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Support for Alaska Public Media On Demand comes from Siri, an Alaska Native corporation.
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With operations and investments spanning five continents.
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45 states and two US territories.
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I just think it's incredibly reckless. I mean, we know what the seafood economy means to the state of Alaska. Lawmakers respond to a proposal to open up more Alaska waters to offshore drilling. From Alaska Public Media. This is statewide news on Alaska News nightly for Thursday, November 20th. Good evening. I'm Casey Grove. Also tonight, debunking a popular statistic around Alaska's food imports. I think it is a very useful thing to just note that like it is made up. Those stories and more tonight on Alaska News Nightly. The Trump administration has a new offshore drilling proposal to offer nearly all of the oceans off Alaska to potential leasing. The draft plan would open the Bering Sea, the Gulf of Alaska and other areas important to the fishing industry. It's part of a national proposal that Interior Secretary Doug Burgum says will help ensure American energy dominance. It includes lease sales off the entire coast of California, where drilling is fiercely unpopular. The top Democrat on the U.S. house Natural Resources Committee, California's Jared Huffman, pledged to fight it in court and in Congress. Representative Huffman says it doesn't make sense for Alaska either. I just think it's incredibly reckless. I mean, we know what the seafood economy means to the state of Alaska. The plan goes beyond what Alaska advocates of offshore development have favored in the past. In 2018, Alaska's all Republican delegation to Congress praised an offshore plan that included lease sales in Cook Inlet and the Chukchi and Beaufort Seas. But they asked the first Trump administration to remove the Bering Sea and the Gulf from consideration. The plan released today is called a first analysis, with two more planned before final approval. If it survives, the first lease sale would be in the Beaufort. It's not clear oil companies would be interested. Shell spent 10 years and $7 billion trying to drill there before giving up on offshore Arctic exploration. You may have heard before that Alaska imports 95% of food purchased by residents. The figure has been around for decades, but there's a problem with it. Food security experts say it isn't real or backed by data. As Avery Elfelt reports for the Alaska Desk, that reality underscores how hard it is to track whether the state is becoming less dependent on imports, even as the Dunleavy administration seeks to do just that.
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95% of Alaska's food is imported from elsewhere.
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95% of the food that we have.
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95% of our food, almost 95% of.
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The state's food is imported.
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Those are just a few examples of the many instances where public officials, the media and others attempt to illustrate Alaska's reliance on imported food with the same statistic. That includes governor Mike Dunleavy, who's consistently said boosting food security in Alaska is one of his top priorities. Here he is In a YouTube video.
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Posted in 2022 Alaska imports about 95%.
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Of our food supply.
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Rachel Lord of the Alaska Food Policy Council, a Homer based nonprofit, says it's well established by now that the vast majority of food Alaskans purchase is imported. And she says 95% is probably a reasonable ballpark estimate. But if she sees it, that's all the figure is an informed guess.
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I think it is a very useful.
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Thing to just note that, like it.
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Is made up which begs the question, where did the 95% figure come from? There's no clear answer, but a web of reports and academic papers point to a few possibilities. A 2023 report prepared for Dunleavy, for instance, says the figure hasn't been substantiated nor updated since a journal mention in 1987. Another paper, published in 2010, says it dates back to 1977 and also nods to uncertainty around its precision. Mike Jones is a food systems economist at the University of Alaska, Anchorage. He says the figure has a few glaring red flags, including that there's no unit like pounds, dollars or calories of food. Whatever the source, Jones says the figure has been repeated so often for so long it's become conventional wisdom. But he's not convinced it should stay that way.
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I think we search for numbers in describing the scope of a problem, and it's appropriate to look for numbers. I think if we're using a number, then it's important that it definitely comes from a verifiable source.
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So why isn't there one? The short answer, Jones says, is that it's a complex math problem that's made even more difficult by major data gaps around both imports and locally sourced food. The point of doing that math would be to pinpoint a figure that would help track progress over time. But for the time being, Jones says, it might be better to rely on adjectives as opposed to percentages.
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I tried very hard to use publicly.
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Available, particularly federal statistics, to be able to infer that for the state, and.
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I found it to be a very, very difficult exercise.
