Traitor's Son: The Raven Duet Book #2 Read Online Free PDF Page B

brought suit in
Mintok v. the Native Corporations.
You have to know about that. It went to the Supreme Court, and affected Natives all over the U.S.”
    And not always for the worse, whatever his grandfather thought.
    “How did it affect them?” Raven asked. “Did it have anything to do with the dissolution of the reservations? I thought that happened about twenty years ago. You wouldn’t even be alive then. And wasn’t that about taxing casinos or something?”
    Jase was so startled that he took his foot off the accelerator to stare, and the car slowed sharply as power ran back into the battery.
    “Where did you come from? You can’t not know this.”
    He waited for an answer, although he did speed up again after the car behind him honked.
    “I could be ignorant for all kinds of reasons,” Raven pointed out. “I could have been raised in a city, by parents who ignored their heritage. I could be the kind of girl who just doesn’t care about silly lawsuits.”
    Jase was watching the traffic then, but she sounded like a total groupie.
    “You’re not that stupid,” he said. “And you didn’t answer my question.”
    “I’ll tell you where I come from later today,” she said. “And other things too, but I don’t want to start that conversation now. So pretend I’m stupid, or city bred, and tell me why
Mintok v. the Natives
makes you look so grim.”
    It was probably safer than struggling with arousal while driving a high-powered car. But not by much.
    “The dissolution didn’t affect Alaska Natives,” said Jase. She had to be from the lower forty-eight, or she’d have known this already. “We never really had reservations up here. What we did have was ANCSA, which settled the ownership of lots of land, including hunting and some of the mineral rights, on Alaska Natives . . . oh, about a century ago. They created village and regional corporations, and everyone who was at least one-quarter Native descent got shares in the corporations. The way it was set up, the corporations had twenty years to get themselves organized and running, to decide on policies and things, before they were able to sell their stock on the open market. But the villages got worried that too many people would just sell their stock, so changes were made to the act that allowed each corporation to make its own rules about whether or not to make its stocks public, and when or to whom people could sell it.”
    “So each village became a . . . a corporation? Jeho—I mean, that sounds odd.”
    “Worse than odd,” Jase told her. “With every corporation making its own rules, things got totally crazy. Some corporations managed their resources, milked the tourist trade, and became as sound as any other blue chip stock. Several of them are blue chip now.”
    “What’s . . . Never mind. Go on.”
    A city girl from the lower forty-eight might not know about the Native corporations, but she had to know about blue chip stocks!
    “Just like any other business,” Jase went on, “a lot of the corporations failed. And since the hunting and mineral rights they held became more and more valuable, they started getting scammed by corporate raiders. They’d buy one person’s stock and then another’s, for really good prices. The moment they owned fifty-one percent of the shares, they’d turn up at the next village meeting and vote to replace the elders with a board of directors who worked for their company. At which point the Native corporation became a regular corporation, in which a few Natives happened to hold stock. That was pretty ugly,” Jase admitted.
    His father said that people of all sorts falling victim to corporate raiders was nothing new.
    “But all that happened a long time ago,” said Raven. “Almost a century, right?”
    “Yes, but after a few villages had been taken over like that, the rest of the Native corporations got scared and voted to put back the original ANCSA policy—only they said that no stock could ‘be