non-producing combatants lodge complaints, file frivolous lawsuits and after all their impeding efforts have failed, they'll turn-coat and reverse course, and step in line to receive a piece of the action in the form of larger Native Corporation Dividend checks.

I'm rather proud of the native corporations and their independent operations in mining, oil drilling and gas frak werks. Hell, I've enjoyed employment at numerous native owned companies, treated at native hospitals and even see a large savings account balance from my pretty wife's frugality, thrift and savings. But the ANCSA corporations have had some real fucking stonewalling to overcome and some stone-throwers came in the form of executive corruption. You older farts might recall the DOJ and FBI corruption investigations that occurred in Juneau. These corruption endeavors were all efforts by Bill Allen, the CEO and largest share owner of VECO. His scheme was to thwart the native corporations from creating their own independent business concerns, and hamstring their competing head-to-head in securing contracts with the big oil firms operating all over Alaska. Mr. Allen was convicted and jailed, alongside his cohorts in the legislature of felony bribery and legislative corruption. VECO was dissolved and bought out, in pieces by CH2M Hill, and years later, the remaining scattered carcass bits were bought by HillCorp.

Over the last few years, there is a collection of tribes and native corps that want Alaska's Federation of Native members to formally withdraw from fossil fuel, hard rock and open pit mining, shale oil excavation and frak gas drilling. Insofar as to disallow membership to AFN if ASRC and Doyon don't conform to these wishes and divest out of high-carbon industries. High-carbon is code for high-profit, and 70% of all the native corporation earnings are put into a profit sharing, slush fund pool for the poorer, dysfunctional corporations to use as a scheme to prop up un-sustainable, silly, green new deal business models. Remember when ivory art was going to sustain native corporations? Shit. Now all the social media and on-line sales sites ban any mention of ivory and fur. Even the Anchorage downtown native art stores are boarded up with the only carvings, parkas and dolls sold at AFN and small-scale native craft fairs statewide. Yup, that indigenous business plan and economic panacea is now dead in the water. That is, if you have water and sewer in yer fucking village.

In the last 50 years of AFN and ANCSA, oil and mining has paid all our bills. With state and borough governments in Alaska spending an average of approximately a billion dollars every month, I shudder at the tax bill we'd receive without such an avalanche of oil and mining resource dollars flooding our state. Do the math, a billion divided by 700,000 Alaskans, works out to $1,428.57 per person, per month in taxes we'd have to pay. With a confiscatory tax penalty like that, nobody'd have any children. No matter how you slice it up and spread it out with income, sales or property taxes, that's one fucking big tab. If you think Alaskans will voluntarily cut or eliminate high-budget programs we already enjoy, think again.

NANA has some promising opportunities inside the Ambler Mining District. The United States Geological Survey has completed decades old soil samples and rock formation analysis and published some of the country's most promising results. Talking with Nush, he mentioned literature suggesting the gold seam and rare earth metal deposits just upriver from you goombas, may be the largest in the world, dwarfing even those located in Africa. Reading the NANA Hunter magazine, I saw the time line of 10 years to wrap up, restore and re-purpose the Red Dog Mine. I say, it's time for a Gold Rush on NANA lands, and right fucking now. Keep in mind though, Gold Rushes are impossible to slow. Besides, if you read your America and Alaska history books, you can't let guys like me have anything to do with your impending stampede all the fuck over native lands, upriver to the Ambler, Kobuk and Shungnak triangle.

If I had my druthers, I'd set up a chain of hotels, casinos, brothels, crack houses, opium dens, bars, massage parlors and weed shops. Keep in mind that Gold Rushes attract free-loaders, carpet baggers, card sharks, prostitutes, drug merchants and brothel keeps. Only a very small percentage of the tidal wave of crooks and con-men will be doing any real mining, the majority will storm into the NANA region merely to separate fools from their money in the same fashion as Wyatt Earp and Soapy Smith.

No shit, if I could play God and design the facilities layout and architecture, I'd do another combination of Ketchikan, Skagway and Nome circa 1865-1905. I'd build modern facilities with spectacular neon lights similar to Indun Casinos, but in this century of diversity, inclusion and equity, staff the entire facility with Eskimo mobsters. The access road should have parallel train service with deluxe first-class train cars from Manley to the mine, but also connected to the railway system allowing wealthy gambling and prostitution tourists to catch a train ride off a cruise ship in Seward and ride in comfort all the way through Anchorage, Mat-Su, past Fairbanks and hang a left to the NANA Gold Rush Inuit Casinos. The road in and out of the mine would be strictly limited to industry freight truckers and company cars for maintenance and security. NANA Purcell Security can perform this task handily. Just like Deadhorse.

