KSTK - Wrangell

Painted sneakers designed by Wrangell High School students have won at least $15,000 for the school’s art program and have a chance to win more than triple that.

Along Wrangell’s Front Street, almost every store has the same sign in its front window: “VOTE TO HELP WIN $50,000 FOR THE WHS ART PROGRAM,” it says. “VOTE FOR WRANGELL EVERY DAY UNTIL MAY 6.”

The signs have pictures of two pairs of painted Vans shoes. The signs have also been miniaturized and taped to every till at grocery stores in town.

Junior Paige Baggen led the group of students that entered this year’s Vans Custom Culture Contest, where high schools design shoes to represent hometown pride and the legacy of one of the Vans founders.

“I’m so excited. I’m just—” she said, burying her face in her hands and groaning.

The endeavor has paid off. Wrangell’s shoes made it into the first group of 250 competing schools, then made the top 50, and — after a public vote — made the top 5 designs in the United States.

“It feels really, really good that everybody else in the community also thinks that art is just as important as I think it is,” Baggen said. “It’s really easy to be like, ‘Oh, no one cares about art.’ But no, so many other people feel exactly the same way I do. So many people think it’s so important.”

Wrangell community members made social media groups to remind people to vote each day for the Wrangell students’ shoe designs, and they posted those “Vote Wrangell” signs all over town.

The two pairs of shoes — one pair with Wrangell sunset scenes, another with Lingít-inspired formline art, beading, marten fur and buttons — are proudly displayed in the window of a downtown Wrangell business.

“Just to see how the community has come together, all the support was really, really exciting,” Baggen said.

Former Wrangell students and community members spread the voting link coast to coast. Southeast’s regional Native corporation Sealaska and Alaska-grown rock band Portugal. The Man shared Wrangell’s shoe designs. Some students even got to meet U.S. Senator Lisa Murkowski, who posted a video with them on her social media.

The students see Wrangell’s success is an underdog story. Some of the top 50 schools come from communities of hundreds of thousands of people. Generously, Wrangell has about 2,300 people on the whole island.

“It’s great to see that even with a small community, you can win a people’s vote,” senior Rowen Wiederspohn said. “It really just shows that all you really have to do to succeed in life is to try.”

Art teacher Tasha Morse agrees.

“You have to dare to try, you have to dare to make mistakes, you have to put your neck out there. And that’s what all of us have done,” Morse said. “Nationwide, to be in the top 5 is astronomical. We have a high school population of 62 children.”

The art students spent hours brainstorming about what makes Wrangell special, then poured that into the design of two pairs of shoes. Morse says she thinks it shows. When she got the email saying Wrangell had made the top five schools, she says she burst into tears.

“This is probably like the most surreal thing that’s ever happened in my life,” she said. “These kinds of things happen to other people, other people go on game shows and when many other people win contests, other people do this. It’s not something that happens to people like us here at Wrangell.”

Baggen, the lead artist for the shoes, says that she doesn’t feel like it’s a competition, really, now that they’ve made the top five schools — all of them deserve to be there. Plus, each top five school wins $15,000 for its art program.

“We get $500 a year [for art supplies]. If we wanted to save up $15,000, it would take us 30 years. So having this much money right now is literally a dream come true,” Baggen said. “I was reading all the impact documents from the other schools and they were like, ‘We’re gonna build a new computer lab filled with iMacs, and we’re going to create a new department and blah, blah, blah.’ We set out being like, ‘I hope we get some money so we can buy some new paints, or some new paintbrushes.’”

High school senior Sophia Hagelman says one of the best parts of the experience is the opportunity to feel like they’re giving back to the school in a meaningful way.

“I’ve seen where teachers had to use their personal money to buy new products and items that the school just can’t afford,” Hagelman says, “So this would be really good to have because then they don’t have to use all their personal money on things they shouldn’t have to buy.”

Junior Cassady Cowan says she feels like the Vans Custom Culture competition has put Wrangell on the map.

“You have to tell someone where we are, point us out [on a map],” Cowan said, “Just a little island turned into something bigger, look where we ended up.”

