Category: Alaska News

Over the past two summers, a pair of remote and treeless volcanic islands in the eastern Bering Sea broadcast signals of climate change danger in the marine ecosystem that feeds Alaska residents and supports much of the state’s economy.

Tribal employees monitoring St. Paul Island’s beaches came across 10 dead but seemingly well-fed northern fur seals in August of 2024, their bodies lying amid piles of dead fish and birds.

Testing revealed that the seals had been killed by an algal toxin that causes paralytic shellfish poisoning. It was the first ever conclusive case of marine mammals killed by saxitoxin, the algal toxin that causes paralytic shellfish poisoning.

The people living on St. Paul, numbering about 400, most of them Unangax, are highly dependent on the marine environment for their food. They are aware of the algal toxins that pose risks of paralytic shellfish poisoning in faraway Southeast Alaska. But seal deaths from algal toxin poisoning on their own island came as a big surprise to local people, said Aaron Lestenkof, who is part of the tribe’s Indigenous Sentinels Network.

“It never occurred to us that it may happen to our marine mammals here,” Lestenkof said. “I guess it was just a matter of time.”

The St. Paul die-off was not a one-time incident. In August of 2025, tribal residents found 21 dead fur seals on a beach at St. George Island, a sister island of St. Paul. Along with the seals were two dead fin whales, a dead sea lion and several dead seabirds.

The events show that deadly levels of algal toxins, once believed to be confined to the warmest waters in the warmest months in southernmost Alaska, are spreading north and into regions and parts of the food web that previously caused no worry for local people.

“This is the scary, ‘I-don’t-know’ moment of this event now happening in consecutive years,” said Mike Williams, one of the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration biologists who happened to be on scene at St. George to gather samples and document the event.

St. Paul and St. George, which has about 70 residents, are the only inhabited islands in the four-island Pribilof archipelago. Located about 750 miles west of Anchorage and 300 miles from the mainland, the islands are far from Alaska’s population centers. But the Pribilofs are at the center of a Bering Sea ecosystem so rich with marine life that they are sometimes called the “Galapagos of the North.”

The waters around the islands support some of the nation’s biggest seafood harvests, with vessels catching pollock, cod, halibut, crab and other fish. Millions of migratory seabirds of a dozen species flock each year to nest in the Pribilofs. The Pribilofs are the breeding grounds for two-thirds of the world’s approximately 1 million northern fur seals. Each summer, they gather on the islands’ rocky beaches in noisy congregations to give birth to and nurture their young, molt their fur and rest.

The algal discoveries on the St. Paul and St. George beaches point to a bigger phenomenon in the ecosystem, but how much bigger is yet to be determined.

“The problem is they die at sea. They’re being poisoned at sea, and they can’t even make it back to land, right?” Williams said.  “We don’t know how this may have population consequences because we don’t really have a true estimate of the number of animals that are dying.”

Paralytic shellfish poisoning: a history

Paralytic shellfish poisoning is a long-known hazard in the southern coastal areas of Alaska and other warmer parts of the world. Alaskans still know a spot in Southeast Alaska as Poison Cove, named for the approximately 100 people who died in 1799 after eating tainted mussels. The victims were Native hunters, either Unangan or Alutiiq, who had been brought to the site by Russian colonizers.

Saxitoxin is colorless and odorless. It cannot be cooked out or frozen out of food. Once ingested, there is no antidote. The poison acts within minutes, interfering with signals from the nervous system that enable vital bodily functions. In mild cases, many of which may go unreported, patients feel some numbness and possibly nausea and other symptoms before recovering. In fatal cases, saxitoxin blocks the nervous system’s functions, causing paralysis that suffocates victims.

From 1992 to 2021, 132 people in Alaska were reported sickened with paralytic shellfish poisoning, according to state epidemiologists. Between 1994 and 2020, five people died after eating saxitoxin-tainted food.

Understanding the exact chemical process that leads to paralytic shellfish poisoning took decades of scientific research. Saxitoxin was first identified in 1937 in an Alaska butter clam by a team led by Hermann Sommer at the University of California, San Francisco. They named the toxin for the species of the clam in which it was found: Saxidomus gigantea.

In later decades, researchers purified saxitoxin extracted from host clams and mussels. That led to a covert military operation. During the 1950s, the Central Intelligence Agency made mass purchases of tainted Alaska clams and developed saxitoxin into an alternative to the cyanide capsules that spies would use to kill themselves as a last resort if caught. Francis Gary Powers, the spy plane pilot who was shot down over the Soviet Union in 1960, was carrying a lethal dose of saxitoxin hidden in a modified silver dollar. He did not use it; he was freed in a spy trade in 1962.

The days of saxitoxin as a military tool are over. Now the ominous factor is climate change.

Saxitoxin is produced by a particular algae species, Alexandrium catenella, that blooms in warm conditions. The association of warmth and algal toxin risks was well-known; an old rule of thumb for harvesters was to gather clams only in months with the letter R in their names. An even older guideline was to use the end of herring spawning — an event usually in late spring — as the signal to pause harvests of clams for the season.

There are inescapable facts about the proliferation of Alexandrium and other harmful algae in Alaska: Ocean waters are getting warmer, and staying warmer longer, meaning there are more blooms producing more toxins and creating more exposure risks for marine life and for the people who depend on food from the sea.

Kathi Lefebvre, a NOAA Fisheries research biologist who specializes in algal toxins, ran through the trends during a presentation at January’s Alaska Marine Science Symposium in Anchorage. She showed charts and graphs of reduced sea ice, warming temperatures and Alexandrium blooms even in Arctic waters north of the Bering Strait.

“Do we predict that these blooms will continue to increase and toxins will be increasing in Arctic food webs? Yes, they will,” Lefebvre said in her presentation.

Risks increasing in the Bering Sea and farther north

Eight years before the St. Paul die-off, Lefebvre and her colleagues published a landmark study that documented at least trace amounts of algal toxins in each of the 13 marine mammal species tested, as far north as the Beaufort Sea in the Arctic. Toxins detected included a domoic acid, produced by an algae called Pseudo-nitzschia and the cause of mass die-offs of sea lions, seals and other marine mammals in California. Domoic acid has not yet proved to be a problem in Alaska, but scientists are watching for trends.

A more recent study led by Lefebvre found saxitoxin in feces of bowhead whales swimming in the Arctic.

