Aleutians

Unalaska’s neighboring communities of Atka and Nikolski — as well as St. George in the Pribilof Islands — are almost completely vaccinated against COVID-19 through the tribal vaccine rollout.

“We’ve got enough vaccines to get everybody completed,” said Lori Jackson, a nurse practitioner and medical director for the Aleutian Pribilof Islands Association, which operates the tribal community clinic in Unalaska.

The Oonalaska Wellness Center is acting as a “vaccine hub” to get doses out to those communities in the Aleutians and Pribilofs that APIA serves. Jackson said that’s anywhere between 450 and 490 people across the four communities.

“I have honestly been a pest, in a lot of people’s words,” Jackson said. “I have advocated, advocated, advocated over and over for our population as a whole in Unalaska, and our surrounding villages.”

According to Jackson, Indian Health Services has allocated 1,100 doses of the Moderna vaccine to the region, to date. Seven hundred have arrived, and 400 are still on the way.

“To be clear, this is first and second doses,” Jackson said. “So really 1,100 sounds like a lot, but that is only 550 [doses] to cover our tribal members in our region.”

Once APIA completes vaccinations for tribal members who want it, the Qawalangin Tribe will determine who’s eligible next for the vaccine, Jackson said.

“Our Alaska Native and American Indian population has a much, much higher risk of contracting COVID and a much worse outcome, should they have it,” she said.

She says it’s her responsibility to provide health care to the Native population, but it’s also important to protect others in the community.

“I continue to advocate for our entire population of Unalaska, not only the Native population,” Jackson said. “We have an entire fishing industry that we need to get [vaccinated] because we’re surrounded all the time by people, by our neighbors, our friends, our family, regardless if they’re beneficiaries to the Indian Health Services or not.”

Vaccine eligibility has recently been opened up to non-Natives who live with tribal members, according to Alysha Richardson, emergency response and community safety coordinator for the Qawalangin Tribe.

For the next distribution, she said the tribe is discussing prioritizing community service organizations with congregate living, as well as workers at organizations and businesses that interface with the public, “such as certain city departments, grocery stores, the airport, KUCB, the Museum of the Aleutians, etc.”

APIA has been allocated just 100 vaccine doses so far for the month of February, according to Jackson, but she said she will continue advocating for more.

“That’s what we were allotted in January too,” she said. “So I’m going to keep pestering people, and hopefully the door will open and more will come on in.”

The tribe is conducting outreach to tribal households to make sure everyone that currently qualifies is made aware and to prepare for the next prioritization, Richardson said.

Near the base of Mount Newhall in Unalaska, among several weathered Russian Orthodox crosses, a tall stone marks the grave of seaman Charles Moulthrope.

Moulthrope was buried in Unalaska in 1896, at the age of 23, after he died during service in nearby waters. But 125 years later, his name lives on, as a recently commissioned U.S. Coast Guard cutter now carries the name Charles Moulthrope.

This will be the first modern Coast Guard cutter named for an enlisted member of the Revenue Cutter Service. The ship is meant to bring recognition to the sacrifices made by Moulthrope and other sailors who served in this precursor of the U.S. Coast Guard, according to Senior Chief Petty Officer Sara Muir.

“The first ten revenue cutters were ten oceangoing cutters,” Muir said. “We’re talking about wooden vessels with sails that were built at the behest of the United States Congress in the early 1790s, largely to crack down on smuggling.”

Moulthrope is recognized for heroically saving his crewmates, while they were serving off the Oregon coast.

“They encountered a storm and several shipmates went overboard,” Muir said. “And he saved them almost single-handedly, diving over the side of the ship with a rope, while his shipmates on the vessel towed them back aboard.”

Not long after this heroic act, Moulthrope died near Unalaska, after he fell from the rigging of the ship to the deck, while trying to unfoul a flag.

