KNBA - Anchorage

Alaska State Troopers have arrested two men accused of killing an elder in the Southeast Alaska community of Klawock.

A report of an assault initially brought troopers and emergency medical responders to 80-year-old Lincoln Peratrovich’s home in Klawock early Tuesday morning, according to an online dispatch. But Peratrovich was declared dead at the scene.

The Alaska Bureau of Investigation is overseeing the case, with help from Craig and Ketchikan troopers as well as area village public safety officers.

The bureau says two Klawock men are currently being held in the Craig Police Department’s jail — 22-year-old Moses Blanchard and 21-year-old Blaise Dilts.

Investigators say the two men physically assaulted Peratrovich, which resulted in his death.

Blanchard and Dilts have each been charged with second-degree murder, manslaughter and burglary.

It’s been almost two months since a polar bear found its way into the Bering Sea village of Wales and killed a woman and her one-year-old son on their short walk from the school to the clinic.

Questions still linger about what caused the bear to attack — but more important for Wales and its neighboring communities is the question of how to move on.

The last polar bear attack in Alaska was in Point Lay, 30 years ago, so it’s been hard to see the way forward — just as it was on January 17, when windstorms whipped up whiteout conditions and gave the bear a veil of invisibility to prowl about unnoticed, until it struck.

The name for Wales in the Inupiat language is Kingigin, which means high place. The village, which sits beside a mountain, also hugs the beach. And in the winter, it’s hard to tell where the shore ends and the sea ice begins, ice that makes it possible for polar bears to hunt for seals and other animals that provide the high energy food necessary for survival in the Arctic.

Susan Nedza, the chief administrator for the Bering Strait School District, says it can be an unforgiving land.

“Tough things happen,” Nedza said. “And life in general is a little more difficult.”

And this winter, even more so.

Nedza, who manages the school district from Unalakleet, a community, more than 200 air miles away, heard about the attack over the phone as it happened. She was told that some staffers and other community members had risked their own lives, trying to save Summer Myomick and her son, Clyde Ongtowasruk.

“They were hitting the bear with shovels,” said Nedza. “The bear can be seen on camera leaving that attack and chasing those people up onto the school porch stairs into the front entry way, and the principal managed to close the door.”

Staffers shut the blinds so the children couldn’t see, but that didn’t keep them from experiencing the trauma.

“Each person responds to crisis differently,” Nedza said. “You’re fine one minute. You’re not the next.”

In this constantly shifting emotional landscape, Nedza says staff and students have to be allowed to heal on their own timetable, a process which requires tenderness and patience.

“Some of the students are really struggling. They’re just really, really struggling hard,” she said.

Parents are now asked to escort their children to and from school. There are extra safety patrols around the building. Initially, students returned to a shortened school day, with a focus on emotional wellbeing, followed by a gradual transition back to academics. Parents still have the option to keep their kids home, depending on bear sightings or how they’re feeling that day.

The school now has a snow machine to give teachers rides, and a fence is going up under the shop, an area where the bear was able to hide before it emerged from under the building.

The Kingimuit School in Wales doesn’t usually have a full-time counselor. They rotate between the district’s 15 communities, scattered across a region that’s about the size of the state of Kansas. But since the attack, the district has made sure that Wales always had one on hand.

The community has also taken some practical steps to move beyond the bear. Volunteers are regularly on patrol to watch for the nannut — the Inupiaq word for polar bears.

Michael Oxereok, the Wales representative on the Alaska Nannut Co-Management Council, says the council is working with other organizations to bring back regular patrols.

With a warming climate and less sea ice, Oxereok believes more human-bear encounters are inevitable.

“With sea ice receding as much as it has, bears aren’t able to fend (for themselves) as well as they used to, 15 years ago,” Oxereok says.

Scientists say it’s hard to know how much the sea ice was a factor in the attack. When the bear found its way into the village, the ice was locked in place. But Oxereok says the ocean didn’t begin to freeze until December.

“It finally formed, maybe two or three inches in mid-January,” Oxereok said. “That’s very late for the area of Wales.”

For the bears, the ice is everything. It’s where they dig their dens and hunt their prey. But Dave Gustine, the polar bear manager for the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service in Anchorage, says the ice is just one part of a mystery that was hard for investigators to probe.

