By Tammy Judd

Heather Kendall-Miller knows what it is to have a high profile. The Harvard grad, fresh out of a prestigious two-year Skadden Fellowship, was hired as a staff attorney with the Native American Rights Fund. Her first cases, back-to-back, were the Venetie village sovereignty case and Katie John subsistence hunting and fishing case. Both were seminal events in shaping legal conditions for Alaska Natives.

About a year ago, her Harvard classmate Barack Obama put her on a short list for the Native American affairs advisory position on his administration.

While back east last year caring for her husband's ailing father, Kendall-Miller had been involved in the Obama campaign and she served as an Alaska delegate at the Democratic convention in Denver. After Obama was elected, she was among a select group considered for the advisory position that ultimately went to Kimberly Teehee.

Kendall-Miller was not disappointed with the outcome.

"I believe it worked out beautifully. It's a high pressure job," says Kendall-Miller, who works in Anchorage. "I would never have been able to say no if it was offered to me, but it came as a big relief to have it go to somebody else. Because it allowed me to come home in good conscience, and this is what's right for my family."

Besides the personal sacrifice a move to Washington, D.C., would have had on her family, Kendall-Miller would have also needed to withdraw from most of the work she's been involved in for the past 15 years.

The 54-year-old Kendall-Miller has a passion for law and Alaska Natives. She is the senior staff attorney in the Anchorage office of the Native American Rights Fund, a nonprofit organization that gives legal support to tribes, individuals and organizations around the country.

The issues going on now are the same ones she was dealing with since she began her career as an attorney nearly 20 years ago — subsistence rights, tribal sovereignty and climate change.

Pipeline path

Kendall-Miller calls herself a little bit of a "late bloomer," having taken the scenic route to find her true calling.

She was born in Seward in 1955. Her Dena'ina Athabascan mother, originally from Dillingham, died when Kendall-Miller was only 2. At age 8 her family moved to Fairbanks where she was raised by her father and adopted mother. As a teenager, the overcrowded Lathrop High School did not hold Kendall-Miller's attention. She was ready to be out in the world doing things.

She dropped out of school at age 17. She and the man she eventually married filed a claim on a place the federal Bureau of Land Management had opened for homesteading, and the couple began the process of developing their land. Kendall-Miller says that BLM made a mistake when it opened the land to homesteading because it turned out a valuable hot springs was there. After BLM realized the mistake, it gave the couple a 100-year lease rather than conveying title to the land. At that time Alaska was gearing up for the oil pipeline, so both Kendall-Miller and her husband, Dennis Kendall, worked construction on the pipeline for part of the year and they would spend spring and fall at the homestead. They engineered a system of pulling the hot spring waters through pipes to their cabin where the radiating heat would warm the cabin before dumping out into a pit that would then run into the river.

When Kendall-Miller was 21, she gave birth to her daughter, Asha. But not long afterward she came to realize she was no longer in love with her husband. She divorced him when she was 23. Because she had been a minor when they started their homestead, she says her husband was able to remove her name from the documents and he inherited all the rights to the property. Kendall-Miller had to walk away without benefit from the work and funds she'd invested.

In an effort to regroup from the emotional fallout of her divorce and to give herself time to deal with some residual feelings about the death of her brother to suicide, Kendall-Miller decided she and her 2-year-old daughter would move to California.

She spent a winter in Berkeley learning meditation techniques at a "new age seminary," then moved to Santa Rosa for several months to attend an extension of the seminary. During that time as a single mom living off money she'd earned on the pipeline, she started to think how she would support her daughter and herself in the future. She decided she'd go back to Alaska and go to school. But before doing so, there were things she wanted to set in order. She wanted to complete a half-finished frame house located on five acres of land her father had given her, and she wanted to earn enough money to pay for school.

Pipeline perspectives

Kendall-Miller went back to work on the pipeline, leaving her daughter with her parents while she was away. While she saw a lot of drug and alcohol use around her, the time away from her daughter and the goal of completing her house "were significant in terms of my personal development," she says.

"The fact that I was a single mom and it was so painful to be away from my daughter, it gave me a focus and made me say, this time has got to count. I'm not going to be like that, because it's such a sacrifice to be separated from my daughter," Kendall-Miller says.

She worked on the pipeline for about four years and set aside money for school and finishing her house. When her daughter was 8, Kendall-Miller was almost ready to concentrate on school, but not quite. She had one more thing she needed to get out of her system.

"I always have loved travel, and knowing that I was getting ready to jump into something quite serious and commit myself to it, I decided I would sow my last wild oat. I decided I was going to do a last major trip," Kendall-Miller says.

Her mother, who was 70, wanted to go along. So Kendall-Miller, 28 at that time, her daughter, 8, and her mother took a trip around the world.

"We spent four months on the road, traveling through Asia. The combination of our ages made people really open up and respond to us," she says.

An experience during their trip continues to stand out in Kendall-Miller's memory.

"I had worked all winter on the Slope and had very little time to decompress before traveling. We got to India one month into the trip, and I found myself overwhelmed by the poverty that was prevalent everywhere.

"My mother had supported a young Indian man, Simon, through a charity organization for many years since he was a small child. When my mother found out that his father had passed away, she would send a small additional amount to his mother.