The cutter named for him is part of a group of Sentinel-class 154-foot fast response cutters, Muir said. It is the first of six of these ships that will be homeported in Bahrain to support the U.S. Naval Forces Central Command, and which will replace older, smaller cutters.

“It’s designed for multi-missions, including drug and migrant interdiction ports and waterways, coastal security, fisheries patrol, search and rescue and national defense,” Muir said. “We are acquiring these to replace the 1980s-era, Island-class, 110-foot patrol boats.”

According to Muir, when those vessels are decommissioned, they can be used for a variety of things.

“Some of them have been used as artificial reefs,” Muir said. “Some of them have been used as training vessels or have been transferred to other U.S. government agencies and some have been sold through the Excess Defense Articles Act through the State Department to navies and coast guards of other nations.”

There are currently 40 fast response cutters, like the cutter Charles Moulthrope, in service, two of which have homeports in Alaska.

Muir said the Cutter Charles Moulthrope will be escorted to Bahrain with its sister ship, the Robert Goldman, which will be commissioned next month in Florida.

Alaska women who live in rural and remote communities usually travel to city centers to give birth — against incredible geographical odds. COVID-19 has made a hard trip even more daunting. A dramatic example of that is in Unalaska, where the only commuter airline went out of business during the pandemic. That is especially hard for pregnant women, who can’t postpone appointments.

Pregnant women don’t have the option to have a hospital birth in Unalaska. They’re referred out to hospitals on the mainland, usually about 800 miles away in Anchorage. They’re asked to leave at 36 weeks, but sometimes women wait too long.

“My call phone rang and dispatch said, ‘Hey, we’re just calling to tell you there’s a woman on our way to the clinic in labor,’” said Sara Spelsberg, a physician’s assistant at Iliuliuk Family Health Services Clinic in Unalaska.

She got the midnight call a few years ago, but the memory is fresh. She asked the dispatcher to send backup paramedics.

“I looked out the window and I saw a truck screaming into the parking lot,” she said.

“I’m in my pajamas, I don’t have gloves. I don’t have anything. I jumped into my flip flops. And I ran down the stairs outside. And I ran up to the car and I said, ‘Let me get a wheelchair and we’ll get you inside.’ And the mom said, ‘I don’t know if there’s time.’”

There wasn’t.

“It’s raining. It’s dark outside. It’s like 11 o’clock at night, and it’s cold. And this baby comes shooting out into my hands and his dad’s hands. We both caught him,” said Spelsberg.

The umbilical cord was wrapped around the baby’s neck. The baby was blue. Spelsberg described it as “Smurf” blue.

“I’ve been in medicine for a really long time. And I did not even know that people could be that shade of blue,” she said.

Bear in mind, even a medevac is a three-hour flight. It had been a decade since Spelsberg had delivered a baby

“I put his little feet in between my fingers, because I only have two hands, and I held him upside down and I used my other hand to unwrap the cord around his neck. And — I smacked him on the behind. And he started to cry. And he turned pink, and it was just the most beautiful cry sound I’ve ever heard in my life,” she said.

Paramedics showed up. Mom and baby were fine. That was before the pandemic.

COVID-19, and no regular air service

Health care professionals and moms say the threat of COVID-19 ratcheted up the anxiety factor of third trimester travel. Then Ravn Air, the airline that served the Aleutians with daily flights, went under in April. Providers were worried that type of scenario could play out again. (Ravn airlines resumed flights in November of 2020.)

“I had to just call moms and say, ‘I don’t know when we’re going to get you out. We’re working on it. We’ll keep you posted,’” said Jennifer Heller, a nurse midwife at the clinic.

To be clear, she says no one has gotten stuck giving birth on the island since that night.

“We did have some gaps in just regular, routine prenatal care and then getting women out for their routine but very important 20-week ultrasound, the women who were 20 weeks right about in those two months,” she said.

