The Alaska Board of Education unanimously approved new reading standards for Alaska Native languages Wednesday. This means students from kindergarten to third grade can have their reading skills evaluated in an Alaska Native language instead of in English.

The new standards are broader than the state’s current reading standards. This allows schools to fit the standards to their cultural and linguistic needs.

The standards recognize students can achieve literacy in state languages other than English.

Jamie Shanley is the assistant director of education with Sealaska Heritage Institute, a nonprofit tribal organization that helped create the standards last year. She said the standards give students learning an Alaska Native language another option to meet reading requirements set by the Alaska Reads Act. But it was a challenge to create the standards.

“That was a really hard clashing of two worlds, a Western ideal of education with this standards based system and an indigenous worldview,” she said. “And so this group really has [a] beautiful way of meshing those two things.”

She said the standards aren’t meant to dictate reading in one of the state’s 23 official Alaska Native languages in a confined way.

The standards also define reading differently. Shgen George is one of the owners of Teaching Indigenous Design for Every Student, an education consulting group. She said Alaska Native cultures do read, even if there wasn’t historically a written language.

“Reading is looking at things and gathering information.,” George said. “And so we really talked a lot about how we have been reading things this whole time. And so we really had these deep discussions about reading the weather and reading our environment and reading our regalia and our art.”

There are Alaska Native language programs and schools all around the state, including the Tlingit Culture, Language and Literacy school in Juneau.

Several educators from TCLL helped to form the standards. Principal Molly Yerkes said the school already uses elements of the new standards and that they will help schools take the next steps to develop ways to assess reading in Alaska Native languages.

“In Alaska, every community has to develop their own,” Yerkes said. “It’s not like something you can buy in Texas and McDougal Littell, so I think this adoption of these standards will support the creation of quality materials and also hopefully lead to a support for more native speakers of indigenous languages to become teachers.”

She said the TCLL staff are working with researchers to develop assessments for Lingít learners.

Per Alaska Administrative Code, regulations typically take effect 30 days after they are filed by the Lieutenant Governor.

A team of about 10 people just returned from their second trip mapping and surveying the old shipwreck site of the Star of Bengal, about 80 miles west of Wrangell close to Coronation Island. Over 100 cannery workers died when the ship went down.

Local fisherman and mariner Gig Decker first dove at the site in the 90s. 

He’s a member of UChart, Underwater Cultural Heritage Archeological Research Team, which has been investigating the site for a few years. Decker said the team had a goal in mind for this last dive – to recover the ship’s bell. He said a biologist found the bell at the site a few years ago, and they wanted to recover it for conservation purposes.

“For shipwreck enthusiasts, the bell is as important as the anchor,” he said. “It’s a very important part of it (the ship)”.

The Star of Bengal sank during a storm when it was heading from Wrangell back to San Francisco. 

Star of Bengal’s artifacts

The UChart team shipped the vessel’s bell to Texas A&M Conservation Lab with the intention to preserve it at the Wrangell Museum in the future. 

The group wrote about the bell on their Facebook page. It says “Watching it breaking the surface after 117 years under water was an emotional moment. Once the conservation is completed, we will hear the voice of the ship again.”

Decker said they also located other artifacts – the debris pile, the anchor and the chain. But there’s something else that’s more pressing on his mind.

“The thing that we’re more interested in than anything is the fact that the majority of the Asians that died on the wreck were locked in the forward hold,” he said. “And of course, there’s been a lot of testimony both ways about whether they were locked down or not.”

Researchers found that over 100 cannery workers, mostly Chinese, Japanese and Filipino, perished in the boat while roughly 30 mostly white crew members survived.  

“we’re all in kind of the same game”

Decker said he hopes an underwater forensic investigation leads to some answers.

The team researching the shipwreck included the captain of the research vessel Endeavour Bill Urschel, cook and Endeavour Program Director Corky Parker, underwater archaeologist Jenya Anichenko, divers Stephen Prysunka, Gig Decker, Shawn Wells and Kevin Landowne; remote sensing specialists Sean Adams and Tayller Adams.

Decker said UChart is a sister organization to the Wrangell Mariners Memorial, which honors people who’ve died at sea. He’s also a board member of Friends of the Museum, which will eventually help rehome the bell at the museum.

He said, “I think it’s really important to recognize the fact that we’re all in kind of the same game; we’re trying to preserve the memory of the history of Wrangell and the significance to our community.”

Decker said that Wrangell’s history goes back hundreds of years and the stories that UChart is uncovering at sea will help enrich the local museum.

Uchart will put on a talk about this experience at the Friends of the Museum spring membership meeting at the Nolan Center on Thursday, May 29 at 6:30 p.m.. 

The event will also be a potluck.

The post Underwater archeological research team explores more of shipwreck site; recovering Star of Bengal’s bell appeared first on KSTK.

Photo: Sitka election workers deliver ballots from Precinct 1

Sitka voters have overwhelmingly rejected a ballot measure that would have capped the number of cruise visitors beginning next year.

Wednesday’s special election brought out almost 3,000 voters, 73% of whom rejected the proposition. This was the third largest turnout for any municipal election in Sitka since 2018.

Sitka Sound Cruise Terminal owner Chris McGraw led the opposition to the proposition. His group, called Safeguard Sitka’s Future, organized early in the process, and even campaigned to discourage residents from signing the petition initiative.

McGraw was heartened by the night’s results.

“I think it, you know, shows that the community understands the benefits of cruise tourism and that the proposed ballot initiative wasn’t the right answer at this time,” McGraw said in an interview with KCAW after the election returns were released at Harrigan Centennial Hall.