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The challenge isn't isolated to Alaska. David Connor is an economist with the University of Vermont who led the state's efforts to count local food. Connor and his team relied on some of the same data sets Jones has worked with. But he also built on that data by reaching out to grocery stores, schools, hospitals, distributors and more to get a sense of how much local food they purchased in the previous year. From there, the researchers did their best to avoid counting any sale twice and asked important questions like, is beer food?
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We have a fairly vibrant local brewery.
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Scene and it's like, do we count.
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That is beer food?
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The researchers ultimately estimated that the state of Vermont had likely surpassed its goal to ensure local food accounts for 10% of total consumption, but they emphasize that that's just an estimate. The 10% figure underscores that Alaska isn't alone in importing the vast majority of its purchased food. Connor says it's true even in states with booming agriculture sectors.
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In many, many cases, food producing regions are also the insecure because the food is grown for sort of export markets, not for local consumption.
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Jones, with the University of Alaska, says it's a good thing that Alaskans can access foods grown really far away. Still, he says, there are lots of reasons for states to boost local food systems. It's good for the planet, the economy and ultimately yields fresher food. In Hanes, I'm Avery Elphelt.
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Still to come on Alaska News Nightly, how peer support specialists can help with addiction recovery.
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I personally really enjoy being able to connect with them on like a personal level of someone that has walked their path and been in their shoes.
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That's ahead. Stay with us. Alaska state troopers have redoubled their efforts to locate a North Pole man charged with murder. The charges stem from the fatal shooting of a teenager at a party near Fairbanks last month. Meanwhile, a court has issued an arrest warrant for Darius Morgan and set bail at a million dollars. KUAC's Tim Ellis reports troopers have been.
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Looking for Morgan ever since witnesses said they saw him carrying a gun during an October 25 party at a residence off Farmer's Loop Road. But so far they've been unable to locate the 18 year old, who was indicted last week on charges of first and second degree murder and two weapons offenses. Sergeant Jeremy Roope says troopers have widened their search to include areas as far away as Anchorage.
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Basically, we've gotten some tips and some other information that people think they may have seen him in various places or they have ideas of where he might be.
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The court also issued an arrest warrant for Morgan during a November 14th proceeding, and it upped his bail from 100,000 to a million dollars. Superior Court Judge Brent Bennett is presiding over the case. Roop says the bail reflects both the serious nature of the crimes he's charged with and because it appears he's trying to evade law enforcement.
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It's a high priority crime, right? Like it's an unclassified felony and we've had somebody who fled, you know, they didn't turn themselves in. They didn't seek out law enforcement.
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Investigators also are asking anyone who knows anything about Morgan's whereabouts to contact troopers. Roope says those to have helped him elude capture may themselves face criminal charges.
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If anybody's hiding him or hoping to hide him, you know, there's a high probability that they're likely going to get charged.
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Troopers say anyone with information about Morgan can contact the Fairbanks office at 907-451-5100, or they can submit anonymous tips with the AK Tips smartphone app or go online at dps.alaska.gov tips for for Kuac News, I'm Tim Ellis.
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A group of residents in the Eagle River Chugiak area is pushing to break away from the municipality of Anchorage and form their own local government. The idea has been around for decades, but now, as Alaska Public Media's Wesley early reports, the Eagle Exit movement has gained some real momentum.
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Catherine Margolin says the Chugiak Eagle river area used to be its own borough after getting legislative approval in 1974. However, she says the newly formed government was challenged in court.
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When they went to court, they acted, won in the first court, but they lost in the Alaska Supreme Court and they basically got drawn back into Anchorage.
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Now, more than 50 years later, Margolin and other advocates are trying to form their own government once again. Margolin is the chair of Eagle Exit, a group that was formed in 2018. She says many residents in the area feel like they don't have a voice in the wider Anchorage government.
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They also feel that there are a lot of decisions made that are kind of counter to what our culture and values are out there, which is a little different from Anchorage in a lot of ways.
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Currently, the area is represented by two of the 12 seats on the Anchorage assembly and tends to be more politically conservative than the rest of Anchorage. On November 17, Eagle exit members sent a draft of their petition to detach from Anchorage to the Alaska Local Boundaries Commission. It includes a charter, a boundary map, plans for how to implement the new government, and a legal memo describing how to effectively separate from Anchorage.