“We kind of had to tread lightly,” said Gustine, who said agencies involved in the aftermath of the attack also found themselves in uncharted territory. “And the one thing we landed on, we made sure by deferring to the community and the family’s needs and requests any chance we could.”

After a community member shot and killed the bear, which was a male, investigators took samples from the skull. Tests didn’t find any signs of Avian flu, rabies or other pathogens that could affect a bear’s behavior, but the bear had less body fat than is typical for this time of year.

Recent results for tests on a tooth put the bear’s age at about 17 years old. Fifteen is considered old for a male. Gustine says, this may answer questions about why the bear was in poor condition.

“This bear was in a place where it had to dip into those energy reserves over time, so there wasn’t any fat on his body,” he said.

Other than the bear’s age and condition, Gustine says there’s not enough information to know for sure what caused the attack. Studies show that polar bears in the Chukchi Sea area are, overall, in good health. And until now, polar bears have not really been a problem in Wales, which once had a patrol, but the community lost its funding.

Lindsey Mangipane, a biologist in Fish and Wildlife’s polar bear program says, the money went elsewhere.

“We have some communities that have over 100 calls every year up there that are in town, so that requires a lot of resources. So that that kind of took the majority of our funding,” Mangipane said. “But we do have some great partners now that might potentially have some funding to help out with these other communities. And it’s definitely a priority for us to try to make that happen.”

Mangipane says the interest is high, and there are plans underway for a regional training session to help communities reestablish their patrols. But that isn’t easy to do in cash-poor communities like Wales, where fuel is almost eight dollars a gallon and supplies, which must arrive on a barge, are costly.

But for now, the community takes comfort in seeing snow machine lights off in the distance, as volunteers take turns on patrol. As head of the district, Nedza has watched how communities in the region has get through hard times.

“Even though this is very strange, not something that we deal with at all, people are used to pulling together, supporting each other, giving each other space,” Nedza said, “And giving each other space, I think is very Alaskan.”

In the Russian Orthodox tradition, a week of memorial services concluded last month for Elizabeth Kudrin, a woman whose family says her legacy is that of a “great survivor.”

Kudrin died just a few days after her 82nd birthday. She was born on Attu, a tiny island in the far Western Aleutians in 1941 — the same year that Japanese planes bombed Pearl Harbor. In June of 1942, more than a thousand Japanese soldiers invaded Attu.

Elizabeth was just a baby, the youngest of seven children, when she and her parents, Olean and Lavrenti Golodoff, along with her family, were taken captive.

In September, the Golodoffs, and the rest of the islanders, were taken to Japan as prisoners of war.

About 40 arrived in Otaru on the northern island of Hokkaido, where they were housed in a big, shabby dormitory. About half of them died by the end of World War II, including Elizabeth’s father, two brothers and one sister.

Kudrin’s husband George says his wife’s passing marks the end of an era. He calls her “the matriarch of matriarchs, the last mom from Attu.”

Her death leaves only one survivor from Attu, her older brother Greg.

Although Kudrin and his wife were a close couple, he says she never talked about the war, partly because she was too young to remember what happened — and what memories she did have were too painful to dwell upon.

Elizabeth’s older brother, Nick Golodoff, described the hunger and starvation in his book, Attu Boy. He said the daily ration, near the end of the war, was only a quarter of a bowl of watered-down rice.

Rachel Mason, a National Park Service historian, says the timing of their evacuation from Attu, which came after the summer fishing season, turned out to be key to their survival.

“The Japanese told the Attuans to pack as much as they could of their subsistence foods, so they brought dried fish,” Mason said. “And that I think saved them, because at least until their fish rain out, they ate fairly well in Japan.”

Mason said Elizabeth’s mother did what she could to keep her children from starving.

“She was reduced to finding orange peels on the ground to feed her children,” she said.

Those who survived the war were not allowed to return home to Attu, which today remains uninhabited. The federal government resettled Elizabeth, her mother and three brothers in the neighboring island of Atka, where her husband George grew up. He remembers stories about how people were puzzled to hear mysterious sounds from this newly arrived four-year-old girl.