To get in and out, women had to charter flights. Heller says it took some explaining, but the clinic got the cost covered by Medicaid. It’s the source of coverage for more than half of women who give birth in Alaska. But everyone else has to pay for tickets. Heller says a charter flight will put you out $1,300 round trip, for one passenger. She spends a lot of time now writing to insurance companies on behalf of her patients to try and get charters covered.

And Medicaid will put you up in hospital housing, or a hotel if that’s not available. But if you want a kitchen or a little more space because Anchorage restaurants, stores, and other public spaces are shut down or restricted for COVID-19 — that will cost you.

“I mean, like, our savings are gone. Like, like that was it,” said Megan Dean.

She found out she was pregnant in December, just months before the pandemic really shook the nation. She was one of the moms whose prenatal care got delayed when RavnAir stopped flying. She ended up chartering a flight to her 20-week ultrasound.

“It’s always kind of like a crazy appointment anyway going in. And then it’s just like an additional anxiety going on,” said Dean.

Her baby was fine. She got to go home and wait until 36 weeks to return to Anchorage. But when she got there, she ended up staying in the city for 2 months. The baby was two weeks late, then they decided to hang around until after a first pediatric appointment rather than having to make the flight twice.

They had to charter another flight home — in a tiny plane, in a pandemic, through Bering Sea weather. With a newborn.

“So, you know, the plane’s tilting, and there’s like men on the plane screaming, and she’s just like, ‘this is awesome.’  She’s the best flyer,” Dean said.

“She’s kind of been, oddly, a rock through all this? Because she’s just phased by nothing.”

It’s a lot of miles and money and time. But this is the fix. The alternative is having babies outside — way outside — of a hospital setting. And Dean did have some complications in labor.  She ended up transferring from a birth center in the city to the hospital — an easy drive in Anchorage, but a high-stakes gamble from home.

She said her daughter, Morwenna, is fine. She’s still a rock.

Unalaska’s largest fish processing plant reopened Monday after a COVID-19 outbreak forced it to shut down for almost a month.

UniSea closed its doors Jan. 5 after a handful of workers tested positive for the virus, following a New Year’s gathering in company housing.

Since then, 66 of UniSea’s more than 900 workers tested positive for the virus, according to UniSea President Tom Enlow. Seventeen of those were during their two-week entry quarantine, and 49 were non-travel related cases, he said.

“The virus has not been eliminated just yet,” Enlow said in an email. “We have active cases in isolation that we are monitoring and close contacts in quarantine that we are continuing to test. But we feel very good about our response to the outbreak and containment thus far.”

The reopening is a bright spot for the Bering Sea fishing industry, which has been hampered by COVID-19 outbreaks at multiple boats and onshore plants.

UniSea’s processing plant has a year-round workforce, and its facility handles multiple species from cod to crab. The shutdown came just as it was gearing up for one of its busiest times of the year — the lucrative winter fishing season for pollock, which goes into products like fish sandwiches, fish sticks and sushi.

The pollock season opened Jan. 20 but the 11 boats that typically deliver their catch to UniSea have been able to hold off, Enlow said.

That’s because the pollock fishery operates as a cooperative, where vessels have a fixed quota of fish they can catch and deliver to a specific plant. Crews that don’t catch their quota now can still catch it later in the season, industry officials say.

“Our fleet have been extremely supportive of our situation and patient with our reopening schedule,” Enlow said. “But they, like UniSea, are anxious to get the season started.”

Enlow said despite “gaining ground on containment” and restarting operations, UniSea will continue to test its workforce every three days until no one tests positive for the virus. It will also continue to limit access to the UniSea complex, which is “challenging,” according to Enlow.

That’s because UniSea is not a completely closed campus like some other plants, and many employees have families who live or work in the community.

“The community risk level remains at ‘high’ with community cases popping up every day,” Enlow said. “As much as we don’t want to be responsible or the source of a spread into the community, we don’t want the community impacting our workforce either.”

