Why is Ron Somerville still on the Alaska Board of Game? Yes, he
has apologized for his offensive comment at the expense of Alaska
Natives - he said it was meant as a joke. But no one is laughing.
And joke or not, the insulting comment will forever reinforce the
fact that Mr. Somerville is a divisive personality in state game
management. No way he can do his job as state Game Board chairman
under that cloud.
Mr. Somerville blurted it out at a Game Board
meeting last month. After a third Copper River-area Native scheduled
to testify before the board failed to appear during the public
comment period, the board chairman said: "There must have been a run
on free beer or something."
Mr. Somerville made it even worse when he called the next person
to testify. He greeted her arrival by wondering aloud why she wasn't
missing like the others. "Don't like beer, Donna?" he asked the
Copper Center resident, who had come to speak on proposed
subsistence hunting regulations.
Alcoholism among Alaska Natives is no joke, and anyone who treats
it like it is has no place in government.
If the comment were
out of character - if it were just a botched attempt to "break the
tension" during a long board meeting, as Mr. Somerville said - a
sincere apology might be enough.
But Mr. Somerville doesn't seem
to fully comprehend why people are offended. His apology was
conditional: "If I offended somebody ..." And even at that, he made
it sound like the apology wasn't really needed: "I don't think I
have to, to be honest with you, but if that's what happened and
someone took it wrong ..."
This isn't the first time Mr. Somerville's disrespect toward
Natives has been on display. Mr. Somerville is a hard-core advocate
for urban sportsmen in Alaska's long-running debate over subsistence
hunting and fishing rights. Natives, whose ancestors have inhabited
Alaska for centuries, see subsistence as the keystone of their
culture and have embraced the rural subsistence priority as a
critical protection. Mr. Somerville sees the priority as undeserved
special treatment that discriminates against urban hunters.
In 1982, he led a failed ballot measure to repeal the state's
rural subsistence priority. He appealed to the same vein of
resentment among urban hunters when he ran for governor in 1986,
claiming he alone had the courage to bring up "racially sensitive
issues others won't touch." Natives were just another
"special-interest group," he said. Mr. Somerville also said that
letting Natives set up Lower 48-style tribal governments would lead
to a "South African style of apartheid."
When critics of his
2003 appointment to the Game Board noted his long record of opposing
rural subsistence, Mr. Somerville made himself out to be a victim of
racial politics.
Truth is, he is a victim of his own racial
insensitivity.
Ron Somerville is a disruptive figure who didn't belong on the
Board of Game when Gov. Frank Murkowski appointed him. And now, in
thinking that beer and Natives are material for a joke - and
offering a less than full apology - he has irreversibly compromised
his standing to help decide statewide game management policy.
He
should resign.
http://www.juneauempire.com/stories/110906/opi_20061109001.shtml | 