In 2019, an especially warm year, scientists retrieved clams from the Bering Strait and Chukchi Sea that had levels of saxitoxin well above the threshold for safe consumption by people. That coincided with a large Alexandrium bloom in the region. Three years later, in another warm year, the Northern Bering Sea had one of the largest and densest Alexandrium blooms ever recorded in the nation, indicating more risks for poison-laden clams.

In July of 2024 and July of 2025, a month before each of the Pribilof seal die-offs, large blooms developed around those islands.

Don Anderson, an expert on harmful algal blooms who runs a lab at the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution in Massachusetts, said there are now two major sources of far-north blooms.

Most of that algae is believed to have been carried north by ocean currents. But climate change has created a possible bigger local source of blooms, he said: germination from massive seed beds that are, by far, the largest and most concentrated ever documented in the world.

The Bering, Chukchi and Beaufort seas used to be dead ends for Alexandrium cysts, the equivalent of seeds. They settled in the sediment after decades and centuries of being washed north, remaining dormant in the cold temperatures.

“We kept having repeated inputs of transported blooms from the south, and that gave us these enormous cyst concentrations that we haven’t seen anywhere else in the world, something we’ve called the sleeping giant,’” Anderson said in a presentation at the marine science symposium in Anchorage.

The warm conditions that enable them to germinate have arrived, albeit sporadically. If temperatures at the seafloor reach a little over 8 degrees Celsius, the cysts can germinate within about 10 days and proliferate during the long daylight hours of Alaska summers, he said.

The new findings have created unease for some Western Alaska residents.

Valerie Tony of Alakanuk, a Yup’ik village near the mouth of the Yukon River, is one of them. At a February workshop on algal toxins held in Anchorage, she asked about the abundant freshwater clams that her people harvest from tundra ponds.

“Does that mean our clams are no good now?” Tony asked. “Any kinds of toxins, we’ve never had to deal with these before.”

The bivalves enjoyed in Alakanuk and other Yukon-Kuskokwim Delta villages are actually mussels colloquially known as Yukon floaters. They should be safe for now, said Thomas Farrugia, coordinator of the Alaska Harmful Algal Bloom Network, a multiagency program.

For St. Paul and St. George residents, food questions are a bit different.

The traditional subsistence diet in the Pribilofs relies little on clams or mussels, wild foods that are the usual sources of the toxins that give people paralytic shellfish poisoning. But residents of St. Paul and St. George rely heavily on the sea for food. That includes fish, like halibut, cod and crab, but also fur seals that are legally hunted in traditional Indigenous harvests.

It is unclear how the fur seals are getting exposed to saxitoxins. Unlike marine mammals considered to be at risk for algal toxins like clam-gobbling walruses and sea otters,  fur seals do not eat bivalves. They do eat squid and schooling fish, including a tiny, slender, silvery fish called sand lance, which is known to absorb large concentrations of saxitoxin.

Luckily for seal hunters, Lestenkof said, the new pattern of Alexandrium blooms seems to be timed to late summer, in between early summer and autumn hunts. But whatever fish the dead seals were eating could be food that the people eat as well.

Sitka a model of testing

About 1,300 miles east of St. Paul, in the rainforest-surrounded coastal town of Sitka, a tribally-operated lab was established in 2016 to help keep locally harvested food safe.

The Sitka Tribe of Alaska Environmental Research Lab is the state’s main algal toxin testing facility for personal harvests. The other main lab in the state, located in Anchorage and operated by the Alaska Department of Environmental Conservation, focuses on commercial harvests.

The Sitka lab accepts any samples brought or sent to it. Mostly, those have been from harvests from Southeast Alaska, though it has tested samples from as far away as Nome.

The lab uses a method called Receptor Binding Assay, a widely used scientific method that measures how well certain chemicals bind to selected materials.

As Environmental Lab Manager Matteo Masotti describes it, the process used in Sitka is intended to parallel what would happen if people ate the tested clams, mussels and other items.

The testing starts with a slurry created once shellfish are delivered. “We blend them up into what we call a shellfish smoothie,” Masotti said. Effective testing generally requires six individuals or 100 grams of tissue, he said.

From there, acid is extracted, “basically simulating the pH of the stomach as if someone was digesting.” Then samples are tested for how well they bind to a swine tissue, a stand-in for a human stomach membrane. Once samples bind, another material is added that converts their chemical radiation into flashes. Those flashes reveal saxitoxin quantities.

It is only one method of testing shellfish. Other labs, such as the state’s Anchorage lab, use different methods, each of which have advantages and disadvantages.

The goal in Sitka is to get results to people within a couple of days, which is not always easy.

“The people out there have to harvest the shellfish, they have to get it to the airport, send it to us – assuming it doesn’t get delayed at the airport and assuming we pick it up immediately, which we try to be really good about,” he said. “We get them, we have to blend them up, we have to extract them, we have to then run them on the test, and then we have to analyze the test. And so we try to give people results in one to two business days after submission. Not always possible, but we do our best.”

There is even a slogan for the process of waiting for test results: “Harvest and Hold.”

In a lot of ways, the Sitka operation is a big success story.

Sienna Reid, a young tribal employee who grew up in Sitka, said the lab’s operations are giving people confidence that their traditional harvests are safe.

She said she has seen no decline in clamming, despite what is now an abundance of information about algal toxins’ presence in the environment. That was not the case in the past, she said. “I remember clam digging growing up. I don’t remember even thinking about algal toxins,” she said.

But for Amos Philemonoff, another young tribal employee who happens to be from St. Paul, information about algal toxins is still off-putting.

When he learned from a St. Paul friend about the 2024 seal paralytic shellfish poisoning deaths, he was taken aback. “I thought that was so weird. I’ve never heard of that before,” he said.

Though he enjoys plenty of wild food, Philemonoff stays away from clams, even though they are widely enjoyed in his adopted home of Sitka. That is specifically because of algal toxins, which he learned about when he was attending Sitka’s Mount Edgecume High School, a boarding school. “It’s kind of scary now, after learning about it in marine biology,” he said. “I kind of stepped away from eating shellfish.”

New challenges in old places

While paralytic shellfish poisoning is a long-recognized hazard in Southeast and Southcentral Alaska, climate change has exacerbated the threat in those regions.