“She used to sing Japanese,” Kudrin said. “She used to go under the table and sing Japanese.”

But Kudrin says his wife had no memory of that.

Ray Hudson, a historian who has written extensively about the Aleutians, says the people of Attu are now lost to the footnotes of history, but what happened should not be forgotten.

“These were American citizens and subject to a very high death toll,” Hudson said. “So really, the capture of the Attu people in 1942 sealed the fate of Attu Island in many ways.”

Hudson says prior to the Japanese military invasion, a number of Aleutian villages had disappeared, but Attu was a thriving community.

“The villagers would trap fox, go fishing and made a good living,” Hudson said.

The women, he said, still made the tightly woven baskets that the Aleutians are famous for. But the war changed everything.

“People like Elizabeth are the victims of forces really beyond their control,” said Hudson, who said he was always impressed by her unfailing graciousness. “People like Elizabeth showed amazing courage and resoluteness to start over.”

Hudson said when Elizabeth was taken to Japan, she had to deal with people who didn’t speak her language, Unangam Tunuu. And when her family moved to Atka, she had to learn a new dialect.

“So there’s always this constant reinventing of yourself. And I think Elizabeth showed that resolve and a spirit of renewal that is really in the Unangax people.”

Elizabeth’s family says her life was full of hardships. She lost her first husband in a boating tragedy and outlived four of her five children.

“Anĝaĝinam iĝamanaa,” George Kudrin says in Unagam Tunuu. “She was a good person and she just loved you.

Elizabeth’s husband George says he marveled at Elizabeth’s ability to channel hardship into kindness and compassion for others.

Her daughter-in-law, Crystal Dushkin, said she became a role model to young women in Atka.

“Seeing her example of strength and resilience, in all that she endured in her lifetime, was a real inspiration,” Dushkin said.

Dushkin believes she was also an important tie to the past, whose struggles have helped the younger generation understand the impacts of historical trauma, and how even today, the fallout from war continues.

Dushkin says she grew up hearing adults talk about the war.

“From a young age, I remember knowing that there had been a war, hearing about the war,” she said. “Everybody would always talk about before the war. That was kind of how stories started.”

She says some of these stories frightened her.

“Anytime I heard the plane flying overhead over our village, I would run inside the house, because I thought the plane was going to drop a bomb on our village, because that’s what I grew up hearing about — that planes dropped bombs,” Dushkin said.

Crystal and her husband, Bill Dushkin, love their life on Atka, but as today’s Russian fighter jets — and most recently, a Chinese spy balloon — have crossed into Alaskan air space, they say Elizabeth’s story serves as a reminder that far-flung places like Atka and Attu are still vulnerable, that they could once again be caught in the crossfire between nations. Attu is the only place on American soil that has been occupied by a foreign country since the War of 1812.

“It’s just amazing that it even happened back then, that one of our islands was taken over by a foreign country,” Dushkin said. “But yeah, it could happen here again. You never know.”

Dushkin is Elizabeth’s son, whom she gave up for adoption. It’s a complicated story, one that he began to understand when she gave him a book for his 30th birthday — one that had her picture on the cover — the little girl, who would later become his mother, a prisoner of war, with the number 30 on the front of her dress

Elizabeth’s husband George has two words to sum up his wife’s life and legacy.

“Ayagam Kayutuu,” he says in Unangam Tunuu. “Strong woman.”

It was Elizabeth Kudrin’s strength and resilience that made her a part of Alaska history, which passed with her on Feb. 19 — a woman with a story that few Alaskans, and ever fewer Americans, know.

Editor’s note: Michael Livingston, an Unangan historian, contributed to this story. 

This is the third part of a series. Read the first part here and the second here.

Most evenings, Joe Leavitt, can be found passing the time with a deck of cards at the Barrow Volunteer Search and Rescue Base in Utqiaġvik. He usually plays solitaire by himself.

“Once in a great while, we will have a pinochle game,” he said.

This far north, the weather and climate are generally pretty unforgiving year round. In winter, winds are bitter cold and the season is long and dark. In summer, rains are frigid and winds can make the Chukchi Sea rough. The landscape too can be disorienting. The North Slope Borough includes eight communities scattered across more than 95,000 square miles. There are no trees and landmarks are few and far between.

