Minchumina Natives, Inc. v. United States Department of Interior

ORDER

The opinion filed March 30, 1995, is amended as follows:

At slip opinion page 3501 [51 F.3d at 222], delete the second sentence of the second full paragraph (the first paragraph of the BACKGROUND section) and substitute the following:

At slip opinion page 3507 [51 F.3d at 225], delete the first two sentences of the third paragraph and substitute the following:

With these amendments, the petition for rehearing is DENIED.

OPINION

Minchumina Natives, Inc. (“MNI”), a group of seven Alaska Natives claiming to reside near Lake Minchumina, Alaska, seeks recognition as a “Native group” under the Alaska Native Claims Settlement Act (ANC-SA), 43 U.S.C. §§ 1601-1629 . MNI can qualify as a “Native group” only if its Native members “comprise a majority of the residents of the locality.” Id. at § 1602(d); see Chugach Alaska Corp. v. Lujan, 915 F.2d 454, 457-58 (9th Cir.1990). Whether they constitute a majority depends entirely upon how the boundaries of “the locality” are drawn; those boundaries are the subject of this appeal.

The Bureau of Indian Affairs initially accepted the narrow boundaries claimed by MNI, which enclosed the smallest area that included all of the members’…