The old guidelines about months with the letter R or timing of herring spawning no longer hold because algal toxins are present beyond the summer.

A significant bloom of Alexandrium was detected last September in Southcentral Alaska’s Kachemak Bay. It was the highest abundance measured since 2016. Blue mussels and butter clams found that month had saxitoxin levels about the safety threshold. The bloom followed a spate of bird and marine mammal die-offs earlier in the summer in the bay, and it did not dissipate until early October.

There are algal toxin  hotspots even in winter. In the far Southeast community of Hydaburg, for example, information from the shellfish data system includes a butter clam found on Dec. 5 with saxitoxin levels more than four times the safety threshold for human consumption. It turns out that some bivalve species, like butter clams, can retain algal toxins in their tissues for several months, and sometimes for more than a year.

Another challenge facing the Sitka lab, also related to warming conditions, is the proliferation of invasive European green crabs in the most southern parts of Southeast Alaska.

The invasive species, known for mowing down eelbeds and devouring native fish, was not seen in Alaska waters until 2022. Last year, the tribal government in Metlakatka, in the far southeast corner of the state, trapped more than 40,000 of them.

To avoid spreading the invasion further, the Sitka lab requires that samples sent from the most southeastern part of the state be frozen for at least 24 hours to kill any green crab larvae that might be attached.

Replicating Sitka success

Compared to other states, Alaska has little safety testing for personal harvest of shellfish. Tribal and science organizations are trying to change that.

The Sitka lab’s services are available free of charge to all personal-use harvesters in the state, but deliveries from remote areas outside of the Southeast Alaska region are logistically difficult.

Locally focused shellfish-screening labs have also been set up on the Kenai Peninsula south of Anchorage: in Seward, at the Native-owned Alutiiq Pride shellfish hatchery, and last summer in Homer at the Kachemak Bay Research Reserve.

An innovative research program led by the Knik Tribe, based in the Matansuka-Susitna Borough near Anchorage, has been tracking the movement of toxins through the food chain. It has gathered samples from various parts of the state, including some from as far away as the Bering Strait. Tests are conducted at the state Department of Environmental Conservation lab.

The Paralytic Shellfish Poisoning Risk Management Project is examining not just clams and mussels but also crabs and finfish, and the program has discovered high levels of saxitoxin in some unexpected places.

Livers and digestive tracts of salmon from the Yukon River and Cook Inlet turned out to have saxitoxin levels above the safety threshold. Hermit crabs from the Kodiak Archipelago and the Alaska Peninsula were found to have saxitoxin levels 15 to 17 times the safety threshold. And a stickleback from Wasilla north of Anchorage was found with a level more than 50 times the safety limit. Sticklebacks are small spiny fish found in different varieties and widely abundant in Alaska in both freshwater and saltwater systems; they are not generally eaten by people, but they are important prey for birds and larger fish.

Funding for the four-year research program, provided by the federal government, ends this year. The Knik Tribe and the Alaska Federation of Natives have urged the state to take up responsibility for funding the program into the future.

No lab in the state tests marine mammals for saxitoxin. Tests of the dead Pribilof northern fur seals were conducted at a lab in Seattle that is part of a West Coast program monitoring toxins in marine mammals.

For residents of St. Paul and St. George — both remote and often fog-bound islands dependent on air service that is spotty, inconsistent and expensive — relying on distant labs for toxin testing has been burdensome.

“I mean, there’s just a million billion things that sometimes are against us to get this information back to the community in a timely manner,” said Chelsea Campbell, marine mammal programs manager for the Aleut Community of St. Paul Island. It can take weeks to get results back to the island, she said.

That is why the tribal government is planning to add algal toxin testing to its on-island science program, Campbell said. The tribe already operates a facility, the Bering Sea Research Center, that tracks things like mercury and microplastics in the ecosystem. It is taking the necessary steps to add algal-toxin testing as early as this summer, as long as equipment arrives and workers are available and trained, she said.

The hope is that in time, the St. Paul lab will serve other remote communities in Western Alaska, from the Aleutians to the Bering Strait. “It’s going to be much easier for Saint George to send us samples than it is to send samples to Seattle, right?” she said.

Such a lab would be a big improvement over status quo in Western Alaska, which is to either take risks or use an old-fashioned screening process that Alex Zaochney, a researcher and tribal council member with the Native Village of Atka, described at the Anchorage workshop on harmful algal blooms.

“I wouldn’t recommend it,” Zaochney said. “Traditionally, we would touch the tip of your tongues on it and wait 20 minutes. If you start to get a tingle, that is not good.”

This article was produced as a project for USC Annenberg’s Center for Health Journalism and Center for Climate Journalism and Communication 2025 Health and Climate Change Reporting Fellowship.

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A federal appeals court on Wednesday reinstated protections for Arctic Alaska seals across a coastal and marine region stretching from the Central Bering Sea to the Beaufort Sea off the state’s northern coast.

The 9th Circuit Court of Appeals ruled that federal regulators acted properly in 2022 when they designated nearly 160 million acres as critical habitat for ringed seals and bearded seals. Both species are listed as threatened because of their dependence on Arctic sea ice. Designated critical habitat is required under the Endangered Species Act. It protects listed populations in the places they are most concentrated.

The appeals court ruling reverses a 2024 decision by U.S. District Court Judge Sharon Gleason that struck down the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration’s critical habitat designation as overly broad. And Wednesday’s ruling rejects arguments made by the state of Alaska that the critical habitat designated by NOAA’s National Marine Fisheries Service was too vast to justify the negative impacts to oil development and other activities.

NMFS acted properly and in accordance with the law when it designated critical habitat for the seals, making the decisions after weighing impacts to activities like oil development, the ruling said.

The appeals court ruling said that the nearly 160 million acres of designated critical habitat area is large, but size is relative.

“To put that number into perspective, Alaska and its surrounding waters cover nearly half a billion acres—so even a small subset of the state may seem large in the abstract,” it said.

The seal ruling cited one of its earlier decisions, made in 2016, that upheld the designation of 120 million acres of Arctic territory as critical habitat for polar bears, a species listed as threatened in 2008.

“Like the polar bears, the seal species ‘need room to roam,’” Wednesday’s ruling said. “NMFS explained in detail that the seal species rely on resources spread out over a wide area, including sea ice that is ‘dynamic’ by nature. . . . The text of the ESA plainly permits NMFS to designate habitat on that basis.”

