Sheila Lankford - Not everyone who lived here was excited about Statehood. My father voted against it because he couldn't get a copy of the Statehood compact before the election. Turned out he was right because the Compact permanently created a second-class state where people don't really own their land. My mom voted against it because she wanted a commonwealth which would have given Alaska much more control over our own territory rather than being under the thumb of the feds.

Most people here were ill-informed sheep who believed the media (all the newspaper owners were pro-Statehood) that pretending to be a state would be so much better than being a territory. Fact is we stuck the label of "state" on what was and remains a colony of the United States of American. Do so research on how different our status is compared to the contiguous 48 and you begin to realize that we should have asked harder questions and voted against Statehood.