Although the outcome was a decisive “no,” McGraw is aware that the industry has work to do to address the concerns of the 27-percent of voters who supported limiting cruise visits to Sitka, like acquiring better buses, and refining the terms of a memorandum of understanding – or MOU – with City Hall to make sure the 7,000 passenger-per-day cap called for in that document is met.

“But I think that’s all a conversation that you have with the Tourism Commission, and the public, and everybody weighs in so that we don’t jeopardize the economic impact, but still maintain what makes Sitka great place to live,” McGraw said. 

Although it was not a good night for the proposition’s supporters, one of its authors, Larry Edwards, was glad to have had a chance to put the issue before voters – a process which took him two years, and four attempts.

Edwards said voters were faced with a very narrow choice on a complicated issue, and he does not consider the outcome an endorsement of the cruise terminal’s MOU with the city.

“There’s still the question of what numbers does the town really want, and would the town accept a regulatory approach, or does it really like the MOU approach, which is voluntary and really not that enforceable?” Edwards said.

Initiative co-sponsor Klaudia Leccese was unhappy in the outcome, but hopeful that Sitkans had a better understanding of the issue.

“It’s, of course, like he said, a disappointment, but on the other hand, the people got a chance to vote, and I think that’s really critical,” Leccese said. “Hopefully things will work out in the way that’s best for Sitka over the course of time.”

The final tally on Sitka’s Special Election to limit cruise ships was 773 in favor, and 2,071 opposed. Well over half of the electorate chose to cast their ballots early in this election. 121 absentee ballots will be counted on June 2, but they will not affect the outcome. The Sitka Assembly will certify the results at its first regular meeting in June.

Editor’s note: This is a developing story, and will be updated. 

What you need to know:

• The Mat-Su School Board is considering a districtwide ban on student cellphones and smartwatches during all school hours and activities, including lunch breaks. The ban would start in the 2025-26 school year.
• A yearlong pilot ban at three schools led to significant improvements in student learning and social interactions, officials said.. At Palmer High School, those included a dramatic increase in honor roll students and major drops in drug and alcohol use, reported bullying and disciplinary actions.
• If passed, the policy would be enforced through staff oversight and parent cooperation, officials said. The change also aligns with a pending state law requiring schools to regulate phone use. The policy will go before the Matanuska-Susitna Borough School Board for a vote later this month.

PALMER — A proposal before the Mat-Su School Board this week would ban student cell phones in all Mat-Su schools starting next school year, including during lunch breaks.

If approved, the policy would prohibit phones for the entire school day. It would require students to turn off and store their phones during all regular school hours.

The ban would also apply to smartwatches capable of sending and receiving messages, including Apple Watches, officials said. Health-related exceptions would be allowed, according to the proposed policy.

The proposal is scheduled for introduction at a school board meeting on Wednesday, with a vote expected at a meeting scheduled for May 21. If approved, the policy would go into effect in August for the 2025-26 school year.

The proposed ban is intended to improve student health and learning, officials said, and expands on a current district policy requiring that student phones be turned off during class and not disrupt school activities.

The plan follows a one-year pilot ban implemented last fall at Palmer High School, Palmer Junior Middle School and Su-Valley Jr./Sr. High School, which officials said had a dramatically positive impact on students and staff.

At Palmer High, Principal Dave Booth credits the policy with a 50% increase in the number of students making the honor roll with a 3.0 or higher GPA. The policy also coincided with a significant year-over-year drop in drug and alcohol use at the school and a decrease in discipline rates, he said.

“We had a 43% decrease in our use of alcohol. Everything else was 70 to 80% as far as discipline, bullying, tobacco or vape use, drug use – all of those things just dropped,” he said. “We used to deal with a cyberbullying incident two or three times a week for years. I think this year we’ve had two total.”

Booth said he links those declines to students no longer being able to coordinate inappropriate behavior through messaging or isolate themselves with devices during lunch and activities.

Initially, some parents were concerned about students’ ability to make contact during the day, Booth said. Today, those parents instead call the office to relay messages. If a student needs to contact home, they can take the phone to the office, make the call or send a text, and then turn it off, he said.

Booth said that parents also initially expressed concern about reaching students during a true emergency, such as an active shooter situation.

But keeping kids off their phones during such an incident could be a matter of life or death because a large influx of calls could overwhelm networks and hinder emergency response, he said. Phone sounds could also draw unwanted attention during such an incident, he said.

If approved, district officials plan to work with staff at each school to enforce the new rule, they said.

The pilot program initially used special locking pouches for student phones, but school administrators found them unnecessary and stopped using them early in the school year, opting instead to enforce the ban directly, district spokesman John Notestine said in a statement.

“We learned it is possible to achieve similar outcomes without the pouches if there is a strong policy in place, paired with consistent enforcement and parent support,” Notestine said.

Mat-Su’s proposed ban also fulfills a requirement included in a school funding measure passed by state lawmakers and awaiting Gov. Mike Dunleavy’s signature. If approved, that law would require Alaska school districts to develop their own policies regulating phone use during the school day or implement a state-mandated ban.

A draft version of the state policy was approved by the Alaska Board of Education and Early Development earlier this year.

This story was updated May 7 to correctly reflect Palmer High School Principal Dave Booth’s name.

— Contact Amy Bushatz at abushatz@matsusentinel.com

When Jill Baker’s email pinged late on a Wednesday night in early April, she had no idea that her role as the director for Humanities Montana was about to fundamentally change.

“I received the letter from DOGE [Department of Government Efficiency] through the acting chair of the National Endowment for the Humanities at 10:25 pm on Wednesday, April 2. The letter was dated April 2, and our grant was terminated April 2, so there wasn’t even an opportunity to close out our grant and to be reimbursed for expenses that had happened prior to April 2,” Baker told the Daily Yonder in an interview.

