This month, a small team of federal officials will visit a handful of Alaska villages to discuss with local tribal leaders the proposed multibillion-dollar gas pipeline project one government to another. The meetings or consultations, as they're called stem from an 18-year-old presidential mandate for federal agencies to engage Native American tribes, and to listen and consider their concerns before taking actions that affect the tribes. That mandate grew out of a new federal approach to Native relations that repudiated two centuries of policies that marginalized Native Americans, their culture and their relations with the land