Never forget the Alaskan mantra: Mine the Miners. And all the visiting dignitaries and government officials. I don't think we should go so far as Epstein and secretly video everybody, but pamper the high rollers from all over the world with top shelf liquor, high grade cocaine, real expensive hookers, hotel suites with hot tubs, cigar humidors and premium marijuana shops that'd make round-eye mud racers permanently chinked. NANA has proven successful in the hotel business, the bar business, the mining industry and best of all, Professional Security Services. Now consolidate all these business models, take yer fish net out of the water, put it into a hotel/bar, mining, tourism, gambling and prostitution super native corporation and harvest big buxsh dude. It's no stretch of the imagination to sell seats on this train of debauchery to the likes of Bill Allen, Jacob Adams and Byron Mallot. What the fuck, I'd build special super premium luxury train cars for our former presidents, plus Kim Jong Un and Vladimir Putin too. Those tiny cookoo motherfuckers pay top dollar for beautiful girls to tell them they're sexy studs. Feel a puke coming? Wash yer barf down with giant NANA corp dividends.

In addition to hotels, mining, food services and bar operations, NANA will need specialized training in drugs and sex slavery. This is an opportunity to add my expertise in brothels, cocaine and green bud. We're talking crystal bud so strong, you'd label it Ghost Bud and let patrons see and speak to the dead. The cocaine I'd probably fetch directly from corporate Methican cartel distributors and ship only the blow that's fresh enough to give you kick-ass cat-piss diesel flavored snot, flammable phlegm, sweaty butt cheeks and a drippy chemical dick. The prostitutes would have to come from Ukraine, Romania or Estonia. These girls are naturally prettier, slimmer and taste better. Plus there poor and work hard for silly Indun beads. Over the life of a clean, well-tuned and maintained call-girl, the NANA Corporation can pull down roughly a million dollars. I'd advise against hiring colored, low-budget minority prostitutes. Even niggers won't pay to fuck dark meat, but dictators from Africa and South America will happily pay for slender girls with big eyes, pretty accents and lightly scented premium white pussy. I recommend sending the skanky nigger jelly rolls, jalapeno pepper belly poontang and rum soaked native biscuit back home to the projects, Mexico and the vil. Ain't no money there. That shit's free.

These income forecasts are historically proven. My great-grandparents shipped opium, liquor and children sex slaves purchased at auctions from orphanages all over the Pacific Northwest, up to the brothels of Ketchikan, Skagway and Nome. With a handshake and a wink, each child prostitute, at $10 a hump, could guarantee $10,000 in gold and silver backed brothel proceeds over the life of the product. With a 100:1 money devaluation, across 150 years of currency exchange, you have a million dollars in today's highly inflationary paper fiat money. The product being humans of average marital age. In 1890, the age of marriage was 12-15 years old, so stuffing the ships' hulls with cute little boys and girls that age didn't offend American Western cultural norms dictating the prevailing ages of consent: 150 years ago. Today neither. Epstein kept brothels full of children for his clients. He also kept secret video cameras running 24/7 and filmed dignitaries such as President Clinton, President Trump, Prince Harry and even Bill Gates gittin' some itty bitty titty and micro cooter biscuit. When children choke yer chicken with their tiny little hands, yer junk looks fucking huge.

Back to last week's AFN convention. I booked over to the North Slope seating section to look for my dudes. The fucker was entirely empty. So was the section set aside for Doyon, so none of my Indun buds from UAF were to be seen. The NANA section was sparsely populated too. We sat near Chuck and Marie Greene, chatted briefly, then watched the speakers. Looking around for familiar faces, I found Billy and Linda Lee sitting behind us. During a pee-break and coffee refill, Billy showed us photos of his house they're building outside of Shungnak on Linda's family allotment.

We discussed village alcohol policy since the 1986 Alcohol Restriction Vote and I explained the $100 a year liquor permit the City of Barrow required, the annual record check for any alcohol related domestic or driving convictions, which automatically prohibits me from ordering any liquor. Billy laughed and described Kotzebue's system as fucking insane. I told him that in Barrow, you fuck up, you lose your ability to order ANY booze for years and with a population of 5500, there's only 800 liquor permits. We agreed that the city liquor store in Kotzebue was a money-making scheme, not a public safety nor a public health initiative. Your city administrator butt-fuckers got a special place in Hell waiting fer them, rotating on a spit with forked tines anchored way inside their screaming mouths and way too far up their shredded rectums.