The top school in the competition will also win a visit from Vans officials and a school-wide barbecue, among other prizes. The winner of this year’s competition will be announced the week of May 16.

An eight-person crew of scientists, artists and divers are trying to locate the site of one of the deadliest shipwrecks in Alaska history. Most of the victims were Asian cannery workers, and many of their names remain unknown. Expedition members say they hope to find the wreck and shine a light on how those workers bore the brunt of the tragedy.

On a dramatic spring evening in Wrangell — black clouds and sharp shadows in the golden-hour sun — Alaska artist Ray Troll stood at Reliance Harbor, watching a gray metal box being lowered onto the deck of a 72-foot black-and-white ship.

“Those are oxygen tanks, I believe for scuba diving,” Troll said. “They’re very heavy.”

Troll is a part of an eight-person expedition searching for the wreck of the Star of Bengal, an iron-hulled Alaska Packers Association salmon-packing ship that went down in a storm in 1908 off the coast of Coronation Island in Southeast Alaska.

The group includes remote sensing specialist Sean Adams, marine archaeologist Jenya Anichenko, researcher Shawn Dilles, visual artist and writer Tessa Hulls, Wrangell commercial fisherman and diver Gig Decker and a boat dog named Bella. They’re all sailing on the Endeavour, a former U.S. Army boat built in 1956, owned by Patsy Urschel and her husband Bill.

“I think of this as a right brain-left brain, kind of a project,” Urschel said, “So it’s got the scientific aspects of it of discovery. But it has some cultural pieces too.”

For expedition captain Bill Urschel, the project stands out from other shipwreck explorations because of the story of the Star of Bengal.

“This is a special wreck because of the cultural significance,” he said. “It’s not just a ship that went down. It’s a social system that went down with it.”

All but one of the 111 cannery workers on board — from China, Japan and the Philippines — died when the Star of Bengal sank on September 20, 1908. Fifteen of the 36 white crew members died.

“I think that’s where that sense of injustice really kicked in for me,” said Tessa Hulls, a writer and visual artist who’s a member of the Endeavour crew looking for the wreck. For the last five years, she’s been working on a graphic novel exploring three generations of her family, from the communist takeover of Shanghai to the United States.

She says that for the white men who died aboard the Star of Bengal, there’s plenty of information — full names, ranks, even insurance payouts to spouses.

“Then you try and find any information about any of the Asian passengers and it’s always, ‘And about 100, Orientals, Asiatics, or word I’m not going to say’ — you know, they get so lumped together,” Hulls said.

There are conflicting reports about how exactly the Star of Bengal went down in 1908 and what the ‘abandon ship’ looked like, but some first-hand accounts tell of the mates and masters of the vessel — all white — leaving the ship without freeing the cannery workers who were locked in the ship’s forward hold.

Hulls says the story of the wreck says a lot about the mistreatment of Asian workers in the U.S.

“It’s this incredible microcosm that tells us about a century of how Asian Americans were first coming to this country, and what the practices were with them being migrant workforces,” she said.

In all likelihood, Hulls says the Endeavour crew will never be able to find the names of all of the Asian cannery workers who were killed when the Star of Bengal went down.

“But I think telling the story of why we can’t find their names is the closest that we’re gonna get to justice on this,” Hulls said.

Marine archaeologist Jenya Anichenko says the crew hopes to locate and authenticate the wreck of the Star of Bengal and, if possible, bring back one or two small artifacts. She says she’s excited to be a part of a project of such great importance to the community of Wrangell, and one with historical significance.

“A lot of times in the case of shipwreck projects in Alaska, there is always a strong community source beginning and the group of enthusiastic individuals who care for the place and history,” Anichenko said. “And professional archaeologists, if they come into the picture, come as a secondary step.”

In this case, the enthusiastic community connection is Gig Decker. He’s a Wrangell commercial fisherman and diver who believes he found the wreck of the Star of Bengal more than three decades ago and has been working ever since to research and pique interest in the story of the wreck.

“The ship was from Wrangell, they worked here, and they’re a part of my industry,” Decker said. “And I feel an obligation. So, that’s what was really important to me is just to get the story elevated to the level it should be.”