Critical habitat designations add a layer of review for any federally permitted activities. Under the Endangered Species Act, permits for activities in critical habitat must undergo an analysis to determine whether listed populations would be harmed.

Ringed and bearded seals were granted Endangered Species Act protections because of the impacts to their Arctic habitat from climate change. Sea ice extent and thickness have diminished over the long term, and shorter winters and more spring rains have compromised the layers of snow on sea ice that ringed seals use to build protective lairs for their newborn pups, federal scientists have said.

The Center for Biological Diversity, which filed the lawsuit that prompted the 2022 critical habitat designation and later appealed Gleason’s 2024 ruling, celebrated the ruling.

“This is a great victory for these ice-dependent seals,” Marlee Goska, an Alaska staff attorney for the center, said in a statement. “It’s just common sense that you can’t protect imperiled animals without protecting the places they live, and I’m glad the court agreed. This decision gives these Arctic seals some breathing room, but we still need to stop expanding oil and gas drilling in their habitat to provide these species and so many others a true shot at survival.”

A statement from the Alaska Department of Law said the state continues to object to the designation and “will continue to fight for a commonsense, plain-text reading of the law that achieves the twin goals of conservation and Alaskan success.”

“The State of Alaska is disappointed by today’s Ninth Circuit decision reinstating an unlawful and expansive critical habitat designation. This designation of over 160 million acres of Alaska’s coastline and offshore waters exceeds the authority granted under the Endangered Species Act and sets a troubling precedent unmatched anywhere else in the nation,” the statement said.

“In Alaska, Arctic ringed seals and bearded seals are abundant and healthy. Yet bureaucrats have decided to directly burden responsible resource development, sustainable fisheries, and other vital economic and subsistence activities essential to Alaska through unnecessary habitat designations larger than the state of Texas.”

The 9th circuit ruling is the latest in a long series of litigation over ice-dependent seals in Alaska’s Arctic waters.

The listing was initiated by a 2008 Center for Biological Diversity petition that was followed by a lawsuit filed by the group in 2012. The state, North Slope Borough, Alaska Oil and Gas Association and others filed legal challenges in the past that sought to overturn the threatened listings for each species. Those lawsuits failed, and the U.S. Supreme Court in 2018 declined to take up the state’s case about bearded seals.

The state and North Slope Borough made another attempt in 2022 when they sued NMFS to try to compel the agency to remove ringed seals from the list of threatened species under the Endangered Species Act. The state and borough also lost that case. Last year, the 9th Circuit Court upheld the agency’s decision to maintain the threatened listing.

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The Alaska Senate approved a measure to boost state taxes on oil and gas production on Wednesday. Lawmakers tacked it on to what would have been a routine renewal of a state oil royalty agreement.

Sen. Forrest Dunbar, D-Anchorage, sponsored the amendment to House Bill 194, saying it would close a corporate income tax loophole and potentially capture more than $100 million in new state revenues each year — at a time when Alaska is in dire need of revenue to pay for state services. 

“Can we afford this loophole while we close schools? Can we afford this tax subsidy while we slash the permanent fund dividend? Can we afford this tax subsidy while our infrastructure languishes, while we struggle to recruit and retain state troopers and firefighters and maintenance crews?” Dunbar said. “The answer is no.”

The provision would impose the state’s corporate tax rate on oil and gas companies doing business in the state, at a maximum rate of 9.4% for companies whose net profits are more than $5 million per year. 

Alaska’s oil prices are surging amid the Iran War, and state forecasters are projecting hundreds of millions in potential state revenue in the coming months. Despite the spike in oil prices, Dunbar said lawmaker action to capture more revenue from the oil and gas industry is long overdue. 

“There is still a long term revenue problem in this state, regardless of short term prices connected to the Iran war,” he said. “Now is the time to do this. Prices for oil are high. These corporations are doing very well. You fix the roof when the sun is shining.”

The Senate approved the amendment by an 11 to 8 vote, then passed the underlying legislation by a 12 to 7 vote, with Sen. Kelly Merrick, R-Eagle River, absent. 

The original legislation was introduced by the governor, and passed the Alaska House last year. It would renew a three-year oil royalty agreement between the state and Marathon Petroleum Corporation, for state owned oil to be processed at its refinery in Nikiski, on the Kenai Peninsula. The proposed contract is estimated to generate between $4 million to $18 million in state revenue.

However the bill’s sponsor, Sen. Jesse Bjorkman, R-Soldotna, objected to the new oil tax provision, saying the Senate should take time to evaluate how the tax measure would affect the broader industry and energy supply for Alaskans. 

“I’m a no vote on this amendment, because we do need a legitimate plan,” he said. “We don’t rush things. We don’t do things in a half-cocked manner, because that’s how mistakes are made.”

He said lawmakers should model potential revenue measures so they know how they will function within a state fiscal plan.

Lawmakers have been hotly debating Alaska’s oil and gas tax structure for years. A bill introduced last year, Senate Bill 92, would change the way the state’s corporate income tax applies to the oil company Hilcorp, which is an S-corporation, and the state’s largest oil producer. Hilcorp is a privately held, Texas-based energy company that since 2020 has operated the Prudhoe Bay oil field in the North Slope, as well as most of the operations in Cook Inlet. 

That bill is currently in the Senate Rules Committee and has not moved this year. 

The measure approved by the Senate on Wednesday would enact state taxes not just on Hilcorp but many companies, and collect revenues that would otherwise be leaving the state, Dunbar said in an interview after the vote.

“To be clear, it’s not just Hilorp that might be affected by this, but that is one of the large, obvious holes we see in our oil tax structure right now that is causing us to shift tens of millions, and over the long term, hundreds of millions of dollars, from schools and roads and the permanent fund dividend to out of state companies and individuals,” he said.

The amended bill now goes to the House for a concurrence vote. 

Dunbar urged support for the measure, citing financial woes in his own district where the Anchorage School Board has voted to close three elementary schools and cut hundreds of staff positions to help address a $90 million budget shortfall. 

“I hope they agree that it’s not an acceptable world where the price is high and this industry is booming and we are closing Lake Otis Elementary School because we don’t have enough money,” he said.

Correction: A previous version of this story incorrectly identified the bill numbers, and misstated how the tax would be levied on companies’ income. The story has been updated. 

