# Alaska and the 13 Tribes: The First Corponations

## The Precedent That Built the World

Every corponation in GLMZ owes its legal existence to a piece of legislation signed in 1971 by a president most people have forgotten. The Alaska Native Claims Settlement Act (ANCSA) created the template: take a geographic region, organize its population into corporations, grant those corporations sovereign control over natural resources, make the shares hereditary and untradeable, and require revenue sharing between the corporations to ensure mutual survival. Sound familiar? It should. It is the exact legal architecture that the Big 20 corponations used 170 years later to carve the continental United States into corporate sovereign territories.

The Alaska Native Corporations were the prototype. The corponations are the production model.

## The 13 Tribes

By 2200, the 13 Alaska Native Corporations have existed for 229 years. They are the oldest continuously operating corporate sovereign entities in the Western Hemisphere. They predate Axiom Industries by over a century. They predate the concept of corporate sovereignty by decades. They were doing it before anyone had a name for it.

The 13 Tribes — as they are universally known, though the term is technically inaccurate since they are corporations, not tribes — control the entirety of Alaska. All 586,412 square miles. All natural resources: oil, gas, timber, minerals, rare earth elements, freshwater, and the single most valuable asset in 2200's geopolitical landscape — undamaged Arctic ecosystems.

Alaska is effectively a separate nation. It has been since before the Federal Remnant relocated to Denver. The 13 Tribes do not answer to the Denver administration. They pay no federal taxes. They issue their own identification documents. They maintain their own security forces — not privatized corporate security in the GLMZ model, but genuine military capacity including naval assets, air defense, and the persistent rumor of a nuclear deterrent purchased from the Russo-Siberian Compact during the Sovereignty Crisis.

The Denver administration maintains the legal fiction that Alaska is a US state. The 13 Tribes maintain the legal fiction that they are US corporations. Both fictions are convenient. Neither is true.

## How They Got Here

The story begins with oil. In 1968, the largest oil field in North American history was discovered at Prudhoe Bay on Alaska's Arctic coast. To build the pipeline needed to extract it, the US Congress had to settle aboriginal land claims that had been contested for over a century. The result was ANCSA: Alaska Natives surrendered 360 million acres in exchange for 45.5 million acres, Φ962.5 million (in pre-collapse currency), and the creation of 12 regional corporations plus a 13th for non-resident shareholders.

The critical design features that made the ANCs functionally immortal:

1. **Shares are hereditary and untradeable.** When a shareholder dies, their shares pass directly to next of kin. No probate, no dilution, no hostile takeovers. The wealth stays in the family. Forever.

2. **70% revenue sharing.** All 13 corporations share 70% of their natural resource revenue with each other. This means no single corporation can fail while the others prosper. It is a mutual survival pact encoded in federal law.

3. **8(a) federal contracting advantages.** The ANCs were granted special privileges in government contracting that allowed them to receive sole-source contracts of unlimited size. This made them the preferred partners for every major government project in Alaska.

4. **No transfer out of Native ownership.** In 229 years, not a single ANC has passed out of Native ownership. The shares cannot be sold. The corporations cannot be acquired. The wealth cannot leave.

By the time the rest of America's corporations began pursuing sovereign authority in the 2140s, the Alaska Native Corporations had been operating as de facto sovereign entities for over 170 years. They had the playbook. Everyone else was writing it from scratch.

## Alaska in 2200

Alaska is the quietest major power on the continent. It does not project force. It does not seek expansion. It does not participate in the corporate proxy wars that define GLMZ's political landscape. It sits on top of the Arctic's remaining natural resources — oil reserves that the rest of the world burned through a century ago, freshwater that hasn't been contaminated by industrial runoff, and ecosystems that function the way ecosystems are supposed to function — and it says no.

No, you cannot drill here without our permission. No, you cannot fish here without our license. No, you cannot transit the Northwest Passage without our fee. No, you cannot establish a military presence within our territory. No.

The 13 Tribes have the luxury of refusal because they have something no one else has: patience. They have been a corporate sovereignty for 229 years. They have watched empires rise and fall. They watched the United States government relocate to Denver. They watched the coasts collapse. They watched the corponations carve up the Great Lakes. They watched and they waited and they said no, and they can keep saying no for another 229 years because the shares don't expire and the revenue keeps sharing and the Arctic isn't going anywhere.

## Relationship with GLMZ

The 13 Tribes maintain formal diplomatic relations with the Big 20 corponations through a treaty structure that more closely resembles international diplomacy than corporate negotiation. Axiom Industries purchases Arctic freshwater from the Tribes at rates that would make GLMZ's population riot if they knew the markup. Ironclad Agrisystems licenses cold-weather crop genetics developed by Tribal research facilities. Arcturus Defense Solutions — which would very much like to establish a military testing range in the Alaskan interior — has been politely declined every year for the last forty years.

The Tribes trade with GLMZ but do not depend on it. This asymmetry is the foundation of their power. GLMZ needs Alaska's resources. Alaska does not need GLMZ's anything.

Runners from GLMZ occasionally take contracts involving Alaskan interests — usually corporate espionage assignments targeting Tribal trade secrets, or smuggling operations attempting to bypass Tribal resource licensing. These contracts pay extremely well. They are also extremely dangerous. The Tribes' security apparatus is small, professional, and operates on home terrain that is hostile to outsiders in ways that have nothing to do with the security forces and everything to do with the fact that Alaska will kill you with weather before anyone with a gun has to bother.

## The Permanent Fund

Every Alaska Native citizen receives an annual dividend from the Alaska Permanent Fund — a sovereign wealth fund established in 1976 that has grown to approximately Φ4.2 trillion by 2200. The dividend in 2199 was Φ47,000 per person. This is not wealth by Spire standards, but it is enough to ensure that no Alaska Native citizen experiences the kind of grinding poverty that defines life on the Shelf.

The existence of the Permanent Fund is perhaps the most radical political statement in 2200's landscape: that a government can provide for its citizens directly, without corporate intermediaries, without tier systems, without the elaborate machinery of exclusion that defines life in GLMZ. The corponations find this idea deeply threatening. The Tribes find it obvious.

They have been doing it for 224 years.