Sorted by date Results 1 - 25 of 46
The church, originally known as the Klukwan Presbyterian, has been holding regular Sunday services for nearly a century. But one thing about the church has changed: its owner. More than a year ago, a national denomination of the Presbyterian Church transferred the deed to the Klukwan tribe as part of the denomination's effort to reconcile past abuses by clergy members and teachers against Alaska Native people. The formal ceremony, which had been delayed by COVID-19 concerns, was held in...
The Biden administration could jump into a high-profile lawsuit in which Metlakatla is fighting with Gov. Mike Dunleavy’s administration about tribal citizens’ fishing rights. The U.S. Department of Justice said in a filing Dec. 5 that it’s considering submitting a friend-of-the-court brief in the dispute between the state and the Metlakatla Indian Community, a tribal government. The three-year-old Metlakatla lawsuit, filed by the tribal government against the state, centers on the extent of fishing rights granted to the community’s members...
Former President Jimmy Carter was honored Nov. 1 by the Alaska Wilderness League for his conservation work in the state. The Mardie Murie Lifetime Achievement Award recognized Carter’s role in creating and passing the 1980 Alaska National Interest Lands Conservation Act. “Alaska is a special place for many Americans, and President Carter was ahead of his time in understanding how protecting wild Alaska would outlive his White House tenure,” Kristen Miller, the organization’s executive director, said in a statement. “We honor and celebrate...
Ten Alaska Native youth from the Wrangell School District learned about their heritage and made connections with the statewide Native community at the Elders & Youth Conference in Anchorage last month. The event, which featured cultural and educational workshops, speeches, healing circles, a talent show and more, is a chance for Native youth to learn about democratic processes and leadership skills. This year, its theme was Woosht Guganéixh, which translates from Tlingit to “let it be that we heal each other.” Tlingit teacher Virginia Oliv...
Alaska U.S. Rep. Mary Peltola’s husband, Eugene “Buzzy” Peltola Jr., died after a plane he was flying crashed Sept. 12 in Southwest Alaska. Peltola, 57, was the former regional director of the Bureau of Indian Affairs for Alaska, serving from 2018 to 2022. He previously spent 34 years working for the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service in Alaska. Among other roles, he served as vice mayor and council member for the city of Bethel between 2010 and 2012 and sat on various Alaska Native village corporation boards. After retiring in 2022 from his work...
WASHINGTON — More than 50 years after the Alaska Native Claims Settlement Act passed Congress, proposed legislation again seeks to resolve claims with so-called “landless” Alaska Natives from five Southeast Alaska communities that were left out of the landmark law, including Wrangell. Supporters of the effort say concerns about the environmental damages of logging and public access restricted by private ownership of the lands have stalled progress on the land-transfer legislation in past years. But they are hopeful the political atmos...
According to a new state report, nearly 200 Alaska Native or American Indian people went missing between the beginning of April and the end of June in Alaska. Two dozen of them have not been found. Violence against American Indian and Alaska Native people far exceeds the national average and Alaska has one of the highest rates of missing and murdered Indigenous people in the United States. The problem especially affects women and girls. In Alaska, calls for justice preceded Gov. Mike Dunleavy’s formation of a Missing and Murdered Indigenous P...
Angoon students led a procession of regalia-clad residents down the village's Front Street on June 19. Elders and family members looked on as they sang and drummed Tlingit songs in the afternoon sun, then joined in dances - the killer whale song, the dog salmon song and the Haida "tired paddler" song. Children spun on playground equipment above the sparkling water of Chatham Strait, and visitors recorded videos on their phones. It was a celebration of enduring culture - the students were...
Alaska Native leaders and the state of Alaska have hailed the U.S. Supreme Court decision upholding the constitutionality of the Indian Child Welfare Act. The ruling preserves a 35-year-old law intended to address the harm caused by the federal government’s boarding school program by prioritizing the placement of Alaska Native and American Indian children into tribal homes. “Like most Alaska Native and American Indian tribes from across the country, we have been anxiously awaiting this decision,” Julie Kitka, president of the Alaska Feder...
The Central Council of the Tlingit and Haida Indian Tribes of Alaska, based in Juneau and representing more than 35,000 tribal citizens, and the Tanana Chiefs Conference, based in Fairbanks and representing 42 villages, announced they are leaving the state’s largest Native organization. In earlier decisions, three of the state’s 12 regional Native corporations have also left the politically powerful Alaska Federation of Natives in recent years. AFN continues to represent more than 200 federally recognized tribes, 184 Native village cor...
In a landmark decision, the Alaska Supreme Court ruled last Friday that partisan gerrymandering is unconstitutional under the Alaska Constitution’s equal protection doctrine. The decision follows a contentious reapportionment cycle after the 2020 census: The Alaska Redistricting Board was twice found by the state’s highest court of having unconstitutionally gerrymandered the state’s political maps by attempting to give solidly Republican Eagle River more political representation with two Senate seats in the 20-member body. Following a court...
As Wrangell Tlingit and Haida Community Council president, I want to thank Carol Rushmore, the borough’s economic development director, and wish her the best for her retirement coming up in April. In January 2018, Tom Gillen Sr., our council member, and I went to see Carol at City Hall when WTHCC was attempting to assist Patrick Mayer, former superintendent of Wrangell Public Schools, to get the Alaska Native Science and Engineering Program housed at the old Wrangell Institute property. Though we were not successful in obtaining approval f...
For decades, Alaska’s economy has depended on the harvest of natural resources — industries like pumping oil out of the ground and cutting timber. Now, Republican Gov. Mike Dunleavy wants the state to make money by leaving trees standing, and by pumping carbon emissions back into the ground. Investment is currently flooding into those kinds of projects, driven by the increasing urgency to slow global warming by cutting human-caused carbon emissions. Dunleavy has long rejected the scientific consensus that those emissions are causing cli...