Humanities Montana is one of 56 regional humanities organizations that bring humanities programs to underresourced communities including in rural areas. In 2024, over 17,000 people attended a Humanities Montana program, with more than half residing in a rural county.

Funding was cut to all 56 regional humanities organizations, as well as the national office in Washington, DC. State humanities across the country are scrambling to continue running their programs. In Alaska, a note on their program’s website states, “Late on the night of April 2, the Alaska Humanities Forum received a letter from DOGE officials informing them that their NEH operating grant approved by Congress had been illegally terminated effective immediately.”  Wisconsin Humanities also has an announcement on its website, noting that “the loss of NEH funding will likely result in Wisconsin Humanities closing its doors soon.” 

Humanities Montana has brought experts in history, journalism, and poetry to speak to rural Montanans who would otherwise struggle to access such programs. Through their Montana Conversations program, they also bring trained facilitators to lead workshops and conversations that strengthen community resilience.

“Our mission is to bring untold stories that can help bring people together and find the humanity in one another,” Baker said. “In this moment, that’s a real challenge in and of itself. My worry is that without the public humanities, our divides will grow, we’ll have less opportunities to gather together and have simple civic conversations, to learn from one another.”

Humanities Montana has received general operating support grants through the National Endowment for the Humanities (NEH) for over 50 years. The NEH funding provided most of their operating budget; in 2023, the NEH made up 80.9% of their $1,011,229 budget.

The sudden cut in funding meant they had to cancel all scheduled programs for the year immediately. Like with most federal funding, Humanities Montana needed to spend the allocated money and then submit invoices to be reimbursed. The way their funding was cut meant that they will not be compensated for the funds they have already spent, and they won’t be able to allot any more money for programs going forward.

“We need to pivot pretty quickly to private fundraising, and that changes our business model completely. So we’re pausing those programs and making a plan to move forward in a different landscape,” Baker said.

On With the Program

One person who isn’t ready to pause is the current Montana Poet Laureate and award-winning Métis storyteller, Chris La Tray. He is committed to attending all the events he had been scheduled for through Humanities Montana and has since added even more, regardless of the organization’s ability to pay. He has been working to raise the money through private donations.

La Tray, an enrolled member of the Little Shell tribe of Chippewa Indians, wasn’t surprised by the funding cuts, even if he was angry about them. 

“The way those grants work, it’s like what they learned writing treaties with Indian tribes; just because you say you’re going to do something doesn’t mean you have to. It’s a pretty cruel kind of bait and switch,”  La Tray told the Daily Yonder.

A poet and the author of Becoming Little Shell, a memoir about his journey to embracing his Indigenous heritage, La Tray’s commitment to continuing his program is borne from seeing firsthand how important his work is, especially in rural areas.

“When I started working with Humanities, I said, let’s make the list of all the little places that nobody ever goes to, and let’s make going there a priority,” La Tray said.

Since announcing that he planned to continue his programming regardless of payment, La Tray has been working with schools and community centers to find alternative ways to fund his work, finding private donors who have offered to step in.

For La Tray, the work is just too important to stop. “There’s a little school just on the eastern edge of the Fort Belknap Reservation who asked me to come do the commencement address at their high school graduation, and there’s six graduating seniors,” he said. “They have eighth-grade and kindergarten graduates as part of this. It’s not even 20 kids, and it’s a nine-hour drive away from me. And they started asking, right as Humanities was collapsing, and how am I not going to do that, you know?”

With more than half his work taking place in rural Montana, La Tray and Bake believe these cuts will hit folks in rural areas the hardest. 

“For example, one of the places that we have had speakers is Petroleum County, population 500 in the whole county. Humanities Montana speaker, Mary Jane Bradbury, did her program talking about the history of Nancy Russell, and 80 people showed up in a county that has 500 people. I just think that shows the power of the humanities to bring people together, to gather, to share the hunger to learn,”  Baker said.

Samantha French, the director of the Blaine County Museum in Chinook, Montana, is worried about losing such a valuable resource for her community.

“It’s so affordable to go through the speakers bureau, it’s a $75 copay. Humanities Montana funded all of the speakers’ other expenses, their mileage, their lodging, and that’s not something that’s feasible to do for a lot of small museums,” French said.

The Blaine County Museum holds its speaker series in the winter as a way to build community during the dark months. French said that it brings people from all walks of life, and they typically have between 15 and 30 attendees on a weekday night, out of a population of 1,200.

That’s where Humanities Montana programs were just invaluable, because they appealed to a really broad breadth of age groups and kinds of people,” French said. Humanities Montana also gave the museum $500 to fund its book club, which brought people to the museum and library with which neither institution had previously interacted with. After the programming was finished, the books were turned into kits that can be borrowed by other libraries in the state.

French recognizes the effects losing this program will have on Chinook and other rural Montanans. “There’s already so little here, and unfortunately, with the nature of these federal cutbacks, it really does impact the people who are the most disadvantaged,” she said. 

“Rural people in rural communities are disadvantaged. We really have very few resources. We have very little access to transportation, healthcare, and healthy food. We truly need what was there. So yeah, it makes a big impact.”

The post Cuts to National Endowment for the Humanities Hit Rural Montana, Other States Hard appeared first on The Daily Yonder.

What you need to know:

• The Mat-Su School District is forming a Special Education Engagement Team to improve communication between parents of students with special needs and district officials.
• The initiative follows advocacy efforts led by a district parent. While the new group will not have formal policy-making authority, it can provide input on updates to special education programs.
• The team will meet quarterly during the 2025-26 school year. A kickoff meeting later this month will focus on reviewing current services and defining the group’s purpose.

PALMER – A new Mat-Su school committee looks to connect parents of students with special needs to the district officials who oversee their education programs.

The Special Education Engagement Team will hold its first meeting Monday. It will create a space for “constructive feedback” on the Matanuska-Susitna Borough School District’s special education programs, district spokesperson John Notestine said in a statement.