While UniSea’s “hunker down order” is in place, the company is helping with the delivery of homework packets to the 46 students who live in facility housing, Enlow said. Students living at UniSea will continue home-based schooling, despite local schools returning to a modified in-person learning platform Monday.

“The school district appreciates and supports UniSea’s efforts to contain the spread of the virus through their hunker down orders,” said Unalaska City School District Superintendent John Conwell. “Once the hunker down is lifted, we will look forward to welcoming students from UniSea back at school.”

The financial impact from the plant closure has been “substantial,” according to Enlow. Outside of the company’s big hotel and restaurants in Unalaska, he said UniSea only makes money when it’s processing fish.

“The costs related to COVID mitigation are substantial and are only exacerbated when trying to manage an outbreak,” he said.

Onshore processing plants in the Aleutians were largely successful in keeping COVID-19 out of their facilities last year. But this year appears to be posing more of a challenge, as companies contend with much higher rates of COVID-19 in Alaska and the Lower 48, where many workers come from.

UniSea is one of three onshore plants in the Aleutians that COVID-19 outbreaks have shut down this year.

Alyeska Seafoods in Unalaska shut down a week ago after the city said that a cluster of workers tested positive for COVID-19. And Trident Seafoods’ huge plant on the remote island of Akutan, about 35 miles northeast of Unalaska, remains closed after more than a third of its workforce contracted the virus. Health officials said Monday that 302 of 701 workers had tested positive at the Akutan plant, and the company confirmed Tuesday that a worker died there over the weekend. The cause of death is under investigation.

“The pressure on processors to prevent or contain the virus is immense,” Enlow said. “There is so much at stake in our ability to open up to take and process deliveries of fish and crab.”

While Alaska’s seafood industry has lobbied for early vaccine access for workers, Alaska chose to vaccinate its elders before starting the process for essential workers outside of health care.

Enlow said that it’s “nerve-wracking” to see the virus get into Aleutian processing plants despite strict mitigation measures.

He said he thinks the state and federal government should prioritize vaccination of essential industry workers “regardless of their state residency status,” particularly in Unalaska, which is located 800 air miles from Anchorage and is the largest community in the state without a critical access hospital.

Forty-two of UniSea’s 930 workers have already received the first dose of the Moderna vaccine, according to Enlow. They have been people 65 and over considered “high risk” or company medical personnel, he said. Another 10 high-risk workers are slated to get their first dose in the next few days.

The first time Martin Stepetin went to the Unangax̂ cemetery at Funter Bay, he didn’t know how to find it.

“We looked all over inside of Funter Bay,” Stepetin said. “We went up to people’s cabins. And we’re asking folks, ‘Hey, do you know where this is — where the Aleuts were kept?’ And many people didn’t even know. And they lived there.”

The cemetery holds the graves of 30 to 40 Unangax̂ people who died at Funter Bay during World War II. In 1942, the U.S. government forcibly removed them from the treeless Pribilof Islands in the Bering Sea and took them to the Southeast rainforest about 1,300 miles away — with only one bag apiece and no hunting or fishing gear.

At Funter Bay they were left to fend for themselves, living in tents and the remains of an old mine and cannery, without clean water or medicine. About 10% of them died — mostly young children and the elderly — before they were allowed to return home in 1944.

Stepetin’s grandparents were held there. When he found the cemetery, he realized that anyone who stumbled on it would have no idea what they were seeing.

“Why is there a cemetery in the middle of the forest out in Funter Bay?” Stepetin imagined them asking. “Who are these people? What happened, and why are they here?”

Preserving that history is part of the impetus behind a bill that would add about 250 acres of state land, including the cemetery, to Funter Bay State Marine Park. That would mean the land couldn’t be sold or developed, and people would always be able to care for the cemetery so it wouldn’t gradually vanish in the forest.

But the bill serves a more immediate need.

Serafima Edelen is from St. Paul. She’s acted as a liaison between Pribilof elders and people in Southeast Alaska working to preserve the history of the internment. Edelen said the bill would also give people in the Pribilofs peace of mind that their loved ones won’t be disturbed.