Leavitt has been a volunteer here for decades and he knows all too well how quickly things can go from good to dangerous.

“I was rescued last summer,” he said. “My boat broke down and they actually went and retrieved my boat for me and helped me get home and it’s a good thing because when we are doing our hunting, we don’t have to pay for the rescue.”

But, that could change. Because according to the Arctic Council, all marine traffic increased by 44% through the Northwest Passage between 2013 and 2019. That means more boats, which could mean more rescues.

“Maybe if a lot of people start coming up here and change everything, maybe you’ll start having to pay for your own rescue,” he said.

Leavitt is also a whaling crew captain. In Utqiaġvik, the region’s rich whaling culture is on full display. Most people walk around town wearing jackets emblazoned with the name and flag of their whaling crew.

According to Leavitt, whaling seasons and search and rescue are the two things that bring the whole community together. And whether searching for a whale, or someone who’s lost in a boat or on a snowmachine, he said people up here never stop looking.

“We had [a few] incidents where people walked home and they thought they were dead and they actually went to their own memorial service. People have done that up here,” he said.

The volunteer search and rescue base operates on a shoestring budget, raising money through pull-tab sales and working with the tribal government and the North Slope Borough to fill gaps.

Curtis Lemen is the base mechanic, one of its few paid employees. He maintains two boats, both decades old. He said one of them was out of commission last year waiting on a new motor. A snowmachine parked nearby is one Lemen might use for parts in the future. In January, he went at least two weeks without a paycheck. Finding a regular and reliable source of funding is challenging.

“That is our hindrance. We barely get by with some of the maintenance that we do,” he said.

The North Slope Borough also operates a search and rescue program. At roughly $14 million dollars, its annual budget is more robust. The program’s key assets, two airplanes and two helicopters, are housed in a giant hangar alongside Utqiaġvik’s runway.

Josh Grier is the chief pilot. He said the North Slope is on its own.

“To be able to stage [a rescue] up here typically takes days to be able to get a Coast Guard asset or National Guard assets. Twenty-four hours probably at the very bare minimum, sometimes longer,” he said.

The closest U.S. Coast Guard base is roughly 940 miles due south of Utqiaġvik. By sea, that distance more than doubles. Last October, a Coast Guard helicopter hoisted a crewmember off a Canadian icebreaker 200 miles northeast of Utqiaġvik. The medivac was successful, with help from the borough, but Grier said they wouldn’t have been able to do it alone.

“We have hoist capabilities, but we are not capable,” he said.

He said it would take a much more robust training program and budget to be able to take on that kind of rescue at the borough level.

In 2019, nearly 500 passengers were hoisted by helicopter off a cruise ship in southern Norway — the largest rescue of its kind in Norwegian history. Leadership from the Arctic Council’s Emergency Prevention, Preparedness and Response working group said the incident could be a harbinger for what is to come in the Arctic.

Two years before that rescue, a graduate student in California wrote a dissertation on search and rescue preparedness in Alaska’s Arctic region and found that no single organization in the Arctic has enough resources for adequate search and rescue response, but, together, organizations like the U.S. Coast Guard, the North Slope Borough’s Search and Rescue Department and the Barrow Volunteer Search and Rescue Base are formidable. In fact, experts say that kind of cooperation in the Arctic will become essential as more and more ships pass through the region.

Last August, the Coast Guard, emergency response in Utqiaġvik — including search and rescue — and even the local hospital held a tabletop scenario in which dozens of cruise ship passengers needed help.

“We’re preparing for it and seeing where our gaps and resources lie,” said North Slope Borough Director of Search and Rescue Heather Dingman. “But at the moment, we wouldn’t be able to do any hoisting over the water.”

She added there are other ways her organization could help in an emergency. “If a cruise ship had a landing pad, we could be of assistance.” She said the borough also does something called “search and radio.”

“Where we fly over the water and we can provide communications about sailboats and things like that to the ground,” she said.

For volunteers like Tony Akpik though, it doesn’t matter what’s in the budget, or how many assets do or don’t exist. If needed, he said, he’d always be ready to assist in an emergency.