The group will meet quarterly during the 2025-26 school year, according to a district announcement issued this month. The first meeting will include an overview of current special education services and a discussion of the group’s purpose, Notestine said.

The announcement follows months of requests for such a group from district parent Rebecca Emerson, a special education advocate who regularly speaks at school board meetings. Her 7-year-old son, a first grader with Down syndrome, is enrolled in a district elementary school and frequently joins her at the sessions.

While she believes her son is receiving excellent services at his current school, Emerson said that’s not always the case for every student. Parents of students with specialized learning plans or classroom accommodations — known as IEPs and 504 plans — often struggle to navigate the public education system, access services and advocate for their children, she said in an interview.

Emerson launched an online petition last fall to build support for the effort and gathered signatures from more than 100 district parents, she said.

She hopes the new group gives families a way to work with the district to improve special needs support and communication despite ongoing budget challenges.

“I think when you’re in a resource-constrained environment, if you don’t speak up, then it’s hard to allocate those limited resources because you might not know what the issues are,” she said. “I thought it was really important to have some sort of parent and teacher input to these decisions so we don’t get overlooked.”

Emerson, who volunteered in special education advocacy in other school districts and at the Defense Department before moving to Mat-Su last year, initially asked the district to empower the group with an official special needs policy advisory role.

The new engagement team won’t set policy, but it could help inform that work, Notestine said.

That’s a good first step, Emerson said.

“I am an optimist. I’m going to make this work,” she said. “And if it turns into something that isn’t working, I’m gonna try to change it.”

The group announcement comes amid an ongoing lawsuit filed in late 2023 against the district and three employees, alleging the district illegally restrains and isolates disabled students in violation of state and federal laws and its own guidelines.

The case was filed in U.S. District Court in Anchorage by district parents on behalf of their child and other disabled students. A status conference for that case is scheduled for May 8 in Anchorage.

Individuals can attend the Special Education Engagement Team’s first meeting from 12:30 to 1:30 p.m. Monday, April 28, at the district administration building in Palmer. Future meeting times will be scheduled based on feedback. A registration and feedback form is available.

— Contact Amy Bushatz at contact@matsusentinel.com

Investing in the Soil

In running the Metlakatla Indian Community S’ndooyntgm Galts’ap Community Garden, Gatgyeda Haayk has developed a particular relationship to soil. “People misunderstand soil,” she explained. 

Alongside permafrost, extreme climate, and a short growing season, poor soil is often cited as a reason why gardens will not grow in Alaska. “A lot of people think you could just throw something in the ground where it’s not that easy because our soil is so acidic,” Haayk said.

However, Haayk’s garden thrives. Watermelons and pumpkins, green onions, beets, potatoes, tomatoes, cucumbers, peas, beans, corn – Haayk grows a mix of Southeast Alaska staples and new plants.

The key is the dirt – investing in healthy soil can be a decades-long process. “The time and the effort and the love and all the energy – the soil that I have now, I built that soil,” Haayk said.

The investment is worth it to Haayk, because she believes community gardens help solve a basic challenge facing rural Alaskans: putting food on the table. 

Alaska’s rural retail grocery system is extremely costly to maintain, leading to unparalleled logistics challenges and famously expensive cheese. This is one reason the main source of food in rural Alaska is subsistence and personal use gathering. However, climate change, state and federal policy, and commercialization have disrupted longstanding practices of living off the land. 

As both retail and non-retail food systems come under stress, rural Alaskans are all the more willing to try new (and old) ways of obtaining food that align with their values, their budgets and their tastes. 

Small Planes and Fragile Supply Chains

More than 80% of Alaska communities are not connected to a central road network year round. These towns and villages are spread out over a tract of land two and a half times the size of Texas at the absolute periphery of the United States. Maintaining grocery stores is often impossible.

Additionally, Alaska is largely dependent on food from out of state. Mike Jones, an economist who studies rural food systems at the University of Alaska Anchorage, told the Daily Yonder in an interview that the food supply chain to remote Alaska is perhaps the most complex in the nation. 

Imported food reaches Alaska by plane or, mostly, by boat to the Port of Alaska. From there in-state suppliers rely on a “hub and spokes model” to get the food out to regional depots where it is then shuttled on to individual communities. “It is not so much planes, trains and automobiles as it is planes, barges and snowmobiles,” Jones said.

Each link in the supply chain raises costs for the end consumer and raises the likelihood of something going wrong in transit.

Jones pointed to Automated Weather Observing System (AWOS) outages as an example of how one small pain point can affect remote Alaska’s entire food system. AWOS weather stations collect data on Alaska’s extreme weather conditions. Alaska has about 140 AWOS stations, (a station-density far below the lower 48). When a station goes down, it inhibits a pilot’s ability to track weather conditions and FAA guidelines prohibit a commercial pilot from flying in an area for which they don’t have that weather data.

Outages ground planes and forsake food to hangars that usually lack sufficient cold storage capacity. In September of 2024, there were 55 unscheduled outages. That means a lot of rotting food. “Combine this with other issues like runway plowing, maintenance, labor constraints … you get major backlogs” Jones said. This jacks up the price of produce in rural Alaska, where average household income in some areas is as low as $36,753.

“That’s how you end up paying $11 for a gallon of milk,” said Bruce Botelho, former Attorney General of Alaska who was part of the effort to oppose the recent Kroger Albertsons merger. “Rural Alaska is a tiny market spread across vast geography … it is very difficult to establish competitive prices and availability,” Botelho told the Daily Yonder.