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We feel like we're founders of the Constitution, you know, and in our own little, little area here.
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The Chugach Regional Borough, if approved, would comprise all of the communities in anchorage Assembly District 2 that includes Eagle River, Chugiak, Birchwood, Eklutna, and Joint Base Elmendorf, Richardson, totaling about 47,000 people. The draft petition includes a process for how a mayor and assembly members would be selected and even a school district that would be composed of publicly funded charter schools.
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There's gonna be a core curriculum which will include the sciences and math and English and civics, and then each school will its own specialties, say STEM or language, things like that.
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Eagle Exit advocates actually submitted a different draft petition to the local boundary commission in 2023, and Margolin says commission staff kicked it back to them with feedback on what was missing.
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The main comments were that we needed to bulk up the school district and define how the schools would be run. And the other main thing was the division of assets and liabilities, which they really didn't address in that first iteration.
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In other words, how do you divide up? All of the facilities are currently owned by the municipality. Margolin says Eagle Exit spent the last two years fixing the issues. She says she's confident they'll be able to address any small corrections on this draft.
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This is definitely the farthest we've gotten. We feel that we've answered all of the staff members questions and filled out the pieces that he felt were missing.
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In an email, Jed Smith, a staffer for the commission, said his team hasn't had a chance to review the latest draft petition. But it, quote, appears to be substantially different than the previous draft submitted. If commission staff decide that everything in the draft looks okay, Margolin says her group will then start collecting signatures. They hope to enlist a swarm of volunteers to help.
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They will be taking those petition focus out for signatures. Door knocking, standing in parking lots, you know, going to events. Probably Bear Paw will at least get a ton of signatures there.
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I'm sure once Eagle exit advocates get 25% of registered voters in the area to sign the petition, they would submit a finalized petition to the boundary commission for a technical review. If it's approved, Smith says it would kick off a lengthy process that includes public comment, two staff reports, and a final public hearing where the commission would decide whether or not to approve the new borough. If approved, Margolin says it would go to local voters.
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The voters are only in Assembly District 2, so the vote will be for. It's called a unified vote for detachment in incorporation as a. As a home rule borough. All in the same petition.
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Margolin says even if everything goes as planned, the formation of the Chugach Regional Borough is still years away.
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My Husband says three to five years. I would hope for sooner, but because I'm kind of an optimist in that area, but we're probably looking at a few years.
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The most recent Alaska borough to be approved by the local boundary commission was the Hoona Borough in southeast Alaska last March, though it's being challenged in Superior Court before that. The Petersburg Borough was approved in 2013. Reporting in Anchorage, I'm Wesley Early.
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Freeze up on the Kuskokwim river appears to be behind schedule. That's the conclusion of the first of several aerial surveys put on in a joint effort between Bethel Search and Rescue and the Kuskokwim Ice Road Crew. Mark Leary is a member of Bethel Search and Rescue and was on the plane that surveyed ice conditions Wednesday. This time last year, Leary says the river was a little more frozen and safer to travel on. He says later freeze ups have become more common.
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You know, we always hold our breath during November. During November, anything can happen.
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Leary and the aerial survey crew will continue to monitor ice conditions on the Kuskokwim from the sky throughout the winter. The surveys function in part as a public safety measure to get information out about areas of concern or danger. But they're also to start planning for the annual ice road, which last year spanned from Kasigluk to crooked creek, about 300 miles of marked road.
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Our job right now is to watch and to start and to get out there and start marking. As people start moving around and establishing trails, we gotta make sure all the open water is marked.
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According to Leary, the state Emergency Operations center has formally requested that the Kuskokwim Ice Road crew extend the road to Tuntutuliak to assist with disaster relief efforts, conditions permitting. That's roughly 42 miles beyond the normal southern extent of the road at the mouth of the Johnson River. Right now, Leary says people should not travel on the river even in areas that appear to be frozen up. He says all travel should happen over land at this time. He says part of the delay with freeze up could be related to ex typhoon Ha Long, which brought high winds and flooding to the Yukon Kuskokwim Delta early last month.