Christine Jenkins passed away peacefully surrounded by her family on January 4, 2023, at the age of 94. She was a lifelong Wrangell resident and a much-loved and respected member of the Wrangell community. Cecelia Christine Feller was born October 12, 1928, in Wrangell to Otto and Susie (Cooday) Feller. She was the youngest of seven children. She was Tlingit Raven/Frog, Kiks.a'di of the Sun House in Wrangell and was a tribal citizen of the Tlingit and Haida Indian Tribes of Alaska. Christine...
JUNEAU (AP) — U.S. Rep. Mary Peltola has been elected to a full term in the House, months after the Alaska Democrat won a special election to the seat following the death earlier this year of longtime Republican Rep. Don Young. Peltola defeated Republicans Sarah Palin and Nick Begich, as well as Libertarian Chris Bye in the Nov. 8 election. Results of the ranked-choice election were announced Nov. 23. “It’s a two-year contract,” Peltola told the Anchorage Daily News after her victory — a 55%-45% margin over Palin in the final tabulatio...
As they’ve done every 10 years since 1972, Alaska voters on Nov. 8 again overwhelmingly rejected the ballot measure to convene a convention to rewrite the state’s founding document. Advocates on both sides had expected the outcome to be closer this time because of the annual deadlock in the Legislature over the size of the Permanent Fund dividend, an issue that convention supporters said they wanted to resolve with changes to the Alaska Constitution. But as of the Nov. 9 count, 70% of voters had voted against the measure (146,092 to 63,...
With Election Day less than a week away, the leading group encouraging Alaskans to vote no on a constitutional convention has raised much more money than its opponents after attracting a broad bipartisan group of supporters and a growing list of influential organizations backing its cause. Dwarfed in spending, the leading yes group is fighting on two fronts: In secular public forums, supporters are staying focused on a convention as a way to resolve Permanent Fund dividend debates. Meanwhile, some of the same conservative supporters are also...
Alaska U.S. Rep. Mary Peltola in a televised debate Oct. 26 called partisanship a threat to the country as the Democrat sought to make the case for reelection to the seat she’s held since September against challengers including Republican Sarah Palin. Peltola beat Palin and Republican Nick Begich in a ranked-choice August special election to fill the remainder of the late Republican Rep. Don Young’s term. Those three, along with Libertarian Chris Bye, are running in the Nov. 8 election for a full two-year term that starts in January. This ele...
Alaska’s Republican U.S. Sen. Lisa Murkowski says she plans on ranking Democratic U.S. Rep. Mary Peltola first in the U.S. House race on the Nov. 8 ballot, where Murkowski’s own name will also appear as she runs for a fourth term. Murkowski broke the news after delivering remarks to a packed room of Alaska Federation of Natives convention delegates at Anchorage’s Dena’ina Center, where she was greeted with a standing ovation and frequently interrupted with rounds of applause. Her remarks focused on what she sees as reasons for optimism for the...
The state’s largest Alaska Native organization declared its opposition to a constitutional convention on Saturday, saying rural Alaska could have the most to lose if a convention is called. The Alaska Federation of Natives also called for a potential reduction in the amount of fish caught in Area M, a state-managed fishery off the Alaska Peninsula, in order to protect salmon runs that have crashed on the state’s two largest rivers, the Yukon and Kuskokwim. And, after passing several other measures, the organization voted in executive ses...
Twenty-six places in Alaska received a new name Sept. 8 as part of the Interior Department’s initiative to remove a derogatory word for Indigenous women — a change that affects more than 650 sites and geographic features across the country. Of those, 26 sites are in Alaska. The official name change process has been almost a year in the making. In November 2021, Interior Secretary Deb Haaland unveiled an order to remove the word squaw, a slur for Native women, from federal lands. Many Indigenous organizations, including the Alaska Fed...
Democratic candidate for governor Les Gara and independent candidate former governor Bill Walker said that the best candidate is the one who shows up for public forums. The two had the stage to themselves at a Sept. 7 event sponsored by the Kenai and Soldotna chambers of commerce. The other two candidates did not attend. Incumbent Republican Gov. Mike Dunleavy was absent, as was Republican Charlie Pierce, who last month resigned his job as Kenai Peninsula Borough mayor at the request of the borough assembly after an investigation determined...
Gov. Mike Dunleavy will sign a bill giving state recognition to Alaska’s 229 federally recognized Native tribes, the Alaska Federation of Natives said last week. In a ceremony scheduled for this Thursday, the governor will also sign bills creating child welfare and education agreements between the state and tribal governments, AFN said. State recognition is not expected to affect tribes’ legal relations with the state, but supporters have said it is an important symbolic statement by the state, which has historically fought efforts by tri...
When Dr. Anne Zink began working as the state’s chief medical officer in the summer of 2019, she had a vision of transforming the state’s health system into one that promotes health holistically rather than one that simply responds to sickness. Then came COVID-19. At least a third of Alaskans have tested positive for the COVID virus as of the May 11 count, according to the state’s data hub, while more than 3,700 have been hospitalized and 1,235 have died. Now, two years after the pandemic overt...
A group of four Alaska college students has appealed a state court ruling that upheld a decision by Gov. Mike Dunleavy to drain the state’s $410 million higher-education investment fund. The decision made scholarship programs subject to annual legislative appropriation of state general fund dollars. The students last Friday filed their appeal of the ruling handed down a day earlier by Superior Court Judge Adolf Zeman. Unless reversed on appeal to the Alaska Supreme Court, the Alaska Performance Scholarship program and WWAMI, which helps pay t...
