Northwest

As lawmakers begin to figure out what the makeup of various legislative caucuses will look like, Josiah “Aullaqsruaq” Patkotak is in a slightly different position than most other representative-elects.

With unofficial results coming in two weeks after the general election, Patkotak emerged victorious in the race for House District 40, which includes the North Slope, the Northwest Arctic Borough and several Interior Alaska villages.

While Republicans hold a slim majority in the state House, Patkotak, an independent, says he hasn’t committed to joining a legislative caucus yet. However, he says there are several programs he wants to ensure receive funding.

“As I lump them together, as I’ve had to talk to people over the last couple days, I call them PPT and PCE — petroleum property taxes and Power Cost Equalization,” Patkotak said. “Those are on the list of priorities. There are other things that I’m interested in looking out for, and I’m making sure those are involved in my decision making moving forward.”

With many of the Republicans who’ve been elected to the Legislature in favor of large cuts to funding for state services, Patkotak says he’s opposed to joining a caucus that would cut programs like PPT and PCE.

“Anybody that’s going to look at attacking programs or services that are going to affect my district negatively, that’s not something I’m going to be in favor of, obviously,” Patkotak said.

Gov. Mike Dunleavy proposed transfering oil property taxes from municipalities like the North Slope Borough to the state government last year. He didn’t repeat the proposal this year. And Dunleavy and some Republican lawmakers proposed eliminating the Power Cost Equalization Fund last year. It’s not clear whether Dunleavy will propose a similar change in the budget he introduces in December.

For now, Patkotak isn’t committing to any legislative caucus. He says he hopes to take his role as an independent lawmaker seriously.

“I have this deep belief that a lot of things that I’ve learned going whaling can be applied throughout my life,” Patkotak said. “That’s one of the things. You know when to strike the whale and you know when not to. And I think I’m just applying that same principle here. Like I said, I haven’t committed to anybody. All options are on the table.”

The Division of Elections expects to officially certify the results of the election next week, with lawmakers set to arrive in Juneau in January.

Florence Okpealuk went missing from Nome over two months ago. But