“Our traditions — once somebody is laid to rest, they’re laid to rest,” Edelen said. “What we wanted was to know that they were going to be protected, they’re going to be safe. This land will be protected, and we don’t have to worry about them.”

‘We didn’t have a lot of persuading to do’

The bill to add the Funter Bay cemetery to the marine park almost became a law last year.

Edelen, who traveled to Juneau during the last legislative session with a delegation of elders from the Pribilofs, found most lawmakers were receptive.

“We met with a lot of representatives and legislators and went down to try to help promote the bill and make sure it was going to get passed and make sure we had the support we needed,” she said. “And almost everyone that we met with — we didn’t have a lot of persuading to do.”

Juneau Rep. Sara Hannan, the bill’s sponsor, said the elders’ work had an impact on lawmakers

“They came to understand the historical significance and importance of honoring those who were forcibly taken from their homes and died in custody of the U.S. government through neglect,” Hannan said.

She said the bill was well on its way to passing, with solid support from Senate leadership and committee chairs when the pandemic cut the session short.

For Hannan, who taught social studies and Alaska history before entering politics, passing the bill this year is a priority.

“I think it’s really important that we honor those families and protect their dead and that site,” she said. “And it allows us to point to educating Americans who don’t understand when we say ‘a relocation camp.’”

‘People do not know that this happened’

For the people working to get the Funter Bay bill passed, it’s only a starting point.

Niko Sanguinetti of the Juneau-Douglas City Museum describes the bill as part of a larger Funter Bay project that also includes a museum exhibit and a set of interpretive panels to be placed at the cemetery.

She helps coordinate among the groups involved in the Funter Bay project. They include the museum, Friends of Admiralty Island, private citizens, several Native governments and associations, and state and federal agencies. Together, they’re trying to preserve the history of the internment and the places where it happened.

“What we keep hearing from people here in Juneau, and really throughout the country, and throughout the world is that people do not know that this happened,” Sanguinetti.

Sanguinetti said the interpretive panels, which should go up in Funter Bay later this year, are “meant to follow the journey of the people” — from the forced removal, to captivity in Funter Bay, to rebuilding their wrecked houses when they returned home.

She said bringing the narrative through to the present was important to the elders who worked on the panels.

“Even though this is a terrible event, it didn’t destroy them,” Sanguinetti said, “And it doesn’t completely define them. So we wanted to make sure that we ended with the idea of hope.”

One of Serafima Edelen’s roles was working with Pribilof elders to make sure the panels and museum exhibit would get the story right — and tell it in the right way.

Edelen said in the past, many of the elders who went through the internment had been reluctant to talk about it. And they didn’t always agree on how much of the truth — which Edelen describes as “pretty dark” — they wanted shared.

For a long time, many of the people who were interned did not share their memories with their children and grandchildren at all.

“I hear a lot of stories of, you know, trying to listen through the vents when their parents or their older siblings would talk about being interned and the evacuations,” Edelen said. “And if they got caught, they were in trouble.”

She thinks part of the reticence was to protect younger generations from the trauma:

“I went through it and I’m just going to deal with it. You don’t need to know about this, you don’t need the hurt, I can handle it,” Edelen said.

There are important parts of the story that few outsiders understand: that the Unangax̂ were taken from a treeless island with endless views and dropped in an entirely alien, closed-in, forested landscape; that the men were forced to return to the Pribilofs in summer to hunt seals, leaving the women and children alone in Funter Bay; and that when it was over, they came home to find their houses ransacked and shot up by bored soldiers — and many of their religious icons gone.

Working with the elders ensured that those parts of the story would be told. But Edelen said everyone agreed it was important to tell the story in a way that would show the strength of the Unangax̂.