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The story of a family is a story of the world, and the story of the world is that of a family. That premise is at work in a new book by Alaska author Ch’igiioonta She Holds a Child, who explores the displacement of the Nendaaghe Dena people through her own family stories. Readers interested in the precolonial history of the Western Brooks Range will see how no one element or person stands alone in Ïyaġaaġmiut: People Who Live Among the Rock Caches. From multiple viewpoints, Ch’igiioonta brings out what belonging to one another and the land requires amid great and complex changes.  

The Nendaaghe Dena people were called Ïyaġaaġmiut by their Iñupiat neighbors, who characterized them as the ones who live among rock caches — a reference to pits they dug below permafrost levels to store caribou and other meats. As Ch’igiioonta tells their story, she refers to their homeland as their “estate. The author defines “estate” as a territory and economic unit formed from Indigenous peoples’ knowledge of the land, existing trail systems and natural boundaries, each with distinct features and ability to sustain a number of persons. 

Throughout the book, many colorful maps guide readers through the storied, “late prehistory” geographies of the Nendaaghe Dena Estate in extended kinships with others of Northwestern “Alaska.” The full “map-in-progress” of the focal area is printed at the book’s front. I recommend viewing a larger version of the “Map of Athabascan and Inupiat Estates in Northern Alaska, ca. 1800” on the website of AthabascanWoman.com. The author’s discussions are replete with place names and changes in place names across multiple languages and cultures—Iñupiatun, and three Athabascan ones, Dinjii Zhuh K’yaa —the author’s own, Denaakk’e, and Lower Tanana and their various subgroups. The whole book is organized with an introduction and five chapters, featuring multiple family genealogies and six useful glossaries listing regional, place and family names as well as some Indigenous word definitions and a chronology of key events. 

 This work develops two mutually contributing historical contentions, an environmental one and an economic-colonialist one. At the same time, Ch’igiioonta’ shows their interactions. Her environmental argument, an underrecognized one, links volcanic eruptions that cause worldwide weather cooling with Iñupiat and Athabascan oral histories of two back-to-back winters with no intervening summer. Consequences included Arctic famine and depopulation with consequential demographic and societal shifts. With brilliant sleuthing, the author pinpoints the 1815-16 eruption of Tambora in Indonesia as the likely culprit. She does so by contributing the oral genealogies and family stories her father, Stephen, taught her, as well as ones shared by others. She combines these teachings with nineteenth-century ship logs and maps showing coastal ice conditions, tree ring evidence, and other ecological and climatological sciences.  

Lethal environmental hardships, including consequences of subsequent volcanic eruptions, and adaptive recoveries from them interact with the chronologically overlapping economic-colonialist contention. From the late eighteenth century new trade items brought changes to established economic relationships within and among estates and their families. This was followed by appearances of European and Russian explorers, naval expeditions, and Hudson’s Bay company traders themselves, and Christian missionaries. Nineteenth-century incursions also included smallpox and scarlet fever epidemics and introductions of guns. Whereas customary respect among Arctic Indigenous citizens called on those from another estate to take up the ways and language of their hosts, many Europeans arrivals expected and began administering adherence to their own views and ways brought from outside.  

Through many stories, the author shows how environmental forces, causing fluxes of food availability, overlapped with Europeans’ press into long-established socio-economic-cultural networks. The book shows those forces and intrusions  cannot be separated from internecine conflict, altered ecologies, adaptive kinship patterns, traditional boundaries and outright dispossession. In one of my favorite stories from the book, I learn how the Nendaaghe’s Tłeevihiti’ family included a man whose life was protected while battling Iñupiat. This was because—although they were not from the same people—the two men were brothers. In the author’s words, “a person’s relationships had everything to do with survival.”  

Amid intense climatological changes, violent conflict and the ongoing march of empire, there is something to learn—particularly for those with deep family ties—for every serious reader interested in Alaskana, world history, climatology, geography, colonialism, decolonization, Indigenous languages, worldviews, self-determination and more-than-survival for everyone. As Ch’igiioonta’ herself writes: “As with all my writing this will not be your bedside reading.” Ïyaġaaġmiut is a rich, authoritative book well worth reading while wide awake. 

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Two inches of raw sewage. Persistent chemical leaks. Pipes insulated with asbestos. A bat infestation. Black mold. “It kind of blows my mind some of the things I found in public schools,” says Emily Schwing, a KYUK reporter and ProPublica Local Reporting Network partner. Recently, we published her investigation of dangerous conditions in deteriorating public schools in Alaska’s rural villages. Schwing, who reported this story while also participating in the University of Southern California, Annenberg Center for Health Journalism’s National Fellowship, spoke to dozens of sources, including local resident Taylor Hayden, who showed her concrete footings that had been reduced to rubble in one village school.

ProPublica has previously reported on how restrictive funding policies in Idaho have contributed to similarly dangerous school conditions.

In Alaska, a unique set of circumstances means the responsibility for school repairs in many rural villages rests exclusively on the state Legislature. Yet over the past 25 years, state officials have largely ignored hundreds of requests by rural school districts to fix the problems that have left public schools across Alaska crumbling, even though the state owns these buildings. As rural school districts wait for funding, the buildings continue to deteriorate, posing public health and safety risks to students, teachers and staff. The impact is felt most by Alaska Natives.

For Schwing, the “record scratch” moment came when she realized some school districts were spending their own money, in one case $200,000, in a desperate effort to rank higher up the funding priority list, even going as far as hiring a lobbyist. Other districts told her they couldn’t do so without cutting teaching positions.

“Why are public school districts paying a lobbyist to convince lawmakers to invest in public schools, and even more so, to invest in infrastructure that the state owns?” she thought.

I called up Schwing to talk about the process of reporting this investigation and how different going to school can be for students across Alaska. Our conversation has been condensed and edited.

What got you interested in this story?

I travel a lot to rural communities in Alaska, just by virtue of the things that I cover. And usually when you are traveling to villages, you stay in the school. I have always been surprised by the things that I’ve experienced there. On the Chukchi coast, there’s a school where you can’t see out the windows anymore because they’re so pitted from the wind. There was a school that I was in last year during a sled dog race that I was covering where I could smell the bathrooms from down the hall. That’s not normal. So I was keeping a list of things that were strange for public schools.

