FAIRBANKS -- The challenge for his generation of Alaska Natives, Willie Hensley said, was to secure land rights, a fight that took place between 1966 and 1971. The challenge for the next generation, he said, is to simplify what has become a complicated administrative process across rural Alaska.

"If we got into a battle over governance, it was a no-starter," Hensley said Thursday, recounting the early history of the Native land claims movement. He said there was a focus on getting the state to back the land claims effort and keeping Natives unified through the Alaska Federation of Natives.

"If we started trying to argue about the extent of our powers as tribes, that would have taken up all the time. And so in a sense we tried to avoid that. In fact, I don't even remember a single AFN board meeting in which we discussed the administrative aspects of the settlement. We were focused on the land. And of course the land allows a culture to exist," he said.

Hensley, 73, an early leader of the land claims movement, took part in a panel discussion Thursday at the annual convention of the Alaska Bar Association about the past, present and future of tribal sovereignty in Alaska, along with attorney Heather Kendall-Miller and Attorney General Craig Richards, moderated by attorney Andy Harrington.

"The challenge of our generation was to get that land," he said. "The challenge for the younger generation here is to simplify it and find a way for the corporation and the tribe to co-exist."

He said there are too many institutions today -- from regional and village corporations to cities, school districts, health authorities and tribes -- with overlapping jurisdictions. "We're going to get too poor to afford all that," he said.

"I think that there is a way to resolve these issues. And if a zillion Western states can find a way to accommodate the tribes, I think we can too," he said, adding that tribes are "a part of the flora and the fauna of American governance."

Hensley said amendments to the Alaska Native Claims Settlement Act of 1971 have helped resolve some of its shortcomings, such as recognizing the rights of Natives born after that year. He said some people don't want corporations at all, but the companies "have a bit of Native heart."

"The reality is that's what we have to work with and we've tried to make it better through these amendments," he said.

Kendall-Miller, a senior attorney at the Native American Rights Fund who has argued key tribal rights cases since the 1990s, said the the land claims settlement was championed by wonderful and well-intentioned people who wanted to protect the land base, but it was an "assimilationist piece of legislation."

She cited the resistance by some Native corporations to open their rolls to those born in the years after 1971 and steps by other corporations that create obstacles to enrollment as some of its deficiencies.

"That is one of the impacts of having Congress superimpose a structure on Native people that quite frankly doesn't fit," she said. Kendall-Miller said that, contrary to widely held assumptions, civil government did not begin in the aftermath of the purchase of Alaska in 1867 and the 229 tribes in Alaska have a legal standing and access to federal tools for self-governance.

"Tribes have exercised their own inherent sovereignty for millennia before non-Natives arrived on the scene. Now it's important to understand that, because unfortunately today we are still wrestling with some of those same biases," she said.

In viewing the Native claims settlement as a land bill, not as a law that settled the powers of tribes, her position runs against what had long been the state view in the 1970s and 1980s. The U.S. Supreme Court ruled in 1997 that "Indian Country" did not exist in Alaska, with some exceptions, meaning that tribes did not have sovereign powers over land. But there is also the matter of "inherent sovereignty," stemming from the history of tribes in Alaska and not linked to land.

Attorney General Richards said that the ambiguity of what tribal sovereignty means in Alaska remains a problem. He said in the nearly six months since he took over the Department of Law, he has been focused on understanding key unanswered questions. "Is there Indian Country in Alaska? And if there is, what does that look like?" he said.

Richards said another key question unrelated to land status is "What does inherent sovereignty look like for tribes?"

Kendall-Miller said she has a different view. "We believe that most of those questions you have alluded to have already been decided by the courts and they are not really the subject for ongoing debate," she said.

Citing the law on child custody and child support cases, Richards said there is a Supreme Court decision recognizing tribal jurisdiction in child custody cases, but no court has said tribes have jurisdiction to handle child support matters.

"It just would be useful if there was clarity as to what tribal sovereignty meant, particularly in terms of inherent sovereignty," Richards said. "I think the reason we've had a lot of litigation, particularly in the last 20 years, is because of that ambiguity."

The Walker administration has yet to decide whether it will continue a case at the U.S. Court of Appeals in Washington, D.C., regarding the power of the Interior Department to take tribal lands into trust in Alaska. "We want the courts to enforce the judgment and move on," Kendall-Miller said, adding that the state has had "ample opportunity" to consider the case, but sought delay.

"The state, however, is still wrestling with the concern of the reality of what's going to happen in Alaska when and if the secretary exercises his/her discretionary jurisdiction ... to take land into trust," she said. "We haven't got there yet."

Richards said he was the one who asked for a six-month delay because he wanted to learn the issue and understand what it would mean. He took over as attorney general after the election last fall and said he wanted to talk to as many people as possible about it. If lands are placed in trust in Alaska, the federal government will decide "what lands will go into trust, what tribal jurisdiction will look like, what rights tribes have to self-exercise governance, what rights they don't," he said.