Already, there’s a place set out at the Wrangell Mariners’ Memorial to honor those who died in the wreck of the Star of Bengal, in large part thanks to Decker. 

For Troll, who calls himself a “connector” and brought much of the 8-person crew together, the mission to find and authenticate the wreck is about respecting the humanity of the victims of the sinking, who have since become victims of history.

“There were certain people that were — their humanity was respected and others it was total disrespect,” Troll said. “I hope that what we’re doing here is maybe trying to bring that respect and to honor them in some way.”

The journey of the Endeavour and its eight-person crew started on May 6 at the old APA cannery site — about where Wrangell’s airport now stands. From there, it traces the 82 miles out to Coronation Island — the same route as the Star of Bengal, where they’ll spend a week documenting their efforts to find its wreck.

Juneau-based Alaska Seaplanes is adding a new daily circuit that will connect itka, Wrangell and Petersburg.

The company says it aims to begin flying the route on May 26. The daily flights will leave Sitka at 1 p.m., touching down in Petersburg and Wrangell before returning to Sitka by 3 p.m.

Alaska Seaplanes already has flights to and from Petersburg and Sitka, but Wrangell is the new addition — the fifteenth Southeast community the company will serve.

“There’s a lot of travel that goes on, commerce and people that go back and forth between Wrangell and a lot of other communities in Southeast, especially Sitka Petersburg,” Kline says, “So there’s been a need for a long time.”

Alaska Seaplanes started twice-daily flights between Petersburg and Juneau a little over a year ago.

Wrangell is served by twice-daily Alaska Airlines jets — one northbound, one southbound. Alaska Seaplanes won’t be operating on that kind of scale.

“Our planes are nine-passenger planes, so it’s a very small segment, but it’s a needed segment,” Kline says, “Especially when we’re talking about medical transport for people. Sometimes that very direct route is really a lifeline for people to get the medical attention they need.”

Kline says the Southeast Alaska Regional Health Consortium, which owns and operates Wrangell’s hospital, had asked the company to look into setting up a route linking Wrangell and Sitka, where SEARHC is headquartered.

“They’ve had this request in to us for a while now, and we just had to — as you can imagine, there’s a lot to work through to get airplanes into scheduled service into a community,” Kline says.

Alaska Seaplanes owns the smallest building at Wrangell’s small airport, a brown-and-white trailer. As of now, it’s pretty much empty. It used to be the U.S. Customs Office.

“That [building] right now looks kind of retro-60s,” said Andy Kline, the marketing manager for Alaska Seaplanes, “But we’re gonna try to update it and get it ready for service as we build towards this Wrangell service.”

Despite its name, Alaska Seaplanes operates mostly wheel-based turboprops.

“Every time we get to a new route, it’s really like starting a new business,” Kline said. “You have to get people there, train them up, and we’re having discussions as basic as ‘We need stairs,’ ‘What vehicle should we have there,’ [getting a] de-icer, all that stuff goes into starting up, even for just a one-stop daily route.”

Kline says the route will be run by one of two planes. One could be the Cessna 208B Grand Caravan.

“They’re really a great versatile airplane, especially for conditions in Southeast Alaska,” Kline explains. “They can take off and land in shorter conditions and with lower visibility than a lot of other airplanes.”

The airline also operates Pilatus PC-12s which are faster — Kline describes them as the Ferraris of the Alaska Seaplanes fleet — flying 300 mph with pressurized cabins.

Both planes carry nine passengers, but either way, it’ll be less than an hour’s flying time between legs.

Alaska Seaplanes hasn’t published its new fares yet.

“We want our pricing to be competitive,” Kline says, “So we’re still working on that. The pricing will be a little dynamic.”

Other than office preparations, Kline says everything else is pretty much in place to begin running flights on May 26.

“We’ll get the shag carpeting out of [the trailer],” Kline says with a laugh, “I don’t know, maybe we’ll keep the shag — we’ll see what kind of condition it’s in.”