Traditional Foodways

Eva Burk is Dena’ Athabascan. Growing up, her family lived on a fish camp on the Tanana River about 50 miles south of Fairbanks. Large portions of her diet and her family’s livelihood came from the trapline. “My dad was born before Alaska had statehood… He was born a free man, him and his family could choose when and where and how much to fish and hunt and trap,” Burk said.

Burk was born 10 years after the Alaska Native Claims Settlement Act (ANCSA) passed in Congress, a time when Alaska Native people were still “getting adjusted to capitalism … adjusting to owning land and getting engaged in the cash economy,” Burk said. ANCSA, and subsequent state and federal action, brought huge disruptions to day-to-day life for many Alaska Native people.

Burk has spent her career tracing the ongoing effects of these changes on Alaska Native food systems. Burk studies rural community development at the University of Alaska Fairbanks and serves on advisory panels for the North Pacific Fishery Management Council, The Federal Subsistence Board, and the Alaska Department of Fish and Game.

A 2004 report found that subsistence accounted for 29-69% of caloric intake in off-road communities. Personal use gathering and hunting has become more expensive as inflation drives up supply costs (like fuel and equipment) and regulation drives up permit costs. Climate change and commercial overuse have jeopardized key subsistence resources. Fisheries that have sustained Alaska native communities for millennia are in crisis. 

“We’ve been shut down from subsistence fishing for five years now,” said Burk, explaining that salmon depopulation sets off a series of cascading consequences for the subsistence system. Less salmon means increased predation of caribou calves and moose, both species traditionally vital to subsistence lifestyles. Loss of access to land and subsistence resources has forced Alaska Native communities to alter the food they eat. A University of Alaska Fairbanks report cites growing consumption of processed foods as a reason for higher instances of diabetes, childhood dental cavities, and colorectal cancer. 

Perhaps the most insidious threat is cultural loss. Burk worries that the next generation won’t have access to the methods of fishing, trapping, and hunting that her people have prized as part of a fundamental connection to nature. “Everything is spiraling out of control,” Burk said.

Continuing a History of Adaptation

The challenges are steep, but Gatgyeda Haayk noted that for the thousands of years people have lived in Alaska, they have overcome intense obstacles to forage, gather, and hunt food in some of the world’s most extreme environments. That history is not stagnant, but adaptive. Haayk said that when Tsimshian people migrated to New Metlakatla from British Columbia, they brought plants of value to them and helped them grow in their new environment. “Even though we aren’t, what they say, “traditional farmers,” we have also had our ways of cultivating the land,” Haayk said.

According to Burk, the work to adapt and maintain Alaska Native food sovereignty for 2025 and beyond happens at three levels: systems, community, and individual.

Much of Burk’s focus is on systems change. Her “four buckets” of work are “water stewardship, food sovereignty, cultural revitalization, and community wellness.” This means that one day she is in a North Pacific Fishery Advisory Panel meeting, trying to reduce bycatch (the incidental catch of unintended species) and the next day she is working to secure financing for a community buy-back project to build a small farm in Nenana. “Many of us have to wear a lot of hats in this work … but that’s what it takes to have Indigenous voices represented in the decision-making spaces,” she said.

At the community level, Heidi Rader, Director of the Alaska Tribes Extension program out of the University of Alaska Fairbanks, works to teach practices that enhance rural food security and Alaska Native food sovereignty. Spreading knowledge means meeting people; via an Alaska gardening blog, youtube videos about stewarding wild blueberries, or workshops on how to can salmon. 

Finally, Gatgyeda Haayk helps individuals adopt the practice of gardening. Because gardening is not widespread in rural Alaska, getting started can be daunting. Locals may not know what grows in their area. Haayk has tried to create a space where gardeners can learn from each other. Experimentation has led to new discoveries, like how to grow healthy pumpkins in a short season. It has also led to the recovery of lost growing practices.

Cultivating “Indian potatoes” in Metlakatla was once widespread, but Haayk was only able to find one family still growing them. That family gifted Haayk six potato starters. “Two years ago, I was able to grow over 100 pounds of potatoes,” Haayk said. She gave half of her harvest to the elders. “For them to have that connection to a piece of our heritage that was kind of lost. And then to see more and more community members want to grow that potato and be connected to it. It’s eating a part of our history.” 

Economic analysts sometimes doubt whether these sorts of solutions can scale to a level that fills the massive gaps of Alaska’s rural food system. However, to many food security advocates, solutions that only consider how to produce the cheapest calories miss the point. 

“I lost my daughter in 2006, I had always wanted to do a healing garden for her,” Haayk said. Haayk had spent years building up the community garden in Metlakatla in her daughter’s memory, when Covid-19 hit. The pandemic threatened to cut off the one food supply barge Metlakatla, an island community, relies on for basic goods and produce. Haayk’s garden became a community resource and people who had never gardened before started planting in her plots.

Food intertwines economic, cultural, health, spiritual values. That means when a food-system suffers, it can have deep, corrosive effects. To combat this, Burk emphasizes leaning on cultural strengths. “Sharing in the bounty and having potlatch [an Indigenous gift-giving feast], which is our culture. That’s how we get by and survive,” Burk said.

The post Amid Ongoing Threats to Local Food Systems, Alaska Native and Rural Alaskan Leaders Imagine Alternatives appeared first on The Daily Yonder.

The billions of dollars approved by Congress to clean up abandoned oil and gas wells have been frozen as part of President Donald Trump’s sweeping cuts to government spending, creating concerns that the cleanup will be halted just as it’s getting started.

President Trump’s barrage of executive orders included a January directive called “Unleashing American Energy,” which, among other provisions, ordered that federal agencies stop distributing money appropriated by President Joe Biden’s Inflation Reduction Act (IRA) and the Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act (IIJA).

