The opportunity was born of a disaster, the 1989 Exxon Valdez oil spill. After Exxon agreed to pay a $1 billion settlement, environmentalists had a great idea: Why not have the U.S. and Alaska governments use the funds to buy development rights to some of the 44 million acres of land held by native Alaskans? Then tracts could be set aside as protected forest. Native Alaskans could invest the proceeds, and forests would be saved for hunting, fishing and tourism. But the natives would have to forgo income from logging. Advocates of the plan needed a native Alaskan to help sell it, so Rick Steiner, a University of Alaska biologist, and David Grimes, a fisherman from the village of Cordova, recruited Dune Lankard.

At the time, Lankard was a commercial fisherman who sat on the board of the Eyak Corp., which administered the tribe's land rights. He had grown up fishing for salmon and herring in Cordova and never identified with environmentalists. "I used to call them 'granolas,'" he says with a laugh. But he had become concerned about how runoff from logging operations was polluting the streams fish use to spawn.