In addition to Alaska Airlines jet service, Wrangell also has one air charter, Sunrise Aviation, but it doesn’t run flights on a set schedule.

Of the nearly 50 Alaskans vying to fill the state’s seat in the U.S. House of Representatives, only one hails from the small Southeast community of Wrangell. Commercial fisherman Otto “Ottie” Florschutz says he figures it’s the people’s seat, so why shouldn’t a small-town commercial fisherman run for Congress?

Florschutz, 64, was in Kodiak with his grandkids when Rep. Don Young died.

“I had been thinking about it and thinking about it,” Florschutz said. “I came home, and [my wife] Christina said, ‘Hey, you should run for Don Young’s seat.’ And I said, ‘You know, I’ve thought about it.’ A lot of thought and prayer went into it, and I just decided, well, let’s do it.”

He says he knows it’s a stacked field vying to fill the seat, and getting his name out will be hard — made harder because he usually goes by his nickname.

“My name is Otto, but most people know me as Ottie,” Florschutz said. “And in the commercial fishing industry, it’s Ottie on the Adeline. They don’t even know my last name. So here I am, I’ve got an unrecognizable first name and a nickname.”

But that isn’t what matters when it comes to serving in government, Florschutz says.

“It’s the people’s government, you know, it’s for the people by the people, and you don’t need to be a celebrity,” he said. “Name recognition helps, but it’s the people’s government, so I just thought I’d throw my hat in it.”

It’s not his first brush with public service, but Congress would be a larger ballgame. Florschutz has been elected multiple times to Wrangell’s Port Commission, and has served for decades on Wrangell’s Fish and Game Advisory Committee.

Florschutz, who is a registered Republican, says there isn’t a single issue that pushed him to throw his hat in the ring. He’s against abortion and says Alaska’s representative should be, too. But other than that, he says there aren’t a lot of causes or issues he’s attached to other than doing what’s best for Alaska.

“I’ve always been leery of people that had an issue that they’re running on,” Florschutz said. “Because it automatically disenfranchises some people that might not agree with that. So I’m just a conservative person who lives within my means, and I work hard as a commercial fisherman. I’d like to take those values with me and try to apply them on a national level.”

Florschutz has toes in a number of Southeast commercial fisheries on two vessels, the 47-foot Nephi and 35-foot Lehi. His main focus is halibut, he says, but he also holds troll and gillnet salmon permits and fishes for shrimp and Dungeness crab.

“They used to call me the quick-change artist up in Pelican because I could be doing one fishery one day and another one the next, but that was in my younger days. I’m not quite that energetic these days,” he said.

Court records show Florschutz has a couple of hunting and fishing violations: a conviction for an improper identification charge related to commercial fishing in 2010 — for which he paid $325 — and a season and bag limit charge for moose last year, for which he paid $120.

Florschutz grew up working on a tobacco farm in North Carolina, which he says taught him how to work hard from a young age.

“When I was 19, I went on a walkabout and hitchhiked all over the U.S., and I ended up in Sitka, Alaska,” Florschutz said. “I had a cousin there, and he was getting married and I ended up there at his wedding, and you know, just fell in love with Alaska. It was a young man’s paradise, and I stayed.”

Everyone fished in Sitka, so that’s what Florschutz started doing — first as a deckhand and then on his own boat.

Florschutz says he and his wife got some state lottery land in Wrangell in the mid-1980s. All four of their children were born and raised in Wrangell. He says he likes to stick close to home.

“I worked part-time with Alaska Airlines for, I think, 16 years, and retired from them, so I have flight benefits, but I find I don’t travel as much as I always thought I would,” Florschutz said. “I envisioned myself two weeks in Hawaii, two weeks in Wrangell. But I just don’t do that.”

Even if he might miss Wrangell, he says he’s committed to working hard and listening to everyone he represents in Alaska, if elected.

“I don’t know of any fisherman that’s ever backed away from the job because they thought it would be too hard, you know? So I just thought I’d do it and see what happens,” he said.

However, Florschutz says he won’t have much time for campaigning — he’s still got to go out fishing.