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We barely, barely had any time to recover after that typhoon storm. The land was still very wet and saturated all over, especially low lying areas.
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Leary says people across the region seem to have caught on to the slow freeze.
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One thing I noticed throughout the flight is that there were less nets set and less monocking going on than there usually is this time of the year. And that's just, you know, reflective of the conditions we've had, leary says.
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Even during some of the warmest winters, the crew has been able to maintain a nice ice road with significant mileage. For people experiencing addiction, taking the first steps toward recovery can feel daunting or sometimes impossible. Often it's helpful to talk to people who have been through it themselves. That can help someone's chances of starting and staying in recovery. Alaska Public Media's Rachel Cassandra has more on peer to peer care in the state.
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Josh Engel is bundled up on one of the first really cold days in October. He walks along a forest path to do outreach in a homeless encampment in Anchorage. He approaches a man in a weathered coat.
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How long you been out here on the streets?
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Too long.
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Yeah.
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Several tents and makeshift structures lean together.
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Are you connected with any resources?
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Angel is a manager and peer support specialist at True North Recovery in Wasilla, and one of his aims today is to help guide people into recovery. It's a path Engel knows well because he's in long term recovery himself now. He supports people in ways that go well beyond what a more traditional therapist or psychiatrist can do. He may text with clients outside business hours, help them find work or get connected with benefits, anything that supports them in a way that might lead to recovery.
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I personally really enjoy being able to connect with them on like a personal level of someone that has walked their path and been in their shoes and ultimately have struggled the way that they're currently struggling.
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True North Recovery, where Engel works, aims to employ those with lived experience in recovery for every role, from receptionists to healthcare providers. When patients interact with workers with lived experience, research shows it can aid recovery and peer supports can help people recover from both serious mental illness and substance use disorders and can reduce healthcare costs. NPEers can sometimes say and see things those without lived experience can't. Aaron Surma is executive director of the national alliance on Mental Illness, or nami, in Juneau, which runs training for peer support, and Surma experiences mental illness himself. He says psychiatrists and mental health professionals play an important role in supporting recovery and treatment. But there is a strong power difference.
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You're in a small room, you're making intense eye contact and the dynamic is that you have the expert and the person who needs help. And the experts are taught to not really share about themselves, right? Which makes it feel really one sided. It makes you feel like you're being judged and evaluated.
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Surma says he was arrested multiple times during high school and was court ordered to go to Alcoholics and Narcotics Anonymous meetings He says hearing peers in those groups was awesome. But things felt different when talking with his formal providers.
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When I was a teenager, I was lighting stuff on fire and buying garbage bags of weed. So then to go into a small room and talk to somebody who. Imagine the counselor from south park who's saying, drugs are bad, okay? And it's a million miles from what you know.
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He says it's easier for peers to bridge those gaps in early recovery. Peer support specialists speak the language of addiction and mental illness and also understand the more traditional language of behavioral health professionals, he says. Typically, those professionals dole out care in ways that are convenient for the healthcare system. But peer support is different.
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Recovery isn't just supported in small doses from paid professionals, but it can also happen on our own time in places that are comfortable to us, in settings that feel more accessible and from people who feel more approachable, he says.
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Peer support relationships don't have to be formal, and the role can be incredibly healing for the person providing the support. The hard times and challenges someone has faced suddenly have value if those experiences help someone else. That's something peer support specialist Angle has felt deeply in his work.
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There is no way you could have convinced me 10 years ago that all of the damage and chaos that I was causing in people's lives, my loved ones, you know, people I just would cross paths with, that I would be able to use any of that for good. I thought that was just going to be like a stain on my soul for the rest of my life.
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Instead, now his struggles are a tool to help people and do his job. Back at the Anchorage encampment, he approaches Knock Knock, a couple's tent.
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It's going to be tough.
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They express interest in detox but want to get into a program together.
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But what we can do is we can line it up so like beds on the same day. They're just going to be different programs on this day.
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It's not enough.
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I swear, every single time we talk. Almost there, almost there. I know you are, but.