"Since we were in India we decided that we would visit Simon and his family. We traveled by train to get to their village high in the mountains, and when we arrived, we were met by nuns (who worked at the mission) and by Simon and his family. We visited Simon's small home and were told by the sisters that the home was rebuilt with the funds sent by my mother over the many years, their original home having been destroyed by a flood some number of years ago.

"On the wall, next to a picture of the holy family, was a picture of my parents. My mother was moved to tears by the experience as she had no idea how much so little could mean to people in poverty.

"The experience left a lasting impression on me as a reminder that our actions count, what we give in life comes back tenfold, and that we all benefit by helping others. I try to live my life this way and I try to instill this value in my children," Kendall-Miller says.

Educating Heather

Once Kendall-Miller had sown her travel oats, she was ready to begin school at the University of Alaska Fairbanks. She played around with the idea of becoming a school teacher in the Bush, because she had always been drawn toward Native people. It's a curiosity she attributes to not knowing her birth mother, and it created an inner desire to find what was missing.

Kendall-Miller didn't like the education curriculum.

"There was no substance to it," she explains.

To feed her curiosity, she started taking Alaska Native politics classes. That pulled her in, and she took the next level class, a federal Indian law course that she said was the start of her inspiration to become an attorney. There were a dozen or so people in the class.

"Nobody got it, but it clicked with me," Kendall-Miller says.

Her instructor suggested that she "get her act together and do something more significant" with her field of interest.

"My major was history. I've always enjoyed history and that kind of thing. So this was a culmination of not just history, which I loved but the ability to dig deeper into a past that was my past. And understand it on a level that I had not otherwise, and it also gave me a suggested profession of which I could be of service to people. I also recognized then that there were many Native people that were really suffering as a consequence of all of the generations of oppression, and it gave me pleasure to be able to assist people. There's a lot I can do here that would fit," she says.

She started Harvard in 1988. She said she met Obama the first week she was there because she and Obama were both profiled by the school since they "represented the level of diversity that the school was built on." The average age for law students was 24. Kendall-Miller was 33. The older students tended to socialize among themselves and Obama, who was 27, would join in that social circle, she recalls.

During her first year as a law student, Kendall-Miller was set to intern in the law office Sonosky, Chambers, Sasche & Miller in Washington, D.C.

The firm received a desperate call from an overloaded attorney in Alaska. The Exxon Valdez had run aground a couple of weeks earlier and he was asked to file a class action lawsuit for Prince William Sound and Kodiak villages for which he'd been doing legal work over the years. The law office couldn't send another attorney but agreed to ask the summer intern, who was from Alaska, whether she could help. Although Kendall-Miller wanted to have a Washington, D.C., experience, she was willing to split her summer.

The Alaska-based attorney she came to help was Lloyd B. Miller.

Kendall-Miller worked for the law firm for eight to 10 weeks that summer, half in the Washington, D.C., office and half in the Anchorage office. But her association with Miller lasted. He and Kendall-Miller were married in 1996.

"That's no doubt the only good thing that ever came out of the Exxon Valdez oil spill," Lloyd Miller says.

Career and family

While still in law school, Kendall-Miller worked for a law firm in Seattle and she clerked with Alaska Supreme Court Chief Justice Jay Rabinowitz. She had applied for and was given the Skadden Fellowship, which paid for her wages for two years' work — one year at Alaska Legal Services in Fairbanks and a second year with the Native American Rights Fund. After she completed the second year as a Skadden fellow, Kendall-Miller was hired by NARF, where she still works.

Miller and Kendall-Miller have a 12-year-old daughter, Ruth. They are involved parents helping their daughter with homework and driving her to piano lessons or other activities. As a family they enjoy hiking and outdoor activities.

When asked to describe the value of his wife's work in Alaska, Miller says, "I'm not sure of one single person who has done more to advance Native rights in the courts, particularly in the area of subsistence, than Heather. She's a force unto herself, has a credibly deep, instinctive commitment to human rights. It doesn't come from anything learned. It comes from deep inside her. And it has always motivated everything I see her do whether in the mundane in the store or in her professional work."

Miller said he and his wife have a mutually supportive relationship in term of their careers. They often read each other's work and informally discuss it.

"We can talk the same language because we're both attorneys, so we talk about the issues of the day, not a specific client problem," Miller says.

He said Kendall-Miller's passion for Native rights comes from many places, including her Dena'ina Athabascan heritage and having felt first-hand discrimination. He describes her drive as being a "real intellectual interest."

"These issues of subsistence and reserve water rights and sovereignty are exceedingly complex," he says. It's an intellectual complexity that he thinks she is drawn to and she masters it.

"I think that's why she has become so successful. Because I think it really discourages many people, and they move on to something else. Well, this is her passion, there's no question about it," Miller says.

Kendall-Miller is humble about her success as an attorney, and she attributes it to a personal connection to the issues.

"If it were not for my passion for Native rights work, I would not be an attorney, because I don't particularly like the law. I don't like the adversarial system, and I don't think it's the best way of necessarily resolving issues, but it's a necessary tool, and to advocate for an area like Native rights does require using the judicial system to push policy. So in that respect, I'm happy being a public interest advocate."

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