KFSK - Petersburg

A program that teaches teachers how to incorporate culture into their classrooms has moved into several communities in Southeast Alaska. The program “Thru the Cultural Lens” is run by Sealaska Heritage Institute. It’s been in some of Juneau’s secondary schools for about seven years, but this year it’s expanding to five K-12 school districts in smaller communities in the region.

There are hundreds of Indigenous students in public schools in Southeast Alaska. But many of the K-12 teachers are non-Native and have no idea how to incorporate culture into the classroom. Teachers might be aware of Tlingit, Haida, and Tsimshian cultures but don’t know how to teach it.

“Then they just don’t do it,” said David Sheakley-Early, project manager with Sealaska Heritage Institute.

He says he’s seen this happen repeatedly. It’s not that the teachers don’t want to teach students the local Indigenous culture. They’re just afraid to.

“With fear of maybe ‘I’ll do it wrong,’” Sheakley-Early said. “Maybe I’ll incorporate it and try to do something and offend somebody.”

He says the Thru the Cultural Lens program gives teachers the confidence talk about culture with their students. Studies show Indigenous students are more successful when they have their own culture in their classroom: things like having culturally responsible education materials, a place-based curriculum and the incorporation of Native languages.

“Ultimately, the bottom line is everything is for the student,” Sheakley-Early said. “So, it’s really helping to find that connection so that students can really be engaged.”

Sheakley-Early says the program teaches cultural values and that’s something that all students can benefit from.

“Honoring our land. Strength — the body, mind, and spirit. The past, present, and future generations. And then Balance — social balance, spiritual balance, balance in really everything,” said Sheakley-Early. “So, based off of those four values you can see how it is pretty dynamic, and it doesn’t have to be specifically for Alaska Native students that are going to benefit understanding and learning through these values.”

The five new school districts taking part in the program are in Petersburg, Wrangell, Ketchikan, Hydaburg and Metlakatla.

In Petersburg, all teachers in the district will get some training, says superintendent Erica Kludt-Painter.

“Looking at what framework and background that we all bring to instruction and learning,” said Kludt-Painter.

They will also be looking at district policies.

Some staff in the district are diving deeper into the program and getting additional training. Petersburg’s superintendent, two principals and three teachers are participating in that part. They will be spending 50 hours over several months having cultural orientation and then sharing that knowledge with other school staff.

“So we have a teacher in each building that’s participating and we’ll be able to do our own training and work with staff moving forward,” Kludt-Painter said.

Participants are learning together in a group with the other Southeast communities. They’ll each get a stipend for completing the program. They can also earn three credits through the University of Alaska Southeast if they want.

Their first course will be a sort of Southeast Alaska Native Culture 101 class, where they will learn from different speakers who Sheakley-Early calls “the cream of the crop.”

“And then the hope is that the teachers and educators take this cultural orientation, this knowledge and this background, this history, these cultural values and incorporate these into the classroom, into the schools and into the community as well,” he said.

The participants in the course will develop a final project that they teach in their classrooms and also share with the program so that other educators can use it as well.

The program also has a three-day annual education conference at Sealaska Heritage Institute around the first part of August. There, educators from around the state and country learn and talk about culturally responsive education.

The program is funded by the U.S. Department of Education and the Alaska Native Education Program Department.

This grant cycle will go through September of 2022.

A judge has agreed to another extension for a final rule on designating critical habitat for endangered and threatened humpback whales in the Pacific Ocean.

Wildlife conservation groups including the Center for Biological Diversity, Turtle Island Restoration Network and Wishtoyo Foundation sued the National Marine Fisheries Service in 2018, seeking to force designation of waters important to three different populations of whales. The habitat ruling is a requirement of the Endangered Species Act.

The groups hope it will help the whales rebound that range into the waters off Mexico, Central America and into the western North Pacific Ocean. The numbers for these populations remain low, while humpbacks that frequent other parts of the Pacific are flourishing and have been removed from ESA listing.

The agency issued a proposed rule in 2019 to designate thousands of square miles off the coast of Alaska, Washington, Oregon and California. And it identified some of the threats to these whales, including fishing gear entanglement.

In 2019 and 2020, the Marine Fisheries Service held hearings from California to Alaska on the proposed rule and received thousands of comments. Habitat designation requires the federal government to show its decisions are not destroying waters important to survival of those humpbacks.

Commercial fishermen, the state of Alaska and municipalities in Southeast Alaska opposed the proposed rule and want Alaskan waters left out of the final decision.