“So I’ll probably be available and unavailable, in and out of cell phone signal and just relying on people to keep passing my name around if I get into that top four,” Florschutz said.

Out of the 48 primary candidates for the special congressional election, only the top four from the by-mail election in June will advance. Alaska voters will then rank those four in order in a special ranked-choice contest held in August. It’s a new system approved by voters, who approved Ballot Measure 2 last year.

Florschutz says that he won’t be soliciting campaign donations, but asks that people pass around his website — which is still being built — so more people can learn about him.

“We’ll see if we can just do some grassroots politicking,” he said.

Florschutz says that his candidate website, OttoForAlaska.com, should be finished in the next couple of weeks.

Wrangell High School is one of 250 schools nationwide selected to design a pair of Vans brand shoes that represent the community’s hometown pride. Wrangell students say they’re confident in their two painted pairs of canvas sneakers that could earn their school’s art program up to $50,000 in prize money.

Wrangell High School junior Paige Baggen said it was important to represent local and Native art in their designs.

One pair of Vans — the slip-on style — shows orangey-pink sunset landscape scenes on the toes. 

“So this is just a picture of the nose that I took in front of Bob’s,” Baggen said. “And I just thought it’s a pretty iconic Wrangell symbol. It’s on so many stickers and art and stuff, so it’s got to be on the shoes.”

That’s some Wrangell lingo: the nose is the tip of Woronofski Island, across the strait from downtown. It looks like the nose of an elephant. And Bob’s is the former name of one of the two supermarkets in town, Wrangell IGA. 

The sun setting over the Woronofski nose adorns the summer shoe, along with minute fireworks, bursting over the water painted along the heel — the Fourth of July is Wrangell’s biggest holiday celebration. Snowy sunsets and Northern Lights adorn the other shoe. 

“Winter symbols, summer symbols, just to kind of show like the spirit of our town,” Baggen said.

The second pair of sneakers is covered in red and black Lingít-inspired formline designs — a wolf and a raven. Tiny beaded blue flowers run down the laces, and white buttons line the heels, evoking a Lingít button blanket. Cuffs made of long brown fur spill out of the ankles of the shoes. It’s marten, trapped by senior art student Rowen Wiederspohn almost a decade ago

Baggen spearheaded the shoe-painting project, with assistance from Wiederspohn and other students in the class. Art teacher Tasha Morse says that designing two pairs of shoes wasn’t part of the high school’s curriculum at the beginning of this year.

“We found out about this competition, honestly, through TikTok,” Morse said. “There was a student who was like ‘I found this contest’ and told Paige about it. And Paige was like, ‘Oh my gosh, this is so cool.’”

Morse says that with the help of the school counselor, she filled out the application for the class. 

“Well, imagine my surprise when a few weeks later, I got a ‘Congratulations, you’re one of 250 schools in America to be gifted these vans shoes to paint for a chance at winning $50,000,’” Morse said. “And I was like, ‘Oh man, that just got really real, really fast.’”

It’s a part of Vans Custom Culture High School competition; now in its 13th year.

“The requirements are two pairs of shoes,” Morse said. “One is the hometown pride, which is obviously Wrangell. And the other pair is supposed to be one of the four pillars of the Van Doren legacy (the co-founder of Vans), which I found out are action sports, street culture, music and art.”

For the Van Doren shoes, the students chose to focus on art, specifically Lingít art. Morse says that boiling Wrangell down to iconic images for the other pair of hometown-focused shoes was a collaborative effort. 

“We had some class-wide discussions and my whole entire whiteboard was just filled with ideas like what makes Wrangell — Wrangell? Why are we lucky to live here?” Morse said. “And everything came out. We have the river. We have glaciers. We have wildlife. We have the Fourth of July. We have petroglyphs.”

The whole project came together on a tight timeline, Morse says. A lot of students got sick, some with COVID-19, after basketball regionals in mid-March, and the shoes got lost in the main office’s mail pile for a few weeks. 

Students met every day after school, Morse says, and Baggen took the shoes home over the weekend to continue the work.

“I’d say there’s over 50 hours of work into the shoes easily,” Morse said.