Then Taylor Hayden called me and told me what’s going on at the Sleetmute school. So I went out there. He showed me [the conditions] in the wood shop. And then we went under the building and I thought: “Oh my God. This is crazy.” It took off from there.

How does seeing that black mold and guano in person change the story for you?

I want to tell you about these two little kids I met, Edward and Loretta [in Sleetmute]. They’re in fourth grade. I’m in their school, and they’re giving me a tour: “This is our library, and this is our piano in the kindergarten room, and this is my favorite book.” They’re showing me their artwork. Never once did these kids say, “This is where the moldy part of our school is.” It made me sad to think that they think that this is normal for their school, but it also made me so proud of them for just being fourth-grade kids.

You can throw out numbers and statistics and do an investigation into these state records, but until you’re in the building, I don’t think the reality of how awful things are hits you. The kids are doing their homework at the lunch tables, or the high school kids are doing some really cool science projects, but they’re sitting in a school where if the wood shop collapses, it also takes the water system, the heat system, the HVAC, like all of the critical infrastructure, the electricity that keeps that school usable.

What does a school mean to a place like Sleetmute?

I have visited over 45 villages off the road system in Alaska at this point in my career, and the school is the center of these communities. It’s the largest building. They’re one of two buildings with a guarantee that there will be running water. They’re places where people get together, where people socialize. They have pickup basketball nights and fundraisers.

Public schools in rural Alaska also serve an emergency management function that is often overlooked. If there is some sort of natural disaster — a flood, a giant storm, a severe drop in temperature — or if there’s some sort of other piece of critical infrastructure that’s having problems — the water plant burns down or the electricity goes out or the heating fuel doesn’t get delivered — people will go seek shelter in the school. Wildland firefighters and the National Guard will be based out of these buildings if they’re responding to a disaster.

But in order for it to be an effective emergency management tool, you have to have it safe and operational. There are so many more functions that the public school serves than just school.

Why do you think there’s such little urgency around these repairs?

There’s so much conversation around operational funding, to pay for textbooks and teacher salaries. Currently in our Legislature, it’s all the lawmakers can talk about.

The people who are offering testimony to lawmakers from urban areas are all about funding curriculum and keeping teachers. Then you hear public testimony from people in rural communities who can’t even get that far, because there are pots and pans on the floor to catch the leaks from the roof, or there’s a bucket of oil next to them in their classroom and there’s one in the hall. There’s a very clear boundary between what rural constituents are experiencing and what urban constituents are experiencing with respect to education.

It’s very easy to forget the hundreds of villages that exist in Alaska off the road system, because they are so small. That’s where the real problem lies — when you don’t notice, then you have a roof that leaks for 20 years, and then it turns into a real public health and safety crisis.

This story was translated to the Central Yup’ik dialect of Yugtun. Why was that important?

There are over 50 villages on the Yukon-Kuskokwim Delta that KYUK serves. It’s the predominant dialect spoken on the delta, and there are a lot of elders who speak Yup’ik as their first language. The vast majority of KYUK’s audience is Yup’ik.

The other thing that you’ll notice in this story is the vast majority of the population that is served by rural public schools are Indigenous. So the largest impact from a lack of investment in school infrastructure is on Alaska Natives. So I think it’s really important to the most affected people that we would deliver a story like this in their Indigenous and often first language.

This story was originally published by ProPublica.

The Alaska House of Representatives passed an elections bill aimed at streamlining the state’s voting process and updating the voter rolls with a bipartisan vote on Monday. If signed into law, the bill would implement a new ballot tracking system, provide paid postage for all absentee mail-in ballots and implement provisions for faster election results, among other changes. 

The House passed Senate Bill 64 by a 23 to 16 vote on Monday evening, with Rep. Ashley Carrick, D-Fairbanks, absent. Three members of the House minority caucus joined the majority in supporting the legislation: Rep. Sarah Vance, R-Homer, Rep. Kevin McCabe, R-Big Lake, and Rep. Jeremy Bynum, R-Ketchikan. 

Sen. Bill Wielechowski, D-Anchorage, sponsored the legislation as chair of the Senate Rules Committee and said at a news conference on Tuesday the bill was at least a decade in the making and the result of a bipartisan effort. 

“We’re going to agree on the things that we can agree on, things that just fundamentally make our elections better. And after 10 years, I think this bill does that,” he said. “It’s not a perfect bill. There are still things that need to be worked on, but this goes a long way towards improving our election system for every single person in the state of Alaska.”

The House made a variety of changes to the bill that the Senate passed last year, and the bill now goes back to the Senate for a concurrence vote on Wednesday. If signed into law by Gov. Mike Dunleavy, some elections changes would be implemented immediately, like a review of the voter rolls. Changes to ballot tracking and curing would go into effect after the August primary. 

Lawmakers have focused on updating the state’s voter rolls to make sure voters are currently living in Alaska. Wielechowski said the new system will help the state maintain active voter rolls. 

“We have 105% more registered voters than we have eligible citizens in the state of Alaska,” Wielechowski said, calling the discrepancy a “fundamental problem.”

“Everyone in Alaska knows that our elections in Alaska are probably the most difficult elections to conduct in the United States for a variety of reasons, but mostly because of geography, because of weather, because people are just spread out over such a vast area,” he said.

If the bill passes, the Alaska Division of Elections will review the voter rolls and, based on a list of factors, send a postcard by mail to verify a voter’s address and establish residency. Once the notices are sent, voters have a period of 45 days to respond and confirm their Alaska residency to the division — or be moved to an inactive voter list for a period of 28 months or two elections. 

Some members of the Republican House minority caucus expressed concern that military members stationed overseas would be kicked off the voter roles. 

Rep. Sarah Vance, R-Homer and a member of the minority caucus, spearheaded the House version of the bill and said that even if voters are inactive, they will still be on a master voter list for eight years, under federal law.

“We cannot cancel, according to federal law, someone off of the master register for eight years. So this includes the military voters,” she said. “But I want to make sure that everyone else understands they’re not going to be inadvertently canceled either.”

Under the bill, voters would be able to show identification issued from a federally recognized tribe to register to vote or for voting. To confirm active voting status, voters would be able to  contact the division by calling, emailing or by voting.

Under the Senate’s version of the bill, the state would have done away with the requirement of a witness signature for all absentee mail-in ballots, but the House objected to that change and opted to keep the witness signature.  

