Alaska’s oldest Native organizations are giving younger members more power.
That’s the result of leadership elections held at the recent Alaska Native Brotherhood and Sisterhood Grand Camp Convention in Juneau.
The hundred-plus-year-old organizations have been trying to attract more youths and young adults.
To highlight that effort, they chose Devlin Anderstom, 19, to be their keynote speaker.
He’s already president of the brotherhood’s Yakutat camp. ANB Grand Camp President Sasha Soboleff said convention delegates elected him to regional office.
“His keynote speech … kind of set the tone for where these two organizations are headed, along with the realization that our young people, we need to make them integrally part of our organizations,” he said. “And with his election as grand secretary, which is a pretty high-profile office, put him right smack dab where he should be.”
Many ANB and ANS members are in their 50s, 60s or 70s.
Alaska Native Sisterhood Grand Camp President Cecelia Tavoliero said delegates elected two members of the next generation to her group’s regional leadership.
They’re ANS Sitka camp President Paulette Moreno and fellow Sitkan Heather Powell.
“They wish to work with young people and to get them involved in helping the communities where they live, and active and involved in Alaska Native Brotherhood and Alaska Native Sisterhood,” she said.
Tavoliero and Soboleff pointed to other members in their 20s and 30s who attended the convention, held Oct. 5-8.
“The work that we had set about the year before was to bring young people and the camps that have not been active back,” he said. “We worked on that and got a couple more camps back that we didn’t have before.”
Soboleff was re-elected to his position. Tavoliero was newly elected, though she served in the post about a dozen years ago.
She said her priorities include continuing to focus on the potential dangers of British Columbia mines on rivers that flow into Alaska.
They also include education, targeting elementary students who are learning to read.
“In order to help them, we’d like to see some reading programs developed in the schools for some of our sisterhood members to go in and either listen to them read or reading to them,” she said.
The Brotherhood and Sisterhood are civil-rights and culture-bearing organizations. They’re also Christian groups.
Tavoliero said promoting faith is also a priority.
“What I want our sisters to do is to be in constant prayer for the whole state of Alaska and for our nation,” she said. “We surely do need it as a nation.”
The convention included consideration of changes to the organizations’ constitution and structure. Official results were not immediately available.
Hear Devlin Anderstrom’s keynote speech:
