The edge of the plot where Pat Philpott hopes to plant his garden. Monday, April 20, 2026. (Will Steinfeld/Chilkat Valley News)
The land by the Haines Highway 18 mile marker holds a lot of personal history for Patrick Philpott.
It’s where Philpott, a hunter, got his first kill: “It was a rabbit, and I remember the rifle I used,” he said during borough assembly testimony last week. “It was a Montgomery Ward .410 single-shot bolt action. And the (the rabbit) tasted mighty good. He ate good carrots.”
Philpott also grew up gardening at the spot, on a plot his family cultivated for generations, stretching back to the early 20th century, when they opened a roadhouse near current-day Haines Highway 19 Mile.
“That’s where I learned to make my first dimes,” he said, recalling in his youth shoveling horse manure at the Port Chilkoot Dock to take to the garden as fertilizer.
The old garden footprint is now heavily overgrown, save for a small clearing separated by about a hundred yards of dense brush from the highway. Philpott, 71, a retired veteran and elder of the Frog House in Klukwan, is hoping once more to garden on that land — land that is now part of the state’s Alaska Chilkat Bald Eagle Preserve. In his estimation, he’s earned the right to grow one to two acres of vegetables by his and his family’s years spent gardening that very land, and he says state law supports that assertion.
The 48,000-acre eagle preserve was established in 1982 to protect large populations of bald eagles that fish in the Chilkat, Klehini, and Tsirku river confluence late into the year.
In applications to the state’s Division of Parks and Outdoor recreation, Philpott has cited a passage in the state statute creating the preserve which guarantees “continued opportunities for traditional uses of the Preserve at levels and methods and means that are compatible with the protection of the bald eagle population.” The statute, AS 41.21.618, goes on to say those uses include, but are not limited to, “hunting, trapping, fishing, berry picking, other subsistence and recreational uses, operation of motor vehicles and the harvesting of personal-use firewood.”
Philpott’s argument hasn’t gotten much traction at the Division of Parks, which manages the eagle preserve and is part of the Alaska Department of Natural Resources. Parks director Ricky Gease denied his permit application on May 26. Philpott is now appealing the decision to Department of Natural Resources commissioner John Crowther.
So far, state agencies hold that Philpott’s request is a land use distinct from subsistence activities like hunting and berry picking.
In the denial of the application, Gease wrote that a garden would alter the land from its “current use, open and accessible by the public in general, to a private use for a garden.”
That kind of private use, Gease wrote, would require Philpott to officially lease the land, not just use it under a permit.
While the DNR commissioner does have statutory authority to lease Eagle Preserve land, Gease wrote that eagle preserve land has never before been leased, and the agency has no process outlined to do so, specifically for how to solicit public input and consider a lease application.
Division of Parks spokesperson Wendy Sailors wrote in an email this week the decision “was not based solely on potential impacts to eagle use, but on whether the proposed activity was consistent with the statutory purpose of the Preserve and the legal framework governing management and leasing of lands within the Preserve.”
In an earlier email, Division of Parks staff told Philpott a lease application would likely include a $1,200 application fee, a land appraisal running an estimated $3,000–$5,000, and an annual lease fee “based on the fair market value of the parcel.”
In his initial application, Philpott had asked the state to lease him 2.5 acres for $1 a year and said his motivation for the garden in the first place was stretching a limited income.
“The purpose of this garden is personal food production and food security,” he wrote. “My wife and I are senior citizens living at the poverty level and producing our own food is an important step toward self sufficiency. We would rather grow our own food than depend on assistance.”
“I’m not the person to stand there with my hand out,” Philpott later said at the assembly meeting. “I want to be able to do it myself as long as I’m able.”
As Philpott’s appeal remains pending he has the written endorsement of the Eagle Preserve Advisory Council, the Chilkoot Indian Association, Chilkat Indian Village tribal administrator Brian Willard and the Haines Borough Assembly, which voted unanimously last week to write a letter of support.
Currently there are only two active special-use permits — the type of permit Philpott is seeking — in the preserve, said DNR spokesperson Wendy Sailors Monday. One is for U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service forest monitoring data collection sites. The other allows Alaska Mountain Guides to place outhouses at highway pullouts inside the preserve.
Ilse Abshagen sits on the Ugly Duckling, looking through binoculars in 1961. (Photo courtesy of Christiane Leitinger)
For the past few months, Christiane Leitinger has been hunting down a vehicle previously owned by her parents, named the Ugly Duckling.
The journey took her from Juneau to Haines to Anchorage tracing the path her family took in 1961 when they drove from Florida to Alaska in the World War II-era GMC that is part car, part boat. It took Leitinger’s parents from Prince Rupert, British Columbia up to Haines via the Inside Passage.