If passed, the bill would also allow voters to fix mistakes on their ballot – a process called ballot curing — by requiring the division to contact the voter by phone or email within 24 hours. Within two to five days, the division would send notification by mail. The voter would have to return a form to correct the ballot with a copy of identification by email or by mail within 10 days of the election for their ballot to be counted.  

If passed, the bill would require the state to provide paid postage for all absentee mail-in ballots. The state would also enact a new tracking system so that voters will be notified when their ballot is received and counted. 

Wielechowski said that will help with transparency, as will new provisions to get election results published faster. Additionally, the elections department will start reviewing ballots 12 days ahead of Election Day — five days earlier than under current law — to allow more ballots to be counted on Election Day.

Other provisions in the bill include:

• Require all absentee ballots to be received within 10 days of Election Day; 
• Establish a new rural community liaison position within the Division of Elections to support rural districts, including recruitment and training of poll workers;
• Require the Permanent Fund Dividend Division to share data to improve the accuracy of the voter rolls’
• Require the state to develop a cybersecurity program, and notify the public if there is a data breach;
• Require the division to publish results for all rankings in the precinct results.
• Require presidential ballots to include a line for write-in votes for president and vice president 
• Updates crimes of unlawful interference with an election, ballot tampering and election official misconduct

Wielechowski said the new rural liaison established by the bill would be charged with helping small, rural communities prepare to hold their elections, coordinate equipment and polling places, and hire poll workers to improve operations on Election Day.

“That person is responsible for working with the local villages … working with those communities to ensure that all the citizens are able to exercise their fundamental right to vote,” he said.

He pointed to recent examples of rural residents missing out on opportunities to vote due to issues with poll workers.

“The polls never opened in Wales in 2024 in the primary. The polls in Anaktuvuk Pass in 2024 opened up 30 minutes before closing, and roughly seven people out of about 250 were able to vote in that election in person,” Wielowski said. 

The changes to Alaska’s process of voting and elections this year could come amid potential sweeping changes to national elections.

The U.S. Supreme Court is considering a case that would require all ballots to be received by Election Day in order to be counted for federal elections. 

All ballots received after that deadline would be thrown out, which could potentially disenfranchise thousands of Alaska voters who cast ballots that may be delayed by weather, flight delays or election logistics challenges. 

“It’s going to create some havoc in our election system, and it may very well require a special session for us to come in and deal with it,” Wielechowski said. “And so you could get in a situation where you have ballots coming in that don’t count for the federal election, but do count for the state election. And so there would have to be some kind of way that you figure out how to process those ballots in a different manner.”

The Supreme Court is expected to rule next summer. 

Meanwhile, the Trump administration is putting pressure on the U.S. Congress to pass the SAVE America Act, which would, in part, require voters to present identification and proof of U.S. citizenship in person when they vote. 

Alaska Republican U.S. Sen. Lisa Murkowski has loudly opposed the bill, saying it’s logistically impossible for most Alaskans, as the state only has six in-person elections offices and fewer than a dozen DMV offices. Republicans U.S. Sen. Dan Sullivan and U.S. Rep. Nick Begich III have supported the bill, saying they don’t think it would be hard to comply with its requirements. 

The U.S. Senate is currently debating the bill amid another contentious debate around funding for the U.S. Department of Homeland Security and ending a five-week partial shutdown for the department. On Tuesday, Senate Majority Leader John Thune said the Senate may drop the voting bill in order to reach an agreement with Democrats over funding DHS, and return to it after Easter, according to reporting by Politico.

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Estimated dimensions of the avalanche. (Courtesy/Robert Thor Haraldsson, Avalanche Canada)

A group of skiers triggered a wind-slab avalanche Sunday just northwest of Mount McDonell in the Haines Pass, killing one person and injuring another, according to a preliminary report released by Avalanche Canada.  

The avalanche triggered as a group of five descended a slope northwest of Mount McDonell. The fourth person to descend triggered it during the descent at just above 4,400 feet in elevation.

One person was fully buried in nearly 5 feet of snow, and another was partially buried, according to Avalanche Canada’s report. 

Someone in the group sent out a Garmin SOS alert about 3:26 p.m., and, according to a media release, Atlin Royal Canadian Mountain Police received it about 310 miles away.  

When emergency officials got the call, one person was reported unconscious and receiving CPR.  

Atlin Search and Rescue responded with a helicopter and flew out all five people, including the deceased group member. No identities were released.

On an avalanche scale of 1-5, Avalanche Canada rated this one has been rated as a 4, which can destroy large trucks, buildings or railway cars. It began as a wind slab, formed when snow is picked up from the upwind side of an area and deposited into thick drifts on the downwind side. 

According to Avalanche Canada, as the avalanche slid, it broke deeper into a weak layer, causing an even larger slope failure toward the bottom.  It slid nearly 2,300 feet and spread more than 1,300 feet wide at its base, according to preliminary reports. 

Haines Avalanche Center director Jeff Moskowitz warns of deeply cold temperatures that create weak layers in the snowpack, which gett buried with each successive snowfall. One in particular is a persistent weak layer that formed about Feb. 14, he said, and has been called the Valentine’s layer. As the snow piles up on top of it, danger signs are more difficult to see. 

The area where the avalanche happened, also known as Rainy Hollow, Moskowitz said has a unique snow climate – particularly when compared with nearby Chilkat or Haines Pass, which is a popular destination for backcountry recreation. 

An overview photo of the avalanche taken the day of the incident (Courtesy/Robert Thor Haraldsson, Avalanche Canada)

“Basically, we’ve had these really strong northerly outflows for months, and a lot of the upper pass has been totally windhammered. The snow has been stripped,” he said. “Rainy Hollow has been wind protected, so it was protecting these weak layers as they were getting buried. It’s a unique spot that has overlapping maritime and continental snow characteristics.”  

Avalanche Canada rated the area’s danger at “considerable,” which Moskowitz reaffirmed saying that human-triggered avalanches are likely.

Moskowitz said he has seen shooting cracks — a visible fracture in the top of the snowpack — while out in the backcountry. Shooting cracks occur because of weight from above, often caused by skiers traveling on the surface. He has also gotten reports of human-triggered whumpfing sounds, or collapsing, which occurs when the snowpack drops with weight from above. 

