Michael Baines is seeking a second term as Tribal Chairman. KCAW photo/Rachel Waldholz
Michael Baines has served on the Sitka Tribe of Alaska Tribal Council for nearly a decade: seven years as a council member and the last two years as Tribal Chairman.
Baines is now running for a second term as chair, and he says, if elected, he’d focus on expanding services for tribal citizens.
Mike Baines says he didn’t exactly plan on becoming chairman – in fact, he didn’t plan on joining the council at all.
Almost a decade ago, he was working in the Alaska Native studies program at Sheldon Jackson College.
“My boss, Dennis Demmert was the president of the local ANB at the time,” Baines said. “Just out of curiosity I was walking past the ANB, when they were having an ANB meeting. I poked my nose in there, and they kind of, they nabbed me. I was just sitting there trying to mind my own business, and Dennis and another one of the officers came, and said, ‘Hey, we’ve got a mission for you.’ And I said, just kinda kidding around, I said, ‘Is it a mission from God?’ And they said, ‘Yeah!’ They wanted me to be an officer. So I left [as] an officer of the ANB.”
“Then a week or two later, somebody else said, ‘Hey, we need you to put your name in for the tribal council election.’ And I figured, yeah might as well, what the heck. But at the time, at that particular election, my name was the only name on the ballot, so I kind of won by a landslide.”
Seven years later, when longtime Tribal Chairman Woody Widmark decided not to run for another term in 2012, Baines found himself once again running for a position he hadn’t expected.
“About two or three hours before the deadline to put our name in for the election, I said, ‘Hey are you going to put your name in for the chairman?'” Baines said. “He goes, ‘Ah, I’m not going to run for anything.’ So I kind of scrambled around to try to find somebody else to run, but nobody else would, so I kind of threw my name in the hat.”
Baines beat then-council member Dale Williams in the race for chairman.
Now, two years later, Baines is very deliberately seeking a second term. He said he wants to build on the work the council has done over the past few years – like stabilizing the Tribe’s finances.
“I think we’ve got a real good grasp of how we’re doing financially,” Baines said. “We’re not doing that fabulous, but for quite a while we were in pretty bad shape financially, which we didn’t even know until we had a couple pretty good staff come on board, and they went through everything with a fine-toothed comb. They figured out the things we needed to do and we did them.”
The Sitka Tribe had amassed over $400,000 in debt, and was hit hard by the federal budget cuts in 2013, called sequestration. The decline in cruise ship passengers took a bite out of its tour business. And key grants became harder to get.
All of that means it’s crucial for STA to find new sources of revenue, Baines said.
To that end, the Tribe recently started three enterprises under the new general manager, Lawrence SpottedBird, including a company it hopes will compete for government service contracts.
Baines said the whole point of bringing in more revenue is to expand services. He’d like to see the Tribe increase support for higher education through scholarships and vocational training. He wants to expand the general assistance fund, which provides financial help to families, and the traditional foods program, which harvests and distributes everything from salmon to herring eggs.
One priority, he said, is to strengthen the Tribe’s social services arm — for instance, by hiring a dedicated attorney to work on issues like adoption under the Indian Child Welfare Act, or ICWA.
“My brother was going through an adoption, trying to adopt his granddaughters,” Baines said. “And the social services were able to help a little bit. But in the end the state just sent the kids to Oregon, to a non-Native family, which is just completely against ICWA. But I guess our staff just didn’t have the expertise to help, you know, the resources to do that.”
But, Baines says, first things first: after a long election season – with primaries, the municipal election, and last week’s midterms — he’d just like to see people come out and vote.
The Tribal Council election is Tuesday, Nov. 11. You can find profiles of most of the candidates here.