Based on a court agreement, the deadline for the final rule was Jan. 15, 2021. However, the federal government asked for additional time to review its final decision before releasing it and the plaintiffs in the lawsuit agreed.

On Jan. 19, U.S. District Judge Haywood Gilliam Jr. granted an additional 90 days. That puts the new deadline for the final rule at April 15.

A federal agency has put some dollar amounts to the impact from the COVID-19 pandemic on commercial and charter fishing industries nationwide in the first part of last year.

On Friday, the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration released a report on the economic impact on the seafood catch and recreational fishing nationwide through last summer. NOAA Fisheries deputy assistant administrator for operations Paul Doremus called the report a snapshot of an industry in transition.

“We’re trying to account in great detail with the data and information in this report on the bearing of COVID-19 on the sector as a whole and provide this in a way that can help businesses and communities understand what has happened, where the losses have been concentrated and to inform long-term recovery and resilient strategies,” Doremus said during a conference call with reporters.

Nationwide, the commercial fishing industry started off 2020 with increases in revenue from seafood sales. But as the pandemic hit in March, that income dropped off 19% compared to the most recent five-year average. Those declines swelled to 45% by July.

Port closures and shipping restrictions meant a big drop in seafood exports. Large gains in grocery store sales were not enough to offset big losses from closed restaurants around the U.S., according to the report. More than 70% of seafood is eaten in restaurants and that meant lost markets, especially for high-value fresh seafood.

NOAA Fisheries economist, and one of the report’s authors, Rita Curtis said frozen and shelf-stable product fared better but the revenue losses were seen across many types of seafood.

“You know with these kind of declines, and successively getting worse and worse, going from March, April, May, June, July. It was really quite surprising how badly the situation was deteriorating in the spring,” Curtis said.

With a drop in harvests for many species and lower prices paid for that seafood, the commercial industry in Alaska saw a revenue drop nearly half a billion dollars during that time from the year before — down $436 million dollars from $1.48 billion in 2019 to $1.04 billion in 2020. That’s a loss of 35% from the recent five-year average. The biggest drops were in fisheries for herring, salmon, halibut, Pacific cod and flatfish.

There were a couple of commercial catches that bucked the trend. The report highlights indications of strong demand for crab species from Alaska compared to the year before and the recent average. Some of the most lucrative crab seasons were wrapped up before the full impact of the pandemic hit. Harvests and revenue from Alaska rockfish also beat the recent averages.

Deputy assistant administrator Doremus sounded a more positive note for the upcoming year, because of the rollout of vaccines and changes to how the industry does business.

“I don’t think anybody expects a reversion to life before COVID,” Doremus said. “Significant adjustments are being made in industry, in product form, product diversification, changing distribution channels, a variety of types of adjustments to how supply chains are being managed, all much-needed changes, all changes that will help strengthen industry over time.”

The report also highlighted big revenue declines for the charter sport fishing fleet. A poll of businesses in May showed a 50% drop in bookings from the year before, in the first part of that season.

Cable TV customers across Alaska have lost network channels in a dispute over broadcast fees between cable company GCI and the television companies that provide that programming.

It means GCI’s customers have lost ABC, FOX and CW networks in many communities connected to the company’s fiber-optic system. The television stations, in Anchorage, Fairbanks and Juneau, are run by Coastal Television Broadcasting Holdings and affiliated companies. The outage impacts many other communities including those in Southeast Alaska.

Those channels went dark on Dec. 31. And that left many viewers including Seattle Seahawk football fans scrambling to find a different way to watch their game, right as playoff football gets underway. There are some online alternatives, satellite TV, or even the broadcast signal in some larger communities. GCI has offered to credit the account of impacted customers

GCI says the television companies are seeking a 40% increase in broadcast fees.

“When you’re working with 300 channels, it’s the fees that we pay for those channels that make up the customer’s monthly bill,” said Heather Handyside, chief communications officer for GCI. “And so it’s really important for us to keep those costs low. We simply can’t support multi-million dollar 40% increases across the board. And so that’s why we’re negotiating and we’re in this place right now. We are super frustrated. We know our customers are super frustrated and we’re doing all we can. We try to put things in place to get these negotiations through quickly so it would have resolved by now.”

GCI says it submitted its most recent offer on Dec. 29 and didn’t see a counteroffer until Jan. 7. The telecom company called that essentially the same proposal that did not advance the negotiations. Handyside said GCI started talks with the television companies back in July and even sought an extension when there was no agreement.