The Trump administration titled this section of the order “Terminating the Green New Deal.” But in freezing this congressionally approved spending, the administration halted a program that paid for plugging and reclaiming so-called “orphaned” or abandoned oil and gas wells. The order stated that agencies should “immediately pause the disbursement of funds” from those two Biden laws. It set a 90-day deadline, upcoming in April, for agencies to review their spending programs and make sure that they align with the Trump administration’s goal of increasing U.S. energy production.

The orphaned well program, which was modeled on a North Dakota initiative, had been widely used by oil states, including several in the West.

The program — which set aside $4.7 billion, a historically large sum, for plugging wells — was distributed to states via grants from the Department of the Interior. In January, days before Trump took office, New Mexico announced that it would be receiving $5.5 million to clean up abandoned wells in the state. California also received a $9 million grant.

California, Colorado, Montana and New Mexico had each plugged over 100 orphaned wells using the Biden funds, according to an Interior Department report in 2024. Wyoming alone plugged 1,021 wells in just one year using federal grants.

As of last fall, the U.S. government had released over half a billion dollars in grants. Wells have been plugged in the people’s front yards, in national park areas and deep in the remote Alaskan wilderness. More than $3 billion are still left to be distributed, but previously available information about the grants appears to have been removed from the Interior Department’s website.

In response to questions from High Country News, an Interior Department spokesperson said that the grant program is “under review.”

“President Trump’s decisive actions are necessary steps to eliminate bureaucratic waste and refocus our agency on its core mission: serving the American people and managing our nation’s natural resources with integrity and efficiency,” the spokesperson said in a statement. “Orphaned wells negatively impact current and future oil and gas development activities and pose significant risk to national energy security and public safety.”

In addition to supporting jobs that address oil patch pollution, these federal dollars are used on wells that lack any owner to pay for reclamation. Left unplugged, such orphaned oil and gas wells leak huge amounts of methane into the atmosphere and can contaminate local water sources with salty water and benzene.

Now the future of that work is uncertain, in legal limbo alongside many of the Trump administration’s cost-cutting policies. The funding in question had already been appropriated by Congress, making it unclear that the Trump administration can indefinitely cancel it.

On March 20, more than 30 House Democrats sent a letter to Interior Secretary Doug Burgum, asking him to clear up the lingering confusion surrounding orphaned well funding and restart the grant program.

The funding “protects our communities, cleans up our environment, and builds our economy.”

“We have already begun to hear from IIJA funding recipients impacted by this pause who now face an uncertain future after DOI issued a stop work order on their orphaned well remediation projects,” the letter states.

The letter goes on to say that the Interior Department has issued no guidance on the funds’ status.

“We urge you to resume distribution of this Congressionally directed funding immediately,” the letter stated. “It protects our communities, cleans up our environment, and builds our economy.”

ORPHANED WELLS represent the final stage in what ProPublica recently described as the oil industry’s “ playbook”: When oil wells are no longer productive, large companies sell them off to smaller companies and thereby shed their obligation to plug those wells.

The increasingly marginal wells change hands, eventually landing with operators who lack the financial means to plug them. And when these companies go bankrupt, the wells become orphaned, meaning that the plugging costs then fall on American taxpayers.

The Biden administration’s infrastructure law was the first significant federal attempt to address the growing problem of orphaned wells across the United States, although the funding it provided paled in comparison to the scale of the problem.

The Interior Department estimates that there are about 157,000 documented orphaned oil and gas wells nationwide. This figure is likely a dramatic undercount: The Environmental Protection Agency stated in an April 2021 report that there could be as many as 3.4 million abandoned wells nationally.

“Undocumented orphaned wells may emit nearly 63 million grams of methane per hour into the atmosphere,” according to a November 2024 report, “the equivalent of over 3.6 million gasoline-powered passenger cars driven per year.”

Many state regulators are aware that their financial requirements for oil and gas operators are are aware of this pattern and struggle to prevent it.

Several state oil regulators stated this explicitly in a 2024 survey conducted by the Interstate Oil and Gas Compact Commission (IOGCC), a quasi-governmental body that represents dozens of oil states. The documents were obtained via a records request by Fieldnotes, an industry watchdog, and shared with High Country News.

“Yes, this is the common life of a well,” regulators from Louisiana said, referring to the pattern of marginal wells being passed along to smaller companies.

Utah regulators agreed: “It is definitely a problem when wells are transferred to ‘poor’ operators.”

The plugging program was supposed to address these dysfunctional state programs, primarily by providing money. The Interior Department released its first round of grants in 2023, offering up $658 million to 26 states, including most of the oil states in the West.

The subsequent grants were intended to actually push states to fix their well-plugging programs and require that operators submit more money up front — enough to ensure that the industry and not the public ends up paying for the cost of plugging.

Known as regulatory improvement grants, these pools of funding required that states demonstrate higher financial assurance standards, increase scrutiny on well transfers, improve their plugging standards or show other reforms to their orphaned well regulatory regimes.

These grants essentially became the sole tool for the federal government to incentivize tougher state regulations. But the attempt immediately ran into headwinds: Oil states pushed back on these conditions. Some of this occurred via the IOGCC, which collaborated with the federal government on the rollout of the infrastructure law. This included initiatives to reduce orphaned well numbers, program implementation and data collection. Public documents show the inter-state commission lobbied to keep the federal guidelines as weak as possible. 

“Undocumented orphaned wells may emit nearly 63 million grams of methane per hour into the atmosphere.”

In a meeting of the Texas Railroad Commission in May 2022, Commissioner Wayne Christian – also an appointee to the IOGCC – said that he was working to remove the requirements from the federal grants.

“I’m part of the negotiation with IOGCC on the dollars coming down,” Christian said. “The Interior Department kind of have slowed things down, because all of a sudden, surprise, surprise, they decided they wanted to tell us how to do our work. And so we’re kind of fighting back on that.”