“We help each other. Everybody, no matter who you are,” he said.

Akpik is Joe Leavitt’s nephew and works on Leavitt’s whaling crew. He credits his uncle with his willingness to help his community. Akpik said volunteering gives him a sense of purpose.

“It takes the community to pull up the whale and we pull up 20, 30 whales a year and it takes the whole community to do that, so we just keep it that way,” he said.

This ongoing series is made possible through a grant from the Climate Justice Resilience Fund.

This is the second part of a series. Read the first part here.

Concerns about national security are heating up in the rapidly changing Arctic. In 2021, the U.S. Coast Guard opened a seasonal airbase in Kotzebue. The community was once home to a permanent Air Force station, but that closed in 1983, as the Cold War wound down.

In recent years, more fighter jets have been based in Alaska, cold weather training for soldiers here has increased and an effort to provide the U.S. Coast Guard with a new, state-of-the-art icebreaker is underway. Russia lies about 250 miles west of Kotzebue and conflict with Ukraine has only fueled discussion about whether a more permanent military presence along Alaska’s west coast is both needed and warranted.

“This is our table,” said Vice President of Lands for NANA Qaulluq Cravalho. “We have to make sure that we’re there when it comes to policy making decisions because there is activity happening.”

NANA is one of the largest Alaska Native corporations in the state. Cravalho is also a member of the U.S. Arctic Research Commission. She said any military buildup in Northwest Alaska should include input from Alaska Natives.

“People can think of the Arctic as this pristine place where there’s no activity happening and that might be relatively true. On the U.S. side, there’s not as much activity, but on the Russian side, there is and all of our food resources go over there and come back,” she said. “So, it’s all one environment. There’s a lot of risk associated with it, and so how do we make sure we’re at the table to define what it looks like?”

In recent years, the Arctic has seen a drastic increase in industrial marine traffic in the region. According to the Arctic Council, marine traffic increased by 44% through the Northwest Passage between 2013 and 2019. As a self-described Coastal Iñupiaq, Cravalho has concerns about what more ships and a beefed-up military presence might mean for subsistence resources in the region. People here are heavily reliant on marine mammals and fish that provide a sustained food source.

“When you’re harvesting, when you’re participating in these activities, this is how you learn our culture and our language,” she said. “This is how it’s passed down generation to generation, because of the close relationship with the land in the water. It’s a primary means not only to provide sustenance for ourselves and our people in our communities. It’s also a primary means for our culture to continue.”

That culture has become a defining feature in Nate Kotch’s life, since he arrived here from Hawaii in his early 20s.

“So, it was certainly a culture shock to me to some degree,” he said.

The Air Force stationed him here in in the 1970s. He is one of the last remaining Kotzebue residents that remembers when there was an active military station here. Today, it functions as a long range radar site, with minimal full time civilian staff.

“It’s taken time for me to even learn what the culture really is in the community,” Kotch said. “I mean, the Native community, you know? What are their values, what are their needs? You know, what are they looking for?”

After his time with the Air Force, he married into an Iñupiaq family and spent 27 years on Kotzebue’s City Council.

He said if the military ever decided to resurrect a base here, the community would need to be involved “because if that doesn’t happen that way, then there’s going to be a negative impact.”

Last October, the United States rolled out a new National Strategy for the Arctic Region. In a video posted to Twitter U.S. Secretary of State Antony Blinken included national security as one of four main pillars of a new National Security Strategy for the Arctic.

“We have no higher priority than defending our country and our people and securing the Arctic is key to that,” Blinken said.

Currently, a military buildup is just a discussion and no decisions have been made to move forward. There is talk of basing Coast Guard Personnel here permanently. There has also been talk of developing a naval base here, complete with a deep water port.

In early August, the Sound bustled with small boats. The fishermen inside lined up at a handful of docks, waiting to offload chum salmon. Overhead, small commuter planes shuttled cargo and passengers to nearby remote villages.

Qaulluq Cravalho said if the military does come this far north, the community will be ready.