“An extension is just a common business practice that if you can’t come to consensus, let’s do a temporary extension so we can keep programming going while we figure this out,” she explained. “We suggested the extension. We wrote the language for the extension. We sent it over to them and they said no. And at that point, we had to pull our programming because legally we can’t carry those programs unless we have a contract.”

Coastal Television Broadcasting issued a statement Thursday that GCI was seeking an unsustainable reduction in its current rate by almost 30%. Other postings on the company’s website and Facebook pages call GCI’s statements disappointing and say the cable provider is not negotiating in good faith.

The COVID-19 relief bill signed into law this week includes hundreds of millions of dollars more for the fishing industry.

That legislation appropriates nearly $900 billion for COVID-19 aid and was part of the consolidated measure passed by Congress this month and signed by the president this week.

It will mean another payment of $300 million for fishery assistance nationwide. That mirrors the amount in the first stimulus bill from earlier in the year. Alaska Republican Dan Sullivan says the money will help Alaskans in the industry.

“Of course the Alaska fishing community in my view needs this very significantly, which is why we put it in the CARES Act originally — and this is just a plus up to that exact program,” Sullivan said in a teleconference with reporters before Christmas.

Alaska permit holders and companies could see a total of $50 million from the CARES Act in March, and this new bill will mean additional payments.

The state’s final spending plan for the first $50 million allocates just over $17 million for commercial fishing permit holders, over $15 million for seafood processing companies and over $13 million for the charter and sport fishing sector. The remainder could be paid out to subsistence fishermen impacted by the pandemic and the aquaculture sector. Applications for that program are not yet open.

The appropriations bill passed this month also includes $1.5 billion for the agriculture department to purchase food, including seafood. Sullivan said there’s also grant and loan money for food processing companies to cover costs of COVID-19 protection for their workforce.

“The fish processing facilities, actually, it was one of these things that in some ways fell through the cracks on relief in the original CARES Act funding,” he said. “It was available in the $1.25 billion that the state had, but in terms of federal CARES Act funding program, they really didn’t fit into any of the different kind of buckets of relief. And so we worked to make sure that there was some relief in this next relief package.”

Sullivan also highlighted an extension of the Seafood Trade Relief Program which is making over half a billion dollars available to fishermen impacted by retaliatory tariffs on seafood.

“Sixteen of the 19 products in that half billion dollar program were Alaskan fish products,” Sullivan said. “So that is a program that we got extended for another month that is having a huge impact, positive impact on our fisheries as they go through these challenging times.”

Millions more are appropriated for hydrographic surveys to map the ocean floor, observing ocean conditions, implementing the Pacific Salmon Treaty and studying ocean acidification.

The giant spending bill also ensures seasonal and commercial fishing businesses can increase loans through the Paycheck Protection Program. There’s also a $200 million fund created to support timber harvesting and hauling businesses impacted by the pandemic.

And the legislation extends the deadlines for states, municipalities and tribes to spend CARES Act funding until the end of 2021. Petersburg received $3.9 million in funding and had not spent it all by the end of 2020.

Alaska Republican Sen. Dan Sullivan is highlighting the passage of his bipartisan legislation aimed at cleaning up plastic in the ocean and reducing sources of plastic pollution.

The bill, called Save Our Seas 2.0, builds on the first version of the bill, which was approved in 2018. This update was introduced by Sullivan and Democratic Sens. Sheldon Whitehouse of Rhode Island and Bob Menendez of New Jersey.

Congress finalized the bill this fall, and President Trump signed it on Dec. 18.

“It’s an issue that everybody cares about, cleaning up the oceans,” Sullivan said during a recent teleconference with reporters. “It’s going to be huge for Alaska and our fisheries but really important for America. It puts our country in the lead again on this issue, and it’s a solvable issue. Ten rivers in Asia and Africa are estimated to be responsible for up to 80% of all the plastic pollution in the world, and this targets that.”

The bill aims to reduce the supply of plastic waste entering the ocean with grants for study of waste management and mitigation in the U.S. It also formalizes U.S. policy on international agreements and aims to improve outreach to other countries about the problem.

The bill creates a marine debris response trust fund for cleanup. Sullivan said the bill also focuses on research in that area.

“That has a congressionally chartered ocean debris foundation that will be headquartered somewhere,” he explained. “We think it should be headquartered in Alaska. And I think that’s going to be an important aspect of that bill keeping us on the lead for ocean clean up, the research that needs to go into that and so that’s something we’re going to be following up on.”

Sullivan said a third version of the bill is already in the works.