Regulatory improvement grants would have made available an additional $40 million per state. Now the future of those grants and the improvement incentives are in jeopardy, though some groups are challenging the legality of Trump’s decision to freeze funds that had already been appropriated by Congress and passed into law.

Several environmental groups and many Democratic states have filed lawsuits against the Trump administration, seeking to release the unspent funds from the Infrastructure and Inflation Reduction acts, the Biden administration’s landmark spending bills.

“The Trump Administration has continued to block funds needed for our domestic energy security, transportation, and infrastructure provided under the IRA and IIJA,” said California Attorney General Rob Bonta in a statement in February, after filing an injunction alongside 23 Democratic attorney generals, attempting to halt the administration’s funding cuts.

Bonta’s statement noted that the administration was blocking funding that “creates well-paying jobs while simultaneously reducing harmful pollution.”

The post Trump halts historic orphaned well-plugging program appeared first on High Country News.

In June 1942, Japan’s invasion of the Aleutian islands in Alaska prompted the U.S. military to activate the Alaska territorial guard, an Army reserve made up of volunteers who wanted to help protect the U.S. So many of the volunteers were from Alaska’s Indigenous peoples — Aleut, Inupiak, Yupik, Tlingit, and many others — that the guard was nicknamed the “Eskimo Scouts.” 

When World War II ended and the reserve force ceased operations in 1947, the U.S. approached the Indigenous Yupik people of Alaska with another ask: Could the Air Force set up “listening posts” on the island of Sivuqaq, also known as St. Lawrence Island, to help with the intelligence gathering needed to win the Cold War?  

Viola Waghiyi, who is Yupik from Sivuqaq, said the answer was a resounding yes. 

“Our grandfathers and fathers volunteered for the Alaska territorial guard,” she said. “We were very patriotic.” 

But that trust was abused, Waghiyi said. The U.S. military eventually abandoned its Air Force and Army bases, leaving the land polluted with toxic chemicals such as fuel, mercury, and polychlorinated biphenyls, or PCBs, that are known as “forever chemicals” because they persist so long in the environment. The contamination was largely due to spilled and leaking fuel from storage tanks and pipes, both above ground and below ground. More chemical waste came from electrical transformers, abandoned metals and 55-gallon drums. 

Now, Waghiyi is the environmental health and justice program director at the Alaska Community Action on Toxics, an organization dedicated to limiting the effects of toxic substances on Alaska’s residents and environment. Last week, the organization filed a complaint to the United Nations special rapporteur on toxics and human rights, in partnership with the U.C. Berkeley Environmental Law Clinic. 

Their complaint calls for the United Nations to investigate how military waste on Sivuqaq continues to violate the rights of the people who live there, such as the right to a clean and healthy environment and Indigenous peoples’ right to free, prior, and informed consent to what happens on their land. 

“By exposing the Yupik people of Sivuqaq to polluted drinking water sources, air, and soil, and by contaminating local native foods; by causing pervasive human exposure to hazardous chemicals through multiple routes; by toxifying the broader ecosystem; and by not cleaning up contamination sufficiently to protect human health and the environment, the U.S. Air Force and Army Corps of Engineers violated human rights long recognized in international law,” the complaint says. 

This submission from Alaska is part of a larger, global effort to raise awareness of military toxic waste by the United Nations. The U.N. special rapporteur on toxics and human rights is collecting public input on military activities and toxic waste until April 1. The information collected will be used in a report presented to the U.N. General Assembly in October. 

The two shuttered bases in Sivuqaq, Alaska, are now classified as “formerly used defense,” or FUD, sites, overseen by the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers, and more than $130 million has been spent to remove the contamination. John Budnick, a spokesman for the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers in Alaska, said the cleanup is considered complete but that the agency is reviewing the site every five years “to ensure the selected remedies continue to be protective of human health and the environment.” 

“We have completed the work at Northeast Cape, but additional follow-up actions may result from the monitoring phase of the Formerly Used Defense Sites Program,” he said. The last site visit occurred last July and an updated review report is expected to be released this summer.

The federal Environmental Protection Agency, or EPA, similarly concluded in 2013 that an additional EPA cleanup wouldn’t significantly differ from what the Army Corps of Engineers is doing and declined to place the sites on the EPA’s list of hazardous waste cleanup priorities.

A 2022 study found that so far, federal cleanup efforts have been inadequate. “High levels of persistent organic pollutants and toxic metals continue to leach from the Northeast Cape FUD site despite large-scale remediation that occurred in the early 2000s,” the authors concluded. 

The persisting pollution has garnered the attention of Alaska’s state Dept. of Environmental Conservation which oversees the cleanup of contaminated sites. Stephanie Buss, contaminated sites program manager at the agency, said her office has asked the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers to do additional cleanup at Northeast Cape.

“These active contaminated sites have not met closure requirements,” she said. The second former base, Gambell, was classified as completed but still lacks land use controls, she noted. 

“DEC takes community health concerns seriously and will continue to provide oversight of the conditions at its active sites in accordance with the state’s regulatory framework to ensure an appropriate response that protects human health and welfare,” Buss said.

That same 2022 study found that 89 percent of the fish around the Northeast Cape base contained mercury exceeding the levels the EPA deemed appropriate for people who rely on subsistence fishing. “All fish sampled near the FUD site exceeded the EPA’s PCB guidelines for cancer risk for unrestricted human consumption,” the researchers further found. Waghiyi said the contamination displaced 130 people, and has left her friends and family with a lasting legacy of illness. 

“It’s not a matter of if we’ll get cancer, but when,” Waghiyi said. Her father died of cancer. Her mother had a stillborn child. Waghiyi herself is a cancer survivor and has had three miscarriages. 