“This community is not unfamiliar with it,” she said. “We’ve had a base here in the past. Certainly there’s always that risk of the community changing. So, it’s how we interact with that change that’s really important, right? You know, the tools and types of infrastructure needed to be present here have really changed over time.”

Kotzebue is set back from the open Chukchi sea by nearly 70 miles of shallow, protective water in Kotzebue Sound. So, even though marine traffic in the Arctic is increasing — it can feel far away here.

What 85-year-old elder James McClellan is delighted to focus on is the successful chum fishery.

He’s spent many afternoons sitting on the beach, peering through binoculars as boats pulled in to offload their catch. He said 2022 is the first summer he didn’t fish commercially.

“I just like living from the country,” he said with a smile. It’s good. It keeps you healthy.”

The night before, he said, he’d had salmon for dinner. “Oh, it was good! Fried salmon, fried potatoes and onions and, boy, it was good.”

As McClellan scanned the horizon, what he couldn’t see is beyond Kotzebue Sound: a growing traffic jam of industrial ships, a potential for increased conflict with a foreign neighbor and the unknown impacts of a changing climate on food resources, including the chum salmon.

This ongoing series is made possible through a grant from the Climate Justice Resilience Fund.

By 2050, ships traveling through the Arctic’s Northwest Passage may not need an icebreaker to escort them for the journey. In Nome, residents are wondering whether a new port will help or hinder efforts to address a myriad of chronic social problems. Some are also concerned that an onslaught of industrial marine traffic may impact Indigenous people, who have thrived along the coastline here for generations.

One warm summer day, Austin Ahmasuk stood on Nome’s sand spit. A light breeze blew against his face as he looked over the thin slice of land that lies at the mouth of the Snake River and stretches out in front of the city’s port.

“When you look up ‘sand spit, Nome’ and you look up historical photographs, you’re going to see Alaska Native people living here, celebrating here, harvesting here,” he said.

Ahmasuk grew up in Nome. He has a lot of memories of this place, both good and bad.

“My uncle was working in the tugboat industry and he drowned right over here,” he said. “But I also have really fond memories growing up here, before all these rocks were here.”

He pointed across the spit.

“Cigar fish used to come here and spawn and so myself and a childhood friend — one of us had a box of matches and we cooked cigar fish on a rock and we spent most of the day here,” he said.

A gold discovery here in the late 1890s brought 10,000 stampeders, all looking to get rich. Now, the melting ice caps have triggered another kind of stampede. Large industrial ships can travel through here faster — shaving days off transit times that would otherwise take them through the Panama Canal.

But, Ahmasuk said his memories and the legacy of the Iñupiat who have lived here for thousands of years, shouldn’t have to compete with the modern-day monetary gain some people hope to capitalize on as the Arctic becomes increasingly ice free.

“It’s like a highway going right past us now,” said Nome’s Harbormaster, Lucas Stotts.

Stotts sees Nome as the last pit stop before ships head through the Bering Strait and north into the Arctic.

As the climate warms and sea ice along the northernmost coast of North America dwindles, all kinds of marine traffic — from cruise ships, to hobby sail boats to large-scale industrial ships — is picking up in the icy waters of the Arctic Ocean. According to the Arctic Council, marine traffic increased by 44% through the Northwest Passage between 2013 and 2019.

“There is a lot of traffic that currently isn’t coming into Nome,” Stotts said. “That’s only because they’re too deep draft to come in.”

Anything that rides deeper than 20 feet under the surface of the water can’t dock. He said that’s why Nome needs to expand its port. A $250 million dollar infusion of cash from the Biden Administration’s 2021 Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act means the basin could be nearly twice that deep in coming years.

“We feel we’re already behind the times in terms of what is needed for the region and by the time this thing is built, I think we’ll be behind as we’re already at that point,” he said.

Nine cruise ships passed through Nome last summer, fewer than Stotts expected due to ongoing concerns about the coronavirus pandemic and conflict between Russia and Ukraine.

“We were going to have 24,” he said. “That is massive growth by itself and that industry isn’t basing that growth on our facility. That was happening well before any expansion was ever slated.”

Roughly half a mile from the harbor, at Pingo Bakery and Seafood House, things are pretty quiet after lunch service ends. The restaurant is tiny, with seating for 12, run by Erica Pryzmont. She’s not sure an influx of shipping traffic will influence her business.