Moskowitz said that the strong-over-weak layering is “fairly widespread.” This occurs when a cohesive slab, essentially snow layers that are densely packed together either because of  settling or to the wind adding load, lies on top of weak, sugary-faceted snow, creating poor bonds between layers.

Such layering occurs when stiff snow, often from snow drifts, sits on top of a layer of sugary snow – or snowflakes that don’t stick together well.

For those traveling into the backcountry, Moskowitz advises to “make conservative terrain choices while the snowpack adjusts, and that could include sticking to slopes less than 30 degrees.” Additionally, he said skiers should carefully assess conditions and layers before committing to steeper slopes and be aware of the high degree of uncertainty. 

Since 2012, eight people have died because of avalanches around Haines, in addition to an avalanche partially burying one person.

Elsewhere in British Columbia, three heli-skiers died north of Terrace in the northwestern part of the province. At least nine people have died in avalanches since December, according to the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation. 

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Through two rounds, the Deishú Merchants look like a team to beat at this year’s Gold Medal basketball tournament in Juneau. 

The tournament could not have started more comfortably for Haines’ B Bracket team, which steamrolled Klawock 98-58 to open the tournament. 

The Merchants this year return a number of Gold Medal veterans, including Kyle Fossman and Tyler Swinton, who led the team in scoring against Klawock. Fossman’s 26 points came nearly all from outside shooting. Swinton, in addition to his 22 points, was a menace on the other end, where Klawock struggled to deal with his shotblocking. 

But big minutes have also been going to fresher faces: Recent Mt. Edgcumbe grad Jake Friske has taken the bulk of the primary ballhandling duties and added 10 points against Klawock. First-time Haines player Kyle Tompkins scored 14 points. And Colton Combs, just coming off his high school season with the Glacier Bears, added five. 

Rounding out the scoring against Klawock were Ryan Olsen with 10 points, James Hart with five, and Chevy Fowler four. 

On the Klawock side, only wing Nathan Yockey was able to make much of a scoring dent, leading his team with 23 points. 

The win against Klawock earned Haines a second-round game against a Hoonah team coming off a one-point win over Angoon. 

It was quickly clear, as many fans had predicted, that Hoonah would be a different sort of challenge. First evidence was from the team’s warmup, where it seemed half the Hoonah lineup was throwing down thunderous dunks. 

It was more of the same after the opening whistle, where Hoonah’s starters were able to elevate and finish at the rim. 

But it was Haines that jumped out to the early lead, with balanced scoring. Combs was the first off the bench, giving Haines a three-guard lineup with Fossman and Friske. What they gave up in size they made up for in quickness, on and off the ball — Friske in particular making inroads inside and diving for loose balls. 

Tompkins, too, left his mark on the quarter, with a sequence of back-to-back buckets and then a three-pointer made from well beyond the arc. 

Through the second quarter, Haines maintained a single-digit lead, but it didn’t feel like much of a cushion. Part of that was high-energy play from Hoonah’s Sean Oliver, RJ Didrickson, and Kayden Lamebull-Ingram. The Hoonah core was aggressive on defense and quick to run, the second quarter at times turning into something of a track meet. 

Hoonah’s Orion Dybdahl at times struggled with a tough matchup defending Swinton, but led his team in scoring with 17 points. 

In the open floor, Haines leaned on Friske, a fast ballhandler and tough finisher. But Hoonah had the athletes to more than make life difficult, with Oliver at one point chasing down and pinning a Haines layup against the backboard. 

That got a pop of noise from the crowd — the other major factor on the day. The Hoonah rooting contingent accounted for around a quarter of the packed bleachers, but nearly 100% of the noise. After the chasedown block, big Hoonah buckets, or any number of missed Haines shots, there very well could have been seismic risk: even on the gym floor you could feel the movement coming from the bleachers. 

Haines, to their credit, seemed largely unfazed. In what was certainly an away-game environment, they shot free-throws well, which paid dividends down the stretch. 

But before then, Haines had to manage a series of Hoonah runs which kept the Merchants’ lead to single digits through most of the second half. 

Much of their resilience came from the defense, which looks to be a strength of this Haines team so far. The backcourt doesn’t give up much off the dribble, and coach Steve Fossman noted after the game that even the smaller Combs holds up when teams try to target him down low with bigger players. And the team has plenty of size on the backline. 

But the offense looks smooth, even early on in the tournament. Coach Fossman said the team used the first game to practice some of their halfcourt sets, and through the Hoonah game he was vocal from the sideline, telling players to keep moving off the ball. 

“When guys are tired, as a coach I try to tell them, just keep running your routes and getting the ball,” Fossman said. “Sometimes no matter how tired you are you have to figure out how to get the ball.” 

The team showed off a number of options. Swinton, who can be a high-volume outside shooter — and was for much of the Klawock game — scoring much of his team-leading 31 points under the basket. 

The fourth quarter was a test of late-game execution. That’s not necessarily an easy task for a group that doesn’t formally practice together, or play together as a full squad, before the tournament. 

Hoonah’s Oliver was a force, trying to keep his team in it with a pair of made threes. But Haines, with an 11-point lead and three minutes to go, had the luxury of slowing the game down and managing the clock. They did it well initially. The younger Fossman, on the court, was a vocal presence directing traffic around the court. But in the closing two minutes, Haines began to slip up trying to play keep-away. That prompted a pair of timeouts from the older Fossman. 

“We were making some real fundamental mistakes, like getting caught in the corner or losing our dribble just across halfcourt,” he said afterward. 

As for what happened in the huddle, it wasn’t anything too complicated, Fossman said. 

“(At Gold Medal) you rely a lot on past basketball experience. Guys that have grown up playing the game, they know where they need to be.” 

With generally solid free-throw shooting Haines closed out the game, winning 79-71. 

Scoring leaders for Haines were Swinton with 31 points, Combs with 13, Tompkins with 11, and Friske with 11. Fossman added 3 points and Olsen 2. 

For Hoonah, outside of Dybdahl’s 17 points, Oliver added 16, Didrickson 11, Lamebull-Ingram 9, Malakai Nichols 7, Samuel Lamebull 7, Tyrell Cramer 2, and Jaylin Prince 2. 

With the win, Haines advances to a Thursday night game against Yakutat — essentially a quarterfinal. If they lose, they’ll still have one more shot to get to the Saturday night championship game through the back-door bracket. 

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