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But he's in touch with them and he'll be back working to make their next steps in recovery as easy as possible. When they're ready. In Anchorage, I'm Rachel Cassandra Fairbanks.
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Based Alaska native filmmakers are bringing an award winning 1993 book to the screen for the first time. Two Old Women is an adaptation of Velma Wallace's novel of the same name. And in the new film, the story is told entirely in Gwich'. In. It premiered in Hawaii last month with homecoming showings scheduled in Alaska in December. As KUAC's Patrick Gilchrist reports, the filmmakers say their work is about more than the final product. It's about using art to bring people together and revitalize language and culture.
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Wallace's 1993 book is based on an Athabaskan legend and takes place in a time before colonization. The story follows a pair of elderly women, Chitzigyak and Sa, who are left behind by their tribe, which faces starvation amid a harsh winter and shortage of food. The main characters then battle against the elements, relying on their ancestral knowledge and each other to survive in Alaska's wilderness. Filmmaker Princess Johnson remembers when she first read the book as a teenager, and she says adapting it for the screen is something she's been wanting to do for more than 20 years.
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I felt that when I initially read it I could see it, I could visualize it, and at that time I was still very early in my filmmaking career and my filmmaking journey.
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In the years since, Johnson has worked as a creative producer on the PBS Kids series Molly of denali and produced six episodes of the latest season of HBO's True Detective. Now she's added to her resume writing, directing and producing the 14 minute short for two old women, which is a proof of concept for what she hopes to develop into a feature film. In the screen adaptation, Chitzigyak and Sa speak to each other in Gwich'.
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In.
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In fact, the film is entirely in the Athabaskan language, which is considered severely endangered and has a few hundred speakers in Alaska and Canada. Johnson says she got some pushback early on from production companies and others who thought that would be a hard sell. But she says the language element was non negotiable.
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There's just such a richness and a nuance and I don't think, I mean, I think we would actually lose a lot if it was in English. It wouldn't be as believable or like pull us into that authenticity of a pre contact piece.
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Ta' ay. Peter is a producer on the project and helped with the translation. He's an advocate of Indigenous knowledges, languages and rights, and he also has a background in film production and previously served as Vice Chancellor for Rural Community and Native Education at the University of Alaska Fairbanks. Peter says experiencing Gwich' in on the big screen can be a source of pride, a way to uplift the language and even an educational tool.
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Art is such a powerful medium of communication. It's inspirational. You know, it can be life changing and transformational for people, peter says.
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It's also about what goes into the end product. He says the group worked directly with speakers and culture bearers during the creative process to tell two old women in a language that carried the story for thousands of years, he says. That decision just made sense.
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And then it's also this, this form of helping to make this contribution to advancing the important focus on language and language work that's happening, you know, within our community and within a lot of other Indigenous communities.
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The short film was shot in three days at Borealis Base Camp north of Fairbanks and at Gather, which is a social space downtown. But it's been in the making for about five years, and the filmmakers say they used the project to build community in other ways, too, like running hide tanning workshops where people could learn traditional practices while making clothing that appears in the film. Like Peter Johnson says, those workshops and contributions are just as important as what winds up on the screen.
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To me, like in its best form, filmmaking can be a form of healing. It can be a form of medicine.
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The short will be screened in Fairbanks as part of an event at Morris Thompson Cultural and visitors center on December 5th, which starts at 5pm It'll also be shown at the Anchorage International film festival on December 13th at 3pm for KUAC news, I'm Patrick Gilchrist.
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And that's all for this edition of Alaska News Nightly. If you missed any of tonight's stories, we're online@alaskapublic.org and wherever you get your podcasts. We had reports tonight from Liz Ruskin in Washington, D.C. avery Elphelt and Hanes, Tim Ellis in Delta Junction, Wesley early and Rachel Cassandra in Anchorage, Samantha Watson in Bethel and Patrick Gilchrist in Fairbanks. If you want to send us a news tip, question or comment, email us@newsalaskapublic.org Our audio engineer is Crystal Hyde, Madeline Rose is our producer and I'm Casey Grove. Good night.
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If you love what you hear on your public radio station, consider becoming a member.
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This is statewide news on Alaska Public Media.