“We feel that they have turned their back on us,” Waghiyi said of the U.S. military. “We wanted our lands to be turned back in the same condition when they turned over.” 

The U.S. military has a long history of contaminating lands and waters through military training and battles sites, including on Indigenous lands. Citizens of the Navajo Nation in Arizona and  Yakama Nation in Washington continue to raise concerns about the ongoing effects of military nuclear testing on their lands and health. In the Marshall Islands, fishing around certain atolls is discouraged due to high rates of toxicity due to nuclear testing and other military training. On Guam, chemicals from an active Air Force base have contaminated parts of the islandʻs sole-source aquifer that serves 70% of the population. Last year, a federal report found that climate change threatens to unearth even more U.S. military nuclear waste in both the Marshall Islands and Greenland. 

In 2021, the Navy in Hawaiʻi poisoned 90,000 people when jet fuel leached from aging, massive underground storage tanks into the drinking water supply after the Navy ignored years of warning to upgrade the tanks or remove the fuel. The federal government spent hundreds of millions of dollars to remove unexploded ordnance from the island of Kahoʻolawe, a former bombing range in Hawaiʻi, but the island is still considered dangerous to walk on because of the risk of more ordnance unearthing due to extensive erosion. 

The complaint filed last week by the Alaska Community Action on Toxics calls for the United Nations to write to U.S. federal and state agencies and call upon them to honor a 1951 agreement between the U.S. government and the Sivuqaq Yupik people that prohibited polluting the land. 

The agreement said that the Sivuqaq Tribes would allow the Air Force to construct surveillance sites to spy on the Soviet Union, but they had four conditions, including allowing Indigenous peoples to continue to hunt, fish and trap where desired and preventing outsiders from killing their game. Finally, the agreement said that “any refuse or garbage will not be dumped in streams or near the beach within the proposed area.” 

“The import of the agreement was clear: The military must not despoil the island; must protect the resources critical to Indigenous Yupik inhabitants’ sustenance; and must leave the island in the condition they found it, which ensured their health and well-being,” the Alaska Community Action on Toxics wrote in their complaint. 

“This is a burden we didn’t create,” Waghiyi said.

This story was originally published by Grist with the headline Alaska Natives want the US military to clean up its toxic waste on Mar 19, 2025.

What you need to know:

• The Matanuska-Susitna Borough School District reached a settlement this week allowing students to engage in political discussions and peaceful protests on campus, with district officials having the authority to set protest time and place restrictions. The district must also pay out $30,000 in legal fees.
• The settlement resolves a 2023 lawsuit filed by two high school students who claimed their First Amendment rights were violated when officials blocked student political speech and investigated a student protest.
• Two additional lawsuits are pending: one challenges restrictions on transgender students’ bathroom access and privacy, and another class-action suit alleges illegal restraint and isolation of students with disabilities.

PALMER – The Matanuska-Susitna Borough School District will allow students to hold political discussions on school grounds as long as they don’t interfere with others’ rights, according to the settlement of a 2023 lawsuit against the district announced this week.

The out-of-court settlement resolves a lawsuit filed on behalf of two high school students who said district officials repeatedly violated their First Amendment rights in 2023 by blocking their political statements on campus and investigating a protest staged at a school board meeting. 

The suit was filed in November 2023 by Quin Schachle, then a senior at Wasilla High School who served in student government, and Ben Kolendo, then a senior at Mat-Su Career & Technical High School who served as the student representative on the district school board. Schachle and Kolendo graduated in 2024. Kolendo lost a 2024 school board election bid to incumbent Tom Bergey.

As part of the settlement, Schachle, Kolendo and the district crafted a joint statement agreeing that students can assemble peacefully on school grounds, but district officials may set time, place and safety-related restrictions, according to documents shared by Kolendo. Setting those restrictions is a school district right established by previous case law, Kolendo said in an interview.

The agreement also allows students to have “open and honest” political discussions on any Mat-Su school campus as long as doing so does not interfere with the educational process or impact the rights or safety of other students or staff.

Schachle and Kolendo were represented pro bono by the Anchorage-based Northern Justice Project. As part of the settlement, the district must also pay $30,000 to cover attorney fees, according to terms shared by Kolendo.

The suit alleged that Mat-Su district officials violated students’ First Amendment rights through a trio of actions in fall 2023. 

A school board-directed investigation into whether teachers assisted students with a school board meeting protest intimidated students for expressing their opinions, the suit stated. Students were later banned from political speech during a pair of walkouts held throughout Mat-Su, including on Election Day, the suit alleged. Then, during the Election Day walkout, students were told they could not protest on the grounds of schools used as polling places, it stated.

The suit was filed in U.S. District Court in Anchorage. The notice of settlement was filed with the court Thursday.

School district officials were not immediately available for comment.

Kolendo and Schachle said they are happy with the outcome of the case.

“This is a good thing for students, that their rights are protected and the district is recognizing that,” Schachle said in an interview Friday.

A pair of other lawsuits regarding student rights filed against the district in late 2023 and early last year are still pending.

A lawsuit filed in Palmer Superior Court in January of last year on behalf of a transgender student argues that a school district rule banning him from using the bathroom of his choice violates his rights under the state constitution. It also contends that disclosing transgender students’ birth names and sex through the school’s internal information system is a violation of privacy.

A preliminary injunction issued in the case in late December requires the school district to address students by their parent-approved preferred name and not disclose their birth names. A trial date for the suit has not yet been set.

A class-action lawsuit filed in U.S. District Court in Anchorage against the Matanuska-Susitna Borough School District in December 2023 claims the district illegally restrains and isolates disabled students.

A Feb. 26 court order in that case certifies the suit as representing all district students with an identified disability who have been restrained or secluded by district personnel. A trial date has not yet been set.

— Contact Amy Bushatz at contact@matsusentinel.com