“We’re not trying to say ‘Woe is me,’” she said. “We wanted to portray that what we went through was uncalled for. There was a lot of mistreatment, a lot of trauma that happened, but the biggest thing we want to portray here is how resilient we are. We got through this. And we got through it together.”

‘It’s everybody’s history, not just ours’

Sanguinetti describes the Funter Bay project as a model that, if it succeeds, can be carried over to the other internment camps in Southeast Alaska. Funter Bay was a natural starting point because the cemetery is on state land, which means the site can be protected without asking anyone to give anything up. And Hannan said the bill, if passed, will not cost the state anything.

Some of the other sites could be more challenging.

Hannan said families have lost access to the cemetery at Killisnoo, near Angoon. The land changed hands a few years ago, and the new landowner has barred families from visiting the gravesites, citing liability concerns.

Stepetin hopes the group will tackle that one next.

“We want to get the Killisnoo cemetery back into a respectful order,” he said. “And bring that site out of private hands, hopefully, or at least gain reasonable public access to that cemetery.”

He said bringing the Funter Bay model to all of Southeast is a huge undertaking, but he sees the work as necessary.

“This history is just not Aleut history,” he said. “It’s Alaskan history. It’s American history. You know, it’s everybody’s history, not just ours. This could happen to anybody.”

COVID-19 has hit another processing plant operated by fishing giant Trident Seafoods — this time aboard one of the corporation’s massive factory trawlers, the Island Enterprise.

Trident announced Thursday that five workers on the football field-length ship tested positive for the coronavirus after it arrived in the Aleutian port of Dutch Harbor for the winter fishing season.

The news comes amid a still-growing outbreak that’s already shut down Trident’s massive processing plant on the Aleutian island of Akutan, just as the lucrative Bering Sea pollock fishery was set to ramp up. That outbreak has infected 266 of Akutan’s 700 plant workers, Trident announced Thursday.

COVID-19 has also closed two other major processing plants in Unalaska, threatening to derail the pollock season. Trident, in a prepared statement, said it was mystified about how the virus evaded the ship’s quarantine protocols and infiltrated the campus of the isolated Akutan plant.

“We’ve reviewed our quarantine strategy and other prevention protocols throughout our closed-campus and vessel operations,” said Stefanie Moreland, a Trident executive. “We have not detected a gap that would explain how the virus entered, so are consulting with our medical partners on additional testing options to supplement current strong prevention measures.”

The Akutan plant shut down a week ago after a handful of workers tested positive for COVID-19, just as the billion-dollar pollock season kicked off.

Bad weather delayed shipments of the supplies and the arrival of medical workers Trident needed to conduct mass testing of its large Akutan workforce. But company officials said Thursday that nearly all of the plant’s workers have now been tested, and it should be able to continue testing every one-to-three days.

“This will allow us to be confident in assessing and reporting on our progress toward recovering from this outbreak,” Moreland said.

Workers who tested positive in Akutan are isolating in company housing and have been separated from individuals who tested negative, Trident’s statement said. Some 100 workers considered “high-risk” have been taken to Anchorage to quarantine.

“Our people are safe, supported, and have been cooperative through the disruption necessitated by isolation efforts to eliminate the virus from their living and working quarters,” Moreland said.

Onshore processing plants in the Aleutians were largely successful in keeping the virus out of their facilities last year, despite flying hundreds of workers from around the world to process Bering Sea pollock, Pacific cod and crab each year.

But this season is proving to be more of a challenge, as COVID-19 has become more rampant in Alaska and Outside.

The Island Enterprise arrived in Dutch Harbor on Wednesday with two workers showing COVID-19 symptoms, and testing subsequently revealed the five total cases onboard.

Trident said it believes the virus was detected early, but due to the close quarters on the boat, it plans to re-quarantine the full workforce for at least two weeks, Moreland said.

Neither the Akutan plant nor Island Enterprise are currently operating, Trident said. The company is focusing its efforts on eliminating the virus to support a safe return to work, its statement said.