“It’s interesting because sometimes the cruise ship visitors just sort of come to the threshold and peer in like you’re some sort of a curiosity or almost like you’re on exhibit,” she said.

Right now, she’s more concerned with trying to find and keep reliable staff to serve the clientele she already has.

A bright red Help Wanted sign hangs on her front door. While she’s looking for employees, others are looking for work. At 4.5%, the unemployment rate in Nome is higher than both the national and state averages.

The Bering Straits region is also facing a serious housing shortage. The local emergency shelter is often full, especially in the winter. Chronic substance abuse is another social ill the community is fighting to manage. And, while there is federal funding for the port expansion, a local funding match is required. So, some residents believe the city should address the issues the community already faces, before assuming millions of dollars in debt the federal government requires in matching funds for the port expansion.

Nome’s Mayor John Handeland doesn’t see it that way.

“You know, if we build all these other resources first because we think we need it, it’s all on speculation,” he said. “And, I haven’t been successful going to my bank and, you know, getting a loan for something that’s purely speculative.”

Handeland said a port expansion will decrease the cost of living while simultaneously boosting long-term investment and available jobs in Nome.

Others in favor say it’s essential for national security. They say it will be crucial for environmental protection and emergency response as more ships traverse the Arctic Ocean in the future. But Austin Ahmasuk calls these “the three big lies.” He grew up in Nome and for years worked as a marine advocate and lobbied for improved food security for Alaska Natives through his Alaska Native Corporation Kawerak.

“It certainly makes sense to shippers that cutting a thousand or so miles or a couple of thousand miles off is cheaper. Right. But it doesn’t mean that it’s less risky. You’re still going to the Arctic. It’s still going to be cold,” he said.

Declining sea ice allows more ships to pass through the Arctic. They are coming in larger numbers through the Bering Strait. With them, they bring more greenhouse gas emissions. At least 10% of ships utilizing Arctic waters today are burning heavy fuel oil, which if spilled, can solidify or remain floating for weeks in cold water.

“The weather is so changeable up here, and it’s shallow,” said Vernon Adkison. A lifelong mariner, he says the Bering Sea is not to be underestimated. “So when the wind really picks up, the seas build quicker than out in the middle of the deep blue sea.”

Adkison stars in the Discovery Channel’s reality show Bering Sea Gold. He’s depicted as a gruff and wry business man, with old-school beliefs and a no-nonsense approach to making money off Norton Sound’s rich ocean floor sediments. But he also has some misgivings.

When ships pull into port at Nome, many use much smaller boats to deliver cargo and people to shore. The process is known as lightering. It’s necessary, because the current port can’t accommodate ships over a certain size. Even with a port expansion, lightering would still need to happen. For Adkison, that means more accidents waiting to happen.

“I know what can go wrong in conditions with no eyeballs on the scene,” he said. “They’re out there littering and doing various things. I used to be a lightering master in the Gulf of Mexico, and I saw what some of those guys will do if there’s nobody watching. And then not everybody is ethical. There are bilges, there are spills, there are all kinds of things that can happen if there’s nobody really keeping eyes on the situation.”

The largest Coast Guard base in Alaska is located hundreds of miles south in Kodiak. It could take days to respond to a shipping related accident or spill in the Bering Strait.

“If it was up to me, I’d like to leave it the same as it is right now. I don’t know if I want to have to deal with all the bigger boats and the bigger industry-type scenario just right there where we start our hunting journeys,” said Ben Payenna.

He fishes commercially for crab, salmon and halibut and when he’s not catching fish as his sole source of income, he’s out on his boat, hunting for his family’s main sources of food: seal and fish, many different bird species and walrus.

“I was able to harvest my first one when I was seven,” he said. “I wasn’t really quite big enough to hold a rifle to my shoulder yet. And so my dad actually sat me in his lap and he held the rifle on his shoulder.”

Payenna said that the whole crew of men he used to hunt walrus with is now gone. And he wonders what else he might lose as declining sea ice makes way for more shipping traffic.

This ongoing series is made possible through a grant from the Climate Justice Resilience Fund.