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Feds to lift development restrictions on 28 million acres in Alaska, including Southeast tracts
Revocation of D-1 land withdrawals likely to happen with little public notice; SE areas at northern part of Panhandle, most of land is in western region of state
By Will Steinfeld
Chilkat Valley News
The federal government is expected to open 28 million acres of land in the state to new development and land ownership in the coming weeks, likely with little prior announcement.
The anticipated change is part of a Trump administration effort to spur resource development in Alaska, and would do so by removing a specific type of land classification, known as a D-1 withdrawal, across an Ohio-sized portion of the state.
The classification, established in the 1971 Alaska Native Claims Settlement Act, has for decades withheld parcels of land from resource development like mining. It has also prevented transfer of those parcels from federal ownership to entities still owed land under early statehood-era legislation, including the state of Alaska and Alaska Native corporations.
Much of the land that stands to be affected is elsewhere in the state. The Upper Lynn Canal, along with Yakutat, is the only area in Southeast with any D-1 lands. In the Haines Borough there are two large chunks of withdrawals, both expected to be lifted, totaling 205,000 acres, or about 14% of the borough’s land area. One section stretches from the borough’s northern border down to the upper Chilkat, Chilkoot, Ferebee and Taiya rivers. A second chunk sits along the borough’s border with Glacier Bay, south of the Takhin River.
The possibility that the withdrawals might be lifted is not new. In the final week of the first Trump administration, the Department of the Interior prepared the same policy change that is now planned, removing withdrawals on the same 28 million acres in Alaska. But the change was never finalized, and then the Biden administration reversed the decision.
Once Trump regained the presidency in early 2025, he issued an executive order titled “Unleashing Alaska’s Extraordinary Resource Potential,” a section of which explicitly ordered the interior secretary to revoke the 28 million acres of withdrawals.
That means a return, in many ways, of familiar debates — though this time the change is happening more quietly.
The administration is not conducting a new public process — the long string of notices, public comments and feedback periods — that sometimes presents a window into what a policy might do, as well as an avenue for opposition.
Instead, in at least one email sent to tribal entities in May, the Bureau of Land Management (BLM), part of the Department of the Interior, cited the Biden administration’s public process, which drew roughly 15,000 public comments and included public sessions in affected communities statewide, including Haines.
The lack of a new public process has meant much of the information released about the change has come through mandated consultations with tribal governments regarding the policy change.
Some tribal leaders are frustrated about how those consultations have been carried out, including Chilkat Indian Village tribal council president Kimberley Strong.
“It feels like they’re checking a box this time,” Strong said this week, of meetings with the Bureau of Land Management. The agency this week did not answer questions from the Chilkat Valley News about the process.
Strong said the agency has not provided answers during consultations regarding timelines for the change, how the order will be issued and its justification for going against the findings of the Biden administration’s environmental review.
“I think they’re fast-tracking it to get ahead of the new Congress and a new governor,” Strong said.
The Alaska Federation of Natives (AFN), whose membership includes a majority of the state’s tribal governments and Alaska Native corporations, passed a resolution last month asking for changes to the D-1 process, and a halt to any action until those changes are made. The resolution also stated that the BLM intended to go remove the D-1 withdrawals before the end of the year.
The measures demanded by the resolution consist of limiting both the volume of withdrawals lifted and the impacts to subsistence uses. The resolution also demands the federal government prioritize land transfers owed to Alaska Native corporations and individual Native Allotments “over—or, at minimum, in parity to—” transfers to the state.
Opposition to lifting the withdrawals isn’t universal among AFN membership. For instance, Fairbanks-based Doyon Ltd. has advocated for lifting the withdrawals, including pushing for recognition in the Biden administration’s review of D-1 lands that “BLM also received letters from Alaska Native entities… expressing support for revoking the withdrawals,” not just against.
Kathryn Martin, interim president of Ahtna, Inc., spoke last week to the potential for region-by-region evaluation of D-1 withdrawals, as opposed to a sweeping statewide change — something Doyon representatives also proposed in 2024 comments.
While many of the broader concerns about the land-status change mirror those in the AFN resolution, local concerns center more directly around the issue of resource extraction.
In the Chilkat Valley, lifting D-1 withdrawals could hold implications for the high-profile Palmer Project, as well as Haines State Forest timber sales. In 2024, the Bureau of Land Management concluded that removing the withdrawals in the Chilkat Valley would make Palmer Project expansion and new Haines State Forest timber sales “reasonably foreseeable future actions.”
Public commenters and state biologists also referenced mineral potential in local D-1 lands that would be opened up to mining claims should the withdrawals be lifted.
The federal government’s review quoted state biologist Anthony Crupi saying that “the potential for increased heli-skiing or the development of locatable minerals on priority conveyances in the Haines area could affect brown bears that use these areas for denning, feeding, and movement corridors.”