During our walks and chats out in the lobby, we ran into Josie and Ron Brower, friends of ours from Barrow. I should also explain that Josie's maiden name is Johnson and her dad is bun's grandmother's brother of the Kiana clan. She's been living in Barrow since fucking forever, just like Charlotte Brower, who's a Skin from Selawik, married to Eugene Brower. Lots of native women departed the NANA Region's stink fish, booking northward for tastier whale muk.

I worked on the Brower Whale Crew every year and as smart as my writing, working whaling, I'm only a size 40 shirt with a size 2 hat. I've been called worse, but for a crew member's share of muktuk, I'll take "dummy" or "tunnik" any day of the week. As far as Barrow whale harvests go, all the crews combined pulled in 15 Bowheads this season. Ron Brower even inquired if I was gonna be way up North this Spring and help out. He punched my bicep and told me I needed to eat more whale blubber.

The empty seating sections for Doyon and ASRC was statement enough, but to see their company trademark logos missing from the banners listing all the powerhouse sponsors, sadly explained the overall low-budget tone, ambiance and quality to this year's AFN convention. Pretty skimpy digs nigger. Event planning can be pretty dismal and cheap when the decoration expense accounts are reduced by a couple hunnert thou. Ana Hoffman looked rather shabby, all the dance groups are relegated to the evenings and Julie Kitka's retarded rat face can suck North Slope ass. Okay, she can suck Doyon pockmarked Indun ass too.

My advice is to ignore the shit-ass poor tribes and lightweight corporations that do little to contrib to the ANCSA revenue sharing piggy bank. Caribou and Fish will never pay for our schools, VPSO positions nor replace the honey buckets with white man toilets and showers. Put yer shoulder into efforts to expand native oil drilling, gold mining and shale-gas fracking. What the fuck, cops got bigger shoulders than brains anyway.

I'm allergic to silly environmental blather and violently defecate hearing human rights barf speeches. All native money in the ANCSA bank accounts is good money, especially mining, oil and gas proceeds and royalties. After hearing the annoying greenie weenie renewable resource nigger jive, I quickly pulled out my nose plugs and inserted them into my ears. This year, instead of bleeding ears, I left this year's AFN with watering eyes. Some of them loud wrong-headed environmentalist spewing Indun salmon crunchers sounded dumb, smelled like inverted vagina and when hugged, left marks on me from their distended leaking ani.

Don't fall for the bogus end of the world claims. If Alaskans want to build their own monster Hoover Dam, let's use our larger rivers like the Kobuk, Selawik, Noatak, Susitna or Yukon and rock out with our cock out. Hydro-dams produce the world's cheapest and cleanest electricity. We won't have to pipe North Slope Gas to all of our native hubs, spin turbines and run wired electricity to every remote village. On the other side of the green energy coin, we could install micro-nukes like the Toshiba Reactor that produces more power than the entire NANA Region consumes, yet fits in a Connex container.

Turning off our 3-D GPS directional drills, pipelines and oil derrick rigs won't reduce energy costs to rural Alaska, only skyrocket them even higher, but dams and nuclear power sure as shit will. I don't see any consensus on which avenue to pursue, so delivery of stove oil for electricity and heat seems to be the only viable option for the next decade or two. Maybe even more. The reason I omitted wind turbines and solar panels is due to the non-existent instant on/off capabilities rural native arctic communities require. When it's cold, dark and calm across rural Alaska all winter, an energy source will be needed that can be turned on, fired up and engaged with a throw of a massive switch for heat, lights, 4-wheelers, boats, heavy equipment and trucks.

I've ridden in electric buses, trains and trolleys, and they kick ass. I've never ridden in an electric car, wheeler nor truck. Yes, I've motored around with an electric troll motor on a boat, but to move across Kotzebue Sound with a boat loaded with fish, lumber and building supplies for camp, you'll need a least a hunnert horsepower boat motor. Electrics? Maybe, but today, boats, wheelers, fork lifts and loaders will need energy-rich diesel fuel and gasoline. Regardless of the price of diesel or gasoline, they're still the cheapest options today.

Like the Tesla car or Toyota Hybrid, I'd install a big battery across the floor of my boat, but my payload will be cut in half. On a wheeler, forget it. My forecasts for the future are optimistic, but pound for pound and dollar cost averaging, fossil fuels still win the Pepsi challenge. Ask any elder native how much weight in a boat or sno-go sled can be compromised for fuel, batteries or a nuke.

