By SUZANNE DOWNING
Feb. 5, 2026 – A House Finance Committee meeting on House Bill 284, a sweeping proposal tied to sales taxes and oil and gas revenue, took an unexpected detour Thursday when a lawmaker opened her remarks with a land acknowledgement in the middle of detailed fiscal questioning.
Committee members were hearing from representatives of the governor’s office about various moving parts of the administration’s plan, which touches everything from statewide taxation to long-term budget stability.
But when Rep. Nellie Jimmie, D-Bethel, began her turn to speak, she paused the technical discussion to thank the Tlingit people “for allowing us to do state business on their land.”
The comment was part of a growing trend in progressive political spaces, where land acknowledgements have become a routine preface to public meetings, hearings, and government proceedings. She also misstated that people in rural areas pay taxes and urban residents don’t.
Nellie Jimmie land acknowledgement
Land acknowledgements are intended to recognize the Indigenous peoples connected to the region, but some argue that the practice has become less about history and more about ideology , a kind of political mantra repeated regardless of context.
In this case, the acknowledgement struck some Alaskans as oddly placed: inserted into a meeting focused on sales tax structure, oil production revenue, and the state’s fiscal future.
Juneau, the seat of Alaska government, sits within the general traditional region of the Tlingit people, who have long used the Gastineau Channel region for fishing, seasonal camps, travel, and resource gathering.
But the modern downtown Juneau has been shaped by mining development and tailings and is not a place known historically for permanent Indigenous settlement in the way other nearby areas were, such as Auke Bay.
To some Alaskans, the increasing use of land acknowledgements reflects a broader political shift on the Left: an emphasis on reframing government and civic life through the lens of colonialism, land ownership, and historical grievance over stolen land, when the early inhabitants, in fact, had no legal construct for land ownership.
Rather than serving as meaningful recognition, the acknowledgements often imply a moral claim that today’s Americans, and even Alaska’s elected government, are merely operating at the permission of others.
That framing, they argue, goes well beyond historical respect and enters the realm of modern political messaging.
For many watching, the brief land acknowledgement highlighted how cultural and ideological statements are increasingly woven into even the most technical corners of government, ometimes awkwardly so.
For some legislators, even a tax hearing is now a stage for racial identity as much as fiscal policy.
4 thoughts on “From taxes to ‘occupied land’ politics, a Juneau hearing takes detour”
If they are paying taxes, it’s a local tax. The ignorance level with every new batch of legislators that don’t know what they don’t know is frightening. Seldovia has a 9.5% local tax. Seasonal and crazy high. I buy all I can elsewhere. Stupid local governments think they can tax themselves into prosperity. For government workers, it lines their pockets. Seldovia can’t figure out why businesses keep failing, and new ones do not invest.
How much soda and sweets did she eat in the village?
She exampled why village kids have the worse eating habits of Alaska kids across the state.
Even ANTHC and SCF are campaigning to their Indian beneficiaries about changing their diets and lowering their sugar intake for healthier Alaskans. There are two year-5 year Alaska Natives coming out of the village with already a full set of silver teeth front and back because of soda and juice before their baby teeth came through, during when they came through, and after fillings and extractions. Now they have silver teeth.
Couldn’t she had chosen a better example of something she ate while she is a sitting legislator representing a group that struggles with sugar? Like going to the store to buy an apple and bottle of water having to pay a tax on it. It been a better more forward thinking example.
Sounds like a planned diversion from the business they didn’t want to make public. Like the ” technical problems ” that keep happening in Anchorage
Over and over we hear the “land acknowledgment, stolen land narrative.
If I am in possession of stolen property, prove it.
If it is know that I am in possession of stolen property and I am then expected to pay a tax on that stolen property, then whoever is demanding that tax is complicit in the crime.