Morse says there’s a buzz in the class; they think they have good chances in the competition. 

“We’re just trying to be very positive and forward-thinking and keep it light,” Morse said. “We went from not thinking that this was probably never going to happen to ‘Oh my gosh, we have shoes and now we’re in the middle of this.’”

Baggen says the school needs the prize money. 

“Of course, there’s lots of schools across the nation, and everybody is suffering from the same issues,” she said. “COVID is a problem, it’s hard to get people to work, but we have really specific issues that apply only to us.”

Morse says Wrangell’s schools have had to cut back on art offerings.

“The last couple of years, I’ve been the art teacher, and I am a trained music teacher,” Morse said. “There are things that I can do in art; there are things that are very similar: mindset and creating, and the ‘Don’t give up’ attitude, and those kinds of things. But we went from having full-time art a few teachers ago to now it’s just myself and another teacher at the middle school, and that’s our art program right now.”

But it’s not just a personnel issue. Supplies are also expensive to get to an island.

“I just bought a gallon of milk for $9 at the store, and a gallon of paint is more expensive than that,” Morse said. “Add in barge costs or USPS charges, UPS charges or FedEx or whatever, it’s expensive. We do clay, we do glass, we do painting, we do portraits, we do all these things. And those are expensive. They don’t regenerate themselves. You can’t pick up the thing that you made last year and turn it into something new.”

Baggen, who wants to go into animation as a career, says she thinks it’s vital for the community to have art programs in the schools. Entering this competition could be a way that she and the other students give back, she says. 

“It’s important,” Baggen said. “You want a well-rounded, good, valuable education for your children. And we only have one school. So this is something that we can kind of offer to the community as, you know, we’re trying to improve things and make sure that everybody can get a good arts education because arts are super important.”

Walking outside the school to take photos, one of the hometown pride scenes miniaturized on the shoes appears in real size: down the hill from the school parking lot, the elephant nose of Woronofski Island looms over the water. 

In the next few weeks, judges at the shoe company Vans will determine the top 50 schools, and then open up a public voting period online from April 25 to May 6. There’s more information about voting on the contest’s website.

If Wrangell is one of the top five schools, students could win between $15,000 and $50,000 for Wrangell High’s art program. 

Correction: Cassady Cowan’s last name was misspelled in a photo caption in a previous version of this story. This story has also been updated to correct the type of fur used on the Van Doren shoes. The previous version stated it was ermine, but it is actually marten.

The Alaska Board of Fisheries meeting on Southeast regulatory changes is in full swing in Anchorage, but there’s still a vacancy on the board 40 days after the governor was supposed to appoint a successor.

That may pose issues at the two-week meeting, were the only coastal member of the board, Petersburg’s John Jensen, says he will likely have to recuse himself from more than a third of the 150-odd proposals due to conflicts of interest.

Passing a proposal requires four votes on the seven-person board. As KFSK reports, if Jensen or another member has to sit out, or a board member is sick, the board will be down to five voting members. Proponents of a change would have to convince four of the five remaining, or 80%, to pass a proposal.

The vacant Board of Fisheries seat was left open after board member Indy Walton resigned early this year, citing personal commitments and a spate of bad health. He sat on the board for four months and was never formally confirmed to the position by the state Legislature.

With Walton’s seat still unfilled more than 70 days after it was vacated, it’s the second time in a row the seat has gone unfilled past the legal 30-day deadline for appointing a replacement. Before Walton was nominated to the board, the position sat open for 115 days, even though Walton had applied for the seat soon after the Legislature rejected a controversial nominee, Abe Williams, from the position.

Board of Fisheries members are nominated by the governor and confirmed by the Legislature. A spokesperson for Gov. Dunleavy said in an email March 10 that the administration is still taking applications for the vacancy and that the governor intends to pick a qualified nominee “as soon as possible.”

Dunleavy’s office has not responded to a request for information about applicants to the open Board of Fisheries seat submitted March 10.

After the Southeast Board of Fisheries meeting wraps up on March 22, the board is scheduled to begin a statewide meeting on shellfish and salmon on March 26.