For Strong, the limits on development are important, especially because of past decisions allocating land ownership in the immediate area — none of which was available for selection by Klukwan’s village corporation.
“The Chilkat Valley lands with value are already taken by the (State of Alaska) Mental Health Trust, the University (of Alaska), by state forest. They’ve prioritized extraction — logging and mining,” she said. “The D-1 land is an opportunity for our people to live off their lands as we have for thousands of years.”
Strong says the tribe also values federal ownership beyond just the explicit prohibitions on resource development provided by the withdrawals. On federal lands, she said, the tribe has formal and more effective opportunities for government-to-government consultation than it does with the state.
Outside of the Chilkat Valley, legal impacts to subsistence management are a more central focus. The federal and state governments have different management regimes for hunting and fishing, including for what’s known as “subsistence priority.”
The federal government prioritizes access for subsistence users in rural areas over other user groups; the state has no such distinction between rural and nonrural subsistence users. That becomes especially relevant when resources are limited, and regulators decide which user groups to impose harvest limits on.
Lifting D-1 withdrawals could facilitate a large transfer of land from federal subsistence management to state management. Even before lands are owned by the state, if they’ve been selected by the state for possible acquisition, they fall under state fish and game regulations. When D-1 withdrawals are lifted, lands that are “top-filed,” essentially earmarked for state selection, would almost immediately become state selected, losing federal subsistence priority.
That’s something the leadership of Glennallen-based Ahtna is concerned about, given the Ahtna region’s location on the road system near urban centers. Many of the D-1 lands in the region have also been listed by the state as high priority for acquisition.
“We would have to compete with all the people from urban areas on our hunting lands,” Martin said.
Ahtna Inc. and tribes in the Ahtna region have been meeting with the Bureau of Land Management to register concerns, but don’t expect much to change in response.
“There’s been no public notice, and we’ve been rallying tribes to do consultations with BLM, but we don’t think BLM is taking input seriously,” Martin said last week, echoing the comments of Strong, and others.
Some regional tribal organizations, like the Association of Village Council Presidents in the Yukon-Kuskokwim region, have done the same, pointing to the loss of federal subsistence priority and urging tribes to ask for consultations to register concerns.
Ahtna’s AFN resolution, in raising concerns about rural subsistence impacts, connected the issue to state overselection of land, which expands the reach of potential subsistence impacts. Currently the state has selected more land than is allowed by law, according to the Bureau of Land Management. While it is owed roughly 3.6 million more acres from the federal government, it has active selections on around 13 million additional acres, plus around 5 million acres of top filings.
According to Martin, BLM told Ahtna, in response to questions about the state’s overselection, it had “some sort of agreement that the state would start relinquishing some of its selections.” Indeed, in recent months, the state has announced plans to give up portions of its selections, including a fresh 5 million acres announced this week.
With the complicated system of land ownership, selection, and management, it’s not immediately clear how much federal subsistence priority, if any, the Chilkat Valley stands to lose. In a 2024 public comment, Chilkat Indian Village tribal council vice resident Jones Hotch wrote that removing local D-1 withdrawals would “present challenges to subsistence and traditional gathering, fishing and hunting opportunities, because if these lands are conveyed to the state of Alaska, (federal) subsistence priority will no longer be available on these lands.”
Both the federal and state agencies have said this may not be true. Alaska Department of Natural Resources officials, and state and federal land status maps, say essentially all of the local D-1 lands are already selected by the state, meaning they don’t, and won’t, have federal subsistence priority regardless of what happens. That’s a difference from other regions, where larger amounts of top-filed lands more clearly will pass from federal management to state management when the withdrawals are lifted.
But the idea that there won’t be any subsistence priority impact in the area isn’t certain either. The federal government’s own 2024 review of subsistence impacts at one point does list Haines and Klukwan as standing to lose zero acres of federal subsistence priority land in the event of lifted D-1 withdrawals. But in a different section, it says both Haines and Klukwan might see “significant restriction to subsistence use” due to the loss of local D-1 withdrawals. The Alaska Department of Natural Resources did not respond to questions from the Chilkat Valley News about land statuses in the Chilkat Valley.
The impacts of D-1 changes, be it resource development or subsistence, also just depend on state decision-making.
If the state acquires or manages new land, decisions on how it’s used will depend heavily on who sits in the governor’s office and in the state legislature.
For now, that provides no new clarity: reached last week, a spokesperson for Jonathan Kreiss-Tomkins, who as of Wednesday was leading the governor’s race by a substantial amount, said questions about D-1 lands and state selections would have to be “broached after the election.”
• This story originally appeared in the Chilkat Valley News.
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