MARY Anita NORDALE
• Law
• Native Rights
Inducted: 2024
MARY Anita NORDALE
Mary Nordale has made significant contributions to Alaska society, history, and politics at scales from the local (especially Juneau and Fairbanks), to the state of Alaska, and the United States. She was born in 1934 to Katherine and Alton Nordale. When her father perished in an airplane crash, Katherine raised her and brother Jim, assisted greatly by family friends Bob and Vide Bartlett.
Nordale considers embedding the “corporation” concept in ANCSA her greatest achievement. In the 1950s-60s as Alaska became an oil state, the Bureau of Indian Affairs proposed establishing reservations to protect Native rights. However, in the Lower-48 reservations had not stimulated economic development. Arriving in Washington, DC to work in the Congress, she attended law school at nights and studied business law. She learned that corporations were independent operators, easily managing lands and money. When leadership asked the Alaska delegation to prepare draft legislation, Nordale did quiet work to convince staff and political leaders of the superiority of state-chartered corporations to the stewardship model. Since then, Native corporations have impacted everyone in Alaska (and multinational resource corporations too).
In Alaska, Nordale was a leading force in the Frank initiative (1982), calling for a popular vote before moving the state capitol from Juneau to Willow. She served on the Alaska Reapportionment Board in 1983, and then from 1984 to 1986 she was Commissioner of Revenue in the Sheffield Administration.
At the local level, Nordale developed the Fairbanks Resource Agency with two others in the 1960s as a nonprofit (to deal with problems of the Fairbanks 1967 flood). She has been a member of several community organizations (e.g., College Rotary). In 2018 she campaigned for and won a seat on the Interior Gas Utility (IGU). In all of these capacities Nordale has been a dedicated problem solver.
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