So, along with her husband and daughter, Leitinger came up to Alaska from Colorado with some of the nearly 600 negatives of images that she found in her mother’s journal detailing the trip. For Leitinger, this trip was another way to connect with her parents, who died in 2003 and in 2011. The Ugly Duckling was a central character in the stories her parents told when she was growing up.
“I wish I had been more curious as a kid, because I’m sure there would have been amazing stories had I been more curious, but it was just sort of family lore,” Leitinger said.
Leitinger’s parents, Ilse Abshagen and Hans Leitinger, immigrated to the United States from Germany and Austria to attend school, where they met. The couple bought the vehicle in 1957 in Minnesota and went on a trip through Central America, eventually ending in Patagonia. A few years later, they decided to drive clear across the United States. Starting in the summer of 1961 in Jacksonville, Florida, the pair drove to Seattle and followed the coastal mountains in British Columbia. When they got to Prince Rupert, they put the vehicle into the water and boated up through the Inside Passage, stopping in Ketchikan, Wrangell, Petersburg, Juneau and Haines. From Haines, they drove up to Fairbanks and back down to Anchorage, where they ultimately sold the vehicle to Ralph Centoni, who wanted to restore it. The trip from Florida to Alaska included nearly 6,000 miles of driving and more than 500 miles of boating.
In January, Leitinger’s husband Charley Shimanski told her that he would be traveling to Juneau for the Mountain Rescue Association’s summer conference in June. While she does not typically join Shimanski for these meetings, she realized this would be the perfect opportunity to see if she could find the Ugly Duckling. At first, she thought she might find it in Juneau.
“I had sort of this outline, sort of this initial mosaic of a story but sketchy,” Leitinger said. She said that each person who offered her what they knew would sort another part of the mosaic into place. After spending about five weeks researching where the Ugly Duckling ended up, Leitinger and her two daughters made a breakthrough. One of the pictures she has of her parents shows them on a beach with the jeep, overlooking a body of water with beautiful mountains in the background.
Leitinger’s daughter Eva Sophia looked at the photo and used Google Earth to pinpoint the location. She would go to the ground-level view and go up and down the fjords from Juneau, looking at different angles to match the mountains in the photo to a current geographical location. A few days later, Eva Sophia geolocated the photo to a spot on Mud Bay Road.
Once in Juneau, Leitinger made her way to the Alaska State Archives. She looked at microfilms of newspapers across Southeast Before setting off for Juneau, Chrisitiane went through boxes of her parents’ belongings. She found a box that was titled “Alaska” and found her mother’s journal from the trip and around 600 negatives. The journal entries were written in German, so Christiane was not able to comprehensively look through it before heading to juneau because she had to translate it. Instead, she put all of the dates in a spreadsheet, creating the path of their journey. She brought this to the archives, letting her look at the newspaper archives from around the time her parents made landfall. She found articles from Ketchikan, Petersburg, Wrangell, Juneau, Fairbanks and Anchorage.
Leitinger and her husband decided to extend their trip after realizing that one of the photos was taken in Haines – the photo from Mud Bay Road. Joined by their older daughter, the couple took the ferry up to Haines, where they met Martha and Michael Mackowiak. Leitinger began showing the duo her one-inch-thick binder full of photos from her parents’ trip. Leitinger opened to “another beautiful picture of my parents somewhere in Alaska,” and Martha Mackowiak instantly recognized the view, Letnikof Cove, something she sees daily while driving home.
“It’s just interesting to see that side of them that I didn’t really experience ever, it’s very sweet, sort of having a window into that chapter of their life,” Leitinger said.
Some newspaper archives mentioned how the Coast Guard asked Abshagen and Leitinger not to continue their trip.
“Almost every time you see a picture of it in the water, it looks like it could be sinking, it’s so low in the water,” Leitinger said. She said that her parents would only go out on calm water because of how low the boat sat.
Some parts of the historical journey were uncomfortable for Leitinger. During her parents’ trip, the couple were joined by Bob Broward, an architect from Jacksonville, Florida who traveled with them to Juneau. Leitinger said he brought a Confederate flag on the trip. When her parents landed in Juneau, they traded their Confederate flag to Gov. William Egan for an Alaska flag, she said.
Leitinger said finding the flag in pictures with her parents was difficult as it does not align with her values or what she would want to fly on a vehicle she’s bringing into a new place like Alaska. Her guess is that had her parents known what the flag symbolized, they would have not flown it. Abshagen’s father, Leitinger’s grandfather, was a part of the resistance against Hitler during World War II.
“That’s always the opportunity for human beings, to reflect deeply and learn from history and not make the same mistakes as others did in the past,” Leitinger said.
