Trump’s Unlikely ICE Detention Giant Is an Alaska Native Company
Nana Regional Corp. is supposed to uphold Iñupiat values. Some shareholders say its role in the president’s deportation machinery makes a mockery of that.
Roswell Schaeffer Sr. has had many lives in Kotzebue, Alaska, a coastal town of about 3,000 just north of the Arctic Circle. He’s been a commercial fisherman, a subsistence hunter and holder of just about every local political position—mayor, councilman, judge. Eventually, he got the biggest gig in town: He took over as president and chief executive officer of Nana Regional Corp., an Alaska Native company of which he’s one of more than 15,000 Iñupiaq shareholders. From 1990 to 1992, he ran one of the largest companies based in a vast 38,000-square-mile region of the remote Arctic, one with outsize cultural, historic and economic importance to the Iñupiat people.