Instead of educating stupid Alaskan children to merely graduate gladiator training, fighting and hating, like I did, let's give 'em engineering and physics degrees and cut 'em loose. You'd be surprised at what's possible. Some abused, violent alcoholic, drug addicted children may wake up, grow a brain and a dick, and impress us with creative ways to power rural Alaska with hydro-dams and henceforth, electrifying all or our tools, vehicles, homes and heavy equipment. Imagine a shell-shocked native boy in foster care inventing a small 5-pound battery that could heat and power a cabin for an entire winter. Fuck that rocks my shit hard. I'd be even happier if that same battery powered my sno-go and warmed my plug in parka all the way out to camp too. Give a native kid a shop full of cool tools, give him a goal, and get the fuck outa the way.

What the fuck. I'd pay a couple grand for a micro-nuke that could power and heat my cabin for 50 years, and also charge my wheelers and snow machines for hunting all around camp. Fuck, I think I'm turning Japanese. Or God forbid, native.

As far as airplanes, I'll stick with good old diesel powered turbines like all of our jets and gasoline powered piston engines like all our bush pilot airborne limousines and taxis. Batteries won't fly this year, electrics can get dodgy in the Arctic and flying a nuke powered airplane sounds way to futuristic. Imagine an atomic bomb pointing out the back of my Lear Jet, that's some acceleration there niggers. Grab yer dicks, strap in yer seat belts and punch it. Just pray we don't vaporize like my brother Tim's neighbors in Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Wait, the mechanic failed his drug test and while stoned on Karl's bud, blow and acid, installed our atomic jet engine upside down and backwards. I think I smell burnt shit. Oh, fuck, that's me.

You need to remind yourselves of something, I'll never speak at an Alaska Federation of Natives Convention. I can only kick you in the cranium with the sharp edge of my word-scythe. Despite the thinly veiled autobiographical references to beaten and battle-scarred children that grew up beyond their meager origins, UAF taught me to digest whole libraries of economic data, perform quantitative analysis with stacks of servers all the way to the ceiling AND write like a soulless, demonic, temporarily drug-free motherfucker. You see, I got nowhere else to go. Alaska is the end of the line for me. I can't seem to keep my siblings from dying horribly. And boy, are they dropping hard. A broken heart don't help the deceased and I can't go back to a fictitious home that no longer exists. What hurts most is I can no longer hold my coworkers, best pals, and my brother's hand and walk them into a rehabilitation clinic. As of most recent news, I may have to reach into dirt to hold anybody's hand.

I can't even show up for family burial services. If we ever return to where we're from, we die too. I hope you see my thinking. As long as I pay attention to Alaska's energy policy, the speakers at AFN, compose synoptic prose, and push you to think beyond your careers and neighborhoods, we win. Plus, by writing hours a day, I don't die alongside my coworkers, little brothers and childhood pals. With you coppers reading my shit, writing means living.

Aside COVD fatalities that killed far more elderly natives, AFN put on a pictorial slide show with photos and names of the deceased over the last few years since we had an in-person meeting, that part soaked us all to tears. I spied around me and behind me and saw lots of Siberian Eyes leaking and tiny Inuit noses running. As far as burying little native children, we've been to enough God-awful, gut-wrenching funerals for tiny wooden coffins. And since I'm leaking out my eyes, and just like you coppers, I believe inside every injured native child, adopted out of a family of incarcerated parents or sentenced to foster care, I still think we've got a hunnert sneaky genius Inuits that might crack our simple problems of remote arctic power, rural electrification and motor vehicle fuel delivery, without the fucking shipments of a million barrels of stove/diesel oil every goddamned barge season.

Don't encourage your offspring into public safety. What the fuck, maybe your grandchildren are smarter than a bunch of goddamned cops and narcs. I suggest you give them a tool shop and play room filled with hydro dam structure and function theory, miniaturized nuclear parts and pieces and super compact battery diagrams. Them smart little fuckers just might build something we'd all be darn proud of. We just gotta live long enough to see these dreams to fruition.

Simple. I'm asking you coppers to stick around a couple more decades. Our siblings, best friends and coworkers are dying in agony from the vices we all enjoyed many, many years ago.

So stay with me and keep breathing God' air. I know, with our historical alcohol, tobacco and chronic drug consumption, that's gonna be a real hard motherfucker.

When any of us needs a lift to rehab or recovery, phone me. I'll happily hold yer hand and walk with ye.

Karl.