While looking through articles in the Alaska State Library in Juneau, Leitinger came across a story on the front page of the Ketchikan paper titled “Confederate Invasion.” The article read “the vanguard, the confederacy’s so-called invasion of Alaska, reached Ketchikan Monday, as a war surplus amphibious Jeep, carrying 3 adventuresome Jacksonville, Florida ‘soldiers’ completed a 90-mile water journey from Prince Rupert, B.C. The threesome, 2 men and a girl [my mother was like 36 at that time], pulled into Ketchikan Monday afternoon with the ‘stars and bars’ flying from the makeshift cabin on the Jeep.”
The article goes on to say that Jacksonville architect Bob Broward, as he set foot on Alaska’s soil, claimed, “ the South hasn’t forgotten,” according to the article. “The other members of the party, Hans Leitinger, an Austrian exchange student now living in Florida, and Miss Ilsa Abshagen, a Jacksonville geography teacher, laughingly told the customs and immigration officers that their mission really was peaceful.”
Leitinger said that reading this news article confirmed her suspicion of the lack of deeper understanding that her parents had about the Confederate flag.
Before showing people photos from her parents’ journey, Leitinger said she warns that they’re going to see the Confederate flag. The couple’s trip occurred three years before the Civil Rights Act was passed, meaning Jim Crow laws were still in effect in the South. Leitinger has yet to go through her mom’s manuscript but wonders if her mother touched on these events in her writing. One entry of her mother’s that she read on the ferry up to Haines described her parents camping on the side of the road in the South. While camped, Abshagen writes, cars would stop and point their headlights at them. Leitinger said that even as a white woman, her mother didn’t feel safe.
“The complicated part of this story of discovery is, what are the layers there of coming over as an immigrant, of coming into a country that has this history, trying to in some ways, escape a history of a fascist, authoritarian government,” Leitinger said.
After trading flags, the couple continued north without Broward.
Initially, Leitinger thought that her parents had sold the vehicle in Juneau, however after finding an online military vehicle forum, she discovered the car now lives in Anchorage. In a post from 2008, current owner of the vehicle Ralph Centoni recalled the couple’s trip. He wrote that the couple put their car on display at a local Anchorage hotel. Centoni’s friend asked Leitinger’s parents if the car was for sale and they agreed on a price.
“They took it over to Lake Hood and swam it across the lake,” Centoni wrote in 2008. The vehicle sat in his friend’s garage from 1961 to 1997, when Centoni purchased it. When he wrote the online entry, he said that he had been working on restoring it since 1997 and was about 85% finished at the time.
After reading the account, Leitinger reached out to the president of the Antique Auto Mushers of Alaska, who helped connect her with Centoni. Leitinger and her family were simultaneously on their way up to Anchorage for her husband’s work, when Leitinger made the connection with Centoni. He welcomed them into his garage, where the Ugly Duckling had been living for the past 29 years. After months of investigation, Leitinger was able to sit in her parents’ old vehicle and touch the car that was a main character in so many of their stories. Sitting in the car, she and her daughter Eva Sophia flipped through the binder of images, comparing dents they saw in person to the dents in the photos.
The vehicle built in 1942 had acquired a few dents during the multiple road trips, which helped Leitinger and her family solidify that it was her parents’ vehicle. She said she was overwhelmed when she first saw and touched the car. She said just putting her hand on it was like going through a space-time continuum, expecting to see her parents there on the other side.
“It was a way of sort of seeing my parents, and touching a little bit of that adventure that they took, and understanding it in a very concrete way,” Leitinger said.
Now, Leitinger has seen the Ugly Duckling with her own two eyes, in addition to having her mother’s detailed stories and photographs. Looking toward the future, Leitinger is unsure if she will publish her mother’s partially completed memoir or if she should write a book telling her parents’ story while also including her own personal discoveries along the way.
“There’s a parallel adventure that we’re on,” Leitinger said. “We’ve found it, we’ve touched it, we’ve sat in it.” For Leitinger, the story has been unfolding in real time.
Christiane Leitinger, left, and daughter Eva Sophia look through film photos from Ilse Abshagen and Hans Leitinger’s trip while seeing the Ugly Duckling in person in Anchorage on June 23, 2026. (Photo by Charley Shimanski, courtesy of Christiane Leitinger)
Ilse Abshagen leans against the parked Ugly Duckling in Haines in 1961. (Photo courtesy of Christiane Leitinger)
Hans Leitinger and Ilse Abshagen read a map in the Ugly Duckling in 1961. (Photo courtesy of Christiane Leitinger)
(Courtesy/Leslie Evenden)
Matt Whitman, Leslie Evenden, Michelle Drucker, Steve Williams four bikers and friend Ori Badajos on a bikepacking trip to Denali.
Matt Whitman and Leslie Evenden are back from a five-night “bike packing” trip to Denali. They pedaled about 20 miles a day with former Haines residents Michelle Drucker and Steve Williams, viewing bears, moose, sheep and caribou on the trip. The bikes were outfitted with a bear barrel on the front of the cycle for food storage. They cooked and camped every night. Following the adventure all four met up in Fairbanks for dinner with Sara and Richard Chapell. The Chapells were in Fairbanks working on their cabin as well as attending a hosted discussion with the U.S. Supreme Court Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson. The conversation was cut short by an unspecified emergency the Justice had to attend to, but she did speak for roughly 30 minutes about her early influences and experiences coming up in her career. Jackson is the first black woman to serve on the Supreme Court.
And speaking of the Evendens, their dog Nori went on something of a staycation while they were gone. According to new CVN reporter Lizzy Hahn, who was tasked with watching her, Nori first disappeared from Evenden’s home for a day. After Hahn spent the evening wandering down the street with a leash, dog treats and a squeaky toy, she discovered that Nori had made her way down to Darsie and Courtney Culbecks’ Mud Bay home, a favorite hangout. Later on Nori disappeared from
Culbecks’ home and a call was put out via social media and a listener personal on KHNS seeking her return. All’s well that ends well, though, as Evenden said Nori is safe and sound at home with her and Whitman now.
And on the subject of dogs, the dog walkers and sitters of the community shared their tips for finding elusive hounds. Bryce Wortman might be Haines’ premier pet sitter. He has a client named Goose who has two different colored eyes. He says that you know by the way she looks at you if the Goose is on the loose. The best way he has for getting her back is to pick up Kim Larson’s dogs and inspire Goose to follow the dog pack.
Gabe Long has no problem getting dogs to approach him. He says that a big hairy malamute visits him at his yard twice daily. The dog is named Bodhi, short for Bodhisittva. Long says that Bodhi offers a path to enlightenment, just as the name implies.
Zombie, a 12-year-old Shiba Inu, is learning a new trick, riding on a motorcycle with some help from his human, Karla Peña. Peña is in Haines for work for a few months and has been enjoying the training on the Honda XR15L. She says that Zombie tolerated the doggles (that’s goggles for dogs…) and the motorcycle backpack was the next logical step. Peña said she started him out with just a few miles at a time and is increasing his riding time.
(Courtesy/Karla Peña) Zombie, on a motorcycle with owner Karla Peña on the Haines Highway.
Beau and Zane Bradley recently arrived home from a trip to Valencia, Spain. While there, Beau Bradley participated in the Gay Games XII placing second in the 50-meter butterfly, fifth in 50-meter freestyle and fourth in 100-meter freestyle.
They experienced record-breaking temperatures during a stop in Germany, fresh-squeezed Valencia orange juice from the legendary OJ capital of the world and came home with a couple of new tattoos to remember the adventure.
Chrissie White and Aly Zeiger combined their birthday party plans this year. They hosted a hobbit-themed celebration at Portage Cove last weekend, transforming the spot into the Shire on a sunny afternoon, overflowing with hobbit hospitality. There were flowing skirts, cloaks, waistcoats, plenty of crowns of flowers and a friendly croquet tournament. The “master of the mallet” (or winner of the croquet match), Ryan Eckert played the game on stilts while in character as Gandalf, complete with extended croquet mallet.
A sunny summer day and the opening of the Southeast Alaska State Fair just around the corner inspired Maren Billings to get into the lemonade business in downtown Haines. Her brother Oliver Billings helped for the low, low price of a $20 gift card for the Bookstore that Maren had on hand. Oliver Billings said he has previous experience selling lemonade with his friend Milo Beck. Oryn Stanford and Ava Stanford also assisted in the operation, refilling lemonade and snickerdoodle cookies.
Maren Billings said that she originally wanted to raise money to buy a cat but recently learned that she could get a pig for $250. The other kids said they wanted to save money to spend at the fair. ds said they wanted to save money to spend at the fair.
There will be a celebration of life for Ruth Dick, 76, on Aug. 1 at 3 p.m. in the Haines ANB Hall. A potluck featuring her favorite dish, chicken adobo, will follow. She died peacefully June 5 at the Sitka Pioneer Home, where she had lived for four years.
“It was just her time,” said daughter Rhonda Degtoff. Dick lived most of her life in Haines. She was a L’uknax.ádi (coho salmon) of the Raven moiety.
She loved her family, the singer Tom Jones, forget-me-nots, watching Native dancing and being with friends.
“Ruth was an ‘up’ kind of person,” said friend Doris Bell. She liked to lead her friends in singing “You Are My Sunshine.” “She had some hard knocks and kept soldiering on with a smile on her face and a little hat on her head,” Bell said.
Dick was a member of ANS Camp 5, the Chilkoot Indian Association, the American Legion Unit 12 Auxiliary and enjoyed volunteering at the Salvation Army Thrift Store.
Ruth Dick was born July 29,1949 in Juneau. Her parents were Mary Young and Richard A. Dick Sr. She grew up in foster care in Hoonah and did not have fond memories, her daughter said.
“Both my parents recalled beatings for speaking their language.” Because of that, Dick did not identify with her culture until later in life and then it brought her joy, Degtoff said
She married Randolph Williams Sr. in October 1968 and had the first of her four children the following year. She spent much of her life as a single parent. Degtoff’s earliest memories of her mother are in Juneau, climbing the steep stairs up the hill to their apartment, carrying groceries.
“She had all the bags and a baby on her hip, corralling three little ones. “I’m proud of her,” Degtoff said. “She was a great mom.”
She leaves brothers Wes and Paul Dick; children Rhonda Degtoff of Haines, Mary Uyanik of Juneau, Randy Williams Jr. of Juneau and Manette Hogue of Juneau; grandchildren Adam Williams, Nicholas Degtoff, Meganne Clarke, Ashley Williams, Sam Uyanik and Rebecca and Eliza Hogue.
Her brother Richard Dick preceded her in death.
Donations toward funeral expenses are gratefully accepted at the service on Aug. 1, or at P.O. Box 316.
The George family assists an overturned boat Sunday afternoon in Lutak Inlet. Sunday, July 19, 2026. (Courtesy/Kerry McIver)
The Chilkoot River sockeye run arrived in a large surge last weekend, bringing the fish count at Alaska Department of Fish and Game’s Chilkoot Weir to nearly six-times what it had been just 48 hours before.
As of Friday evening, roughly 3,000 sockeye had passed through the weir since it was installed at the end of May, a number below the historical average for mid-July.
When 6 p.m. hit, the start of the Friday evening shift for Fish and Game staff at the weir, that all changed. Over the three-hour counting period, an average of over 30 sockeye per minute came through the weir, totalling 6,500 fish, department salmon researcher Shelby Flemming said this week. A similar influx of fish continued the next day, with a small lull around midday.
All told, from Friday through Sunday, department staff counted 16,820 sockeye passing through the weir.
News of the sockeye arrival brought anglers and subsistence fishermen out in numbers. Fish and Game’s area sportfish biologist, John Whitinger, reported “hot” fishing around Letnikof Cove. “People pulling their subsistence nets out had sockeye bigger than I’ve ever seen,” he said. “People were telling me they had more fish than they even really needed.”
Amid the fishing frenzy, at least two boats capsized. One of the boats overturned Saturday and sank in Lutak Inlet. A second boat that capsized the next day was salvaged by borough staff. No one was hurt.
The first boat overturned Saturday mid-morning in Lutak Inlet, said Joanne Waterman, who was fishing from a nearby vessel.
Waterman said that while wind and seas were picking up, she and fishing partner Dean Heard saw a small skiff nearby sitting low in the water and a lone boater beginning to bail with a bucket.
Waterman and Heard assisted the other boat, which they found without power due to a subsistence net tangled in the prop.
“The boat took a couple of good waves over the back and it started to sink,” Waterman said. “(Boat owner Linda Huber) was hanging onto the boat and we got her into our boat and then backed off, because the wind was bumping our boats together.”
Huber was the lone person in the vessel, joined only by her dog, who Waterman said was wearing a personal flotation device and also was saved.
Haines Volunteer Fire Department chief Zak Overmyer said the department sent an ambulance to the scene, but Huber declined medical attention. Huber did not return calls seeking more information.
The second boat capsized Sunday afternoon in Lutak Inlet.
Haines resident Michael George said he was boating nearby when he saw the overturned skiff with a man hanging off.
George’s son, Siyel George, piloted a Zodiac his family had been towing toward the overturned boat and hoisted the stranded boater, who was not wearing a personal flotation device, out of the water. Another crewmember of the overturned boat had already swum to shore.
Michael George said the capsized boaters, who he did not know, told him they had rapidly taken on water over the stern of their boat. When he arrived at their boat, George said their subsistence net was underwater and snagged on their outboard motor.
Haines harbormaster Henry Pollan said he towed the empty boat on Sunday afternoon from the mouth of the Chilkoot River to the Lutak launch ramp.
Michelle Sparck (center) poses for a photo with Bering Straits Native Corporation summer interns in Nome on July 20, 2026 during a voter outreach trip. (Photo courtesy of Michelle Sparck)
A Native-led voter mobilization group is working to boost Alaska Native voter education and turnout this election season.
Get Out the Native Vote is a non-partisan effort now underway to reach voters across the state’s vast and varied geography and get them to cast ballots in the primary elections on August 18 and the midterm elections on November 3.
Alaska Native voters make up roughly one in four Alaskan voters, said Michelle Sparck, director of the initiative, who is Cup’ik from the Southwest village of Chevak. She said part of voter education is raising awareness of when Alaska Native voters came out in force and reached a peak voter turnout of 66% in 1982. Some regions had nearly 80% voter turnout, Sparck said. That’s when decisions on subsistence policy, abortion and moving the Alaska State Capitol from Juneau were on the ballot.
“I call it the birth of the Alaska Native super voter. That generation made it a cultural value,” she said. “With that political capital that the 1980s generation built, they were able to own their sovereignty and self-determination tools.”
An Alaska voter drops their ballot into a ballot box on Nov. 1, 2024, in Anchorage City Hall. (Photo by Andrew Kitchenman/Alaska Beacon)
But voter turnout has declined significantly in the decades since. In the last election in 2024, 30% of Alaska Native voters cast their ballots. That meant Alaska Native voters made up 11% of state voters, according to data compiled by Sparck.
The mission of the campaign is to turn that decline around and reach historic highs again.
“This is what we’re capable of, and this is what this is our potential, and and I’m so excited to hold the mirror up to the communities because a lot of them really just had no idea what their performance is over the last, you know, 40-some years,” Sparck said.
“The challenge to the community is to say: own our power. We need to get out and vote,” she said. “Not should we go out and vote, we should make informed decisions.”
Get Out the Native Vote is supported by a partnership between the Alaska Federation of Natives, First Nations Institute and Cook Inlet Tribal Council with some funding from private foundations and the Carter Center, which was founded by former President Jimmy Carter. The campaign is collaborating with local, state and Tribal governments; regional Native corporations, organizations and service providers; schools; prisons and community groups to host voter education and outreach events around the state. Sparck spoke on a video call on Tuesday after returning from a voter outreach visit in Nome, and before heading to visit Utqiagvik, then the coastal community of Wainwright.
The August 18 primary falls within the summer subsistence fishing season, which is challenging for many people to find time to vote, Sparck said, but she’s found a helpful analogy.
“We’ve realized that if we describe primaries like basketball regionals, light bulbs go off their heads,” she said, smiling. “You have to win at regionals in order to make it to state. So a lot of people now know what primaries mean.”
Spark said 131 voting precincts in the state, more than a quarter, rely entirely on the U.S. Postal Service and air carriers to receive and mail their ballots.
Get Out the Native Vote working to make sure post offices are staffed, and helping the Alaska Division of Elections to recruit staff and volunteers so that each precinct has elections workers, bilingual poll workers and outreach workers to help with Native language translations. Sparck is also finding youth volunteers for a “Youth at the Booth” program, whose goal is to have two 17 and 18 year old volunteers assist at polling places and learn about elections in the process.
Particularly in the Arctic, the initiative is partnering with the North Slope Borough and local community leaders to make sure all precincts are staffed and open, in hopes of avoiding repeats of past election years where rural residents could not vote due to issues with staffing poll workers. In 2024, polling stations in rural villages of Wales and Kaktovik never opened. In Northwest and Western Alaska, voting hours were reduced in Marshall, Shaktoolik,Diomede and Kobuk. Primary ballots arrived late in at least 14 other Native villages.
“I get a lot of (precinct) chairs calling me before an election saying, ‘I don’t think I can do this.’ And we’re like, ‘You can do this. Your community can’t vote without you,’” she said. The organization’s goal is to have a well-staffed polling station in each village.
Alaska Native communities have also had the highest rates of rejected ballots, according to the Alaska Federation of Natives. One of the main issues is an incomplete witness signature on the ballot. In 2022, one in eight rural mail-in ballots were rejected, totalling more than 7,500 ballots rejected from rural Alaska.
A bipartisan elections bill that would have removed the witness signature requirement, among many other measures aimed at improving voting access, passed the Alaska State Legislature this year, but Gov. Mike Dunleavy vetoed it.
An 18 year old Ahtna shareholder registers to vote at a Get Out the Native Vote event at their Convention in June 2026 in Glennallen. (Photo courtesy of Michelle Sparck)
Between now and November, the campaign is working to distribute voter information, with guides on how to register, cast a ballot and find more information on state and federal candidates.
“So we’re trying to make things easier, but we’re building the plane as we’re flying it,” Sparck said. “You know, it’s still a work in progress, and we’re glad to have the alliances we have.”
This year, the annual Alaska Federation of Natives convention, where thousands of people from across the state convene in Anchorage, will be held one week later than usual to accommodate early voting at City Hall across the street. “So we’re excited that we’re going to have an ability to send people across the street to go vote or drop off their absentee ballots,” Sparck said.
The campaign is planning to hold voter outreach events in Alaska Department of Corrections facilities where roughly 40% of incarcerated people awaiting trial and sentencing are eligible to vote. Organizers are also working with service provider organizations to reach people who are unhoused or housing insecure, as well as foster youth who are turning 18, and inform them about their voting rights.
“We try to recognize every avenue to access voters, and especially those that are low propensity or disenfranchised. We try to meet their needs in every way, so it doesn’t mean we’re doing it 24/7, but it means we are trying to dedicate time and create the allyship and coordination with organizations that are more intimate with those groups to to best deliver that,” she said.
Get Out The Native Vote shares outreach events and regional voting updates on their Facebook page, and website at aknativevote.com.
Michelle Sparck (left) and Get Out the Native Vote volunteers smile at a tabling event in Bethel. (Photo courtesy of Michelle Sparck)
Migrating summer chum and chinook salmon swim on July 7, 2007, below the U.S. Bureau of Land Managment’s fish weir on the Tozitna River, Alaska. The Tozitna is a tributory of the Yukon River. (Photo by Jason Post/U.S. Bureau of Land Management)
When 26-year-old Tirzah Bryant was a kid, she knew how to watch the cottonwood trees along the Yukon River for the sign that it was time to fish for salmon.
“We know that the fish are coming when the cotton’s flying from the cottonwood,” she said.
But run collapses and successive fishing closures along the river have rendered the cottonwood signal meaningless.
“I remember that first summer that we couldn’t fish, watching the cotton flying and being like …what it felt like, I was drifting. I’m like, ‘What am I doing?’” she said. That drifting feeling includes interactions with members of her extended family who had moved to cities but used to gather in Galena during fishing season. “They don’t have a reason to come home now,” she said.
Bryant described that odd feeling during a presentation in March at an Anchorage tribal environmental conference. A 2025 graduate of the University of Alaska Fairbanks’ Center for One Health Research master’s degree program, which focuses on the human-animal-environmental health connections in Alaska and the Arctic, she described the One Health concept as fitting perfectly with her family’s traditions.
“Everything is related. So a healthy environment equals healthy animals, which equals healthy humans,” said Bryant, who also holds a biology degree from UAF and is now the environmental and education coordinator for the Louden Tribe, the Galena-based tribal government.
That makes the collapse of runs in the Yukon River — where Indigenous residents’ culture is tied to communal salmon harvesting, preparation and eating — “very detrimental to our people,” she said.
On the Yukon River, salmon runs that used to support a thriving and lucrative commercial harvest have collapsed. The runs of Chinook, also called king salmon, that have been in steady decline since the early 2000s, took a nosedive in recent years; by 2022, Chinook abundance was down 81% below its long-term average, according to fishery biologists. Harvest closures that began in 2020 were extended, and in 2024 an Alaska-Canada agreement established a seven-year moratorium on Chinook salmon fishing in the river to preserve Canadian-origin stocks.
Runs of chum salmon, a species that is generally more abundant in the river, suffered a similar but more sudden crash. A series of chum-harvest closures, even for subsistence purposes, started in 2020, and by 2022 abundance had fallen 92% below the long-term average.
Several factors, working in combination, are blamed for the declines. Scientists cite multiple climate change effects in both the ocean and freshwater bodies used by salmon. Those changes have not only affected the raw numbers of fish but also contributed to the shrinking size of salmon, resulting in smaller egg loads carried to spawning grounds by females.
Tirzah Bryant of Galena and elder Betty Huntington after giving a presetnation on One Health issues on March 25, 2026, at the Alaska Tribal Conference on Environmental Managmeent in Anchorage. Bryant is the environmental and education coordinator for the Louden Tribe, the Tribal govenrment in Galena, a community on the middle Yukon River. Huntington is also from Galena. (Photo by Yereth Rosen/Alaska Beacon)
Other factors cited are interceptions at sea by trawlers targeting groundfish species like pollock, changes forced by increasing loads of Asian hatchery fish in the ocean, past fishery management practices and the parasite Icthyophonus, which thrives in warmer conditions and has a more detrimental effect on Yukon Chinook than on any other type of salmon.
Salmon-protection activists say there is not much that can be done in the short term in Alaska to address those factors, other than to adjust fishery management to cut down on at-sea interception, also known as bycatch.
‘We are truly fish people’
Tribal representatives have made that argument repeatedly to fishery managers. Among them was Brian Ridley, chairman of the Tanana Chiefs Conference, a consortium of Interior Alaska tribal governments.
Ridley, in testimony to the North Pacific Fishery Management Council at its February meeting in Anchorage, spoke about salmon-related health issues in terms similar to those Bryant used. He discussed Athabascan salmon traditions that go back millennia — as far back as 10,500 years ago, according to archaeologists’ discoveries of Yukon River fish camps.
“So we are truly fish people,” he said. The approximately 20,000 people who live in the Texas-sized area covered by the Tanana Chiefs Conference need more protections to repair the Yukon River’s weak salmon runs, he said. “I’ve got to do the best I can for them, and that’s why we’re fighting so hard to try to get our fish back,” he told the council.
A dietary staple, salmon had — until recently — been the main source of protein for Indigenous people who live along the Interior Alaska river systems. Traditionally, salmon has made up about a third of the wild food that rural Alaskans eat, according to the state Department of Fish and Game, and along the Yukon River basin, the percentage was much higher, at least in the past.
Store-bought substitutes, in addition to being expensive and of limited availability in rural Alaska villages that lack any outside road access, do not provide the same quality proteins and vitamins, minerals and omega-3 fatty acids, tribal organizations say.
The Tanana Chiefs Conference says effects of salmon shortages are seen in medical records. In October 2024, it said there had been a 24.6% increase in diabetes and a staggering 70% increase in prediabetes among tribal members since 2019.
Concerns in Alaska about adverse health impacts from reduced salmon consumption fit into a larger pattern of problems around the circumpolar North as wild and nutrient-rich foods traditional in Indigenous diets have been gradually replaced by less-healthful store-bought foods.
In Western Siberia, for example, climate change has shortened the seasons in which the Indigenous Nenets people harvest fish and reindeer, resulting in less overall consumption of those dietary staples and higher rates of hypertension, according to a 2021 study by researchers from Russian and Chinese institutions.
In Arctic Canada, a long-term transition away from what in local vernacular is called “country food” — wild foods such as fish, marine mammal meat and berries — has coincided in Inuit populations with rising obesity and related chronic conditions like cardiovascular disease, high cholesterol, high blood pressure and diabetes, according to a Canadian report published online in 2020 that summarized the findings of 162 studies.
Subsistence fishing on the Yukon River (Photo provided by the Alaska Department of Fish and Game)
A 2024 Canadian study calculated the expected increases in heart attack risks over the coming decades for First Nations members in British Columbia.
A traditional foods comeback
Despite challenges around the Arctic, there have been successes in resurrecting traditional diets, which experts say are important for both physical and mental health.
At the Alaska Native Medical Center in Anchorage, for example, traditional Native foods are served regularly, with supplies donated by community members. Traditional foods are “healing, nourishing medicine for our people,” says the hospital’s website. Donated traditional foods are served at other tribal health care facilities, too, such as the Maniilaq long-term care center in Kotzebue.
Count last summer’s culture camp organized by Eva Burk and other tribal leaders in the Interior Alaska community of Nenana as part of the healing process. Burk is a scientist, local food activist and Indigenous representative on the North Pacific Fishery Management Council’s advisory panel. Nenana is located on the Tanana River, a Yukon River tributary.
Burk and other members of the Nenana Native Association gathered local kids to teach them how to harvest and prepare salmon in the traditional Tanana Athabascan ways, along with other Indigenous skills.
For their activities, they used a smattering of locally caught chum salmon, also known as dog salmon because it was traditionally fed to sled dogs, that was available through a very limited harvest opened last summer specifically for cultural camp purposes. In all, they used 25 locally caught chum and 25 locally caught coho salmon for the camp, Burk said.
Camp activities relied mostly on sockeye salmon sent from the Bristol Bay region, where runs remain abundant. The Bristol Bay fish are not as much to Burk’s liking as the fish that used to be plentiful in the Nenana River and other Yukon tributaries. Bristol Bay salmon tastes a bit different, and the traditional smoking techniques she learned from her family don’t work quite as well, she said.
While they were grateful for the donations, they were especially grateful for the ability to harvest salmon from their own river, Burk said.
As she described it, catching, preparing and eating the local salmon was something of a healing process. Special care was taken to serve some of it to appreciative elders, she added.
“We scored them and smoked them for a day and cooked them over a fire and served them at a potlatch,” she said. “Fish that we would have normally cut for dog fish we were treating with the utmost care and respect, and savoring every last bit.”
The Nenana Native Association has scheduled another culture camp this summer to start in late July, and there is another special allowance for culture camp harvesting this year, Burk said.
Eva Burk cuts salmon during a culture camp held by the Nenana Native Association in August of 2025, (Photo provided by Eva Burk)
LifeStance Health reports that 83% of Americans face financial stress, impacting mental health, particularly among millennials and Gen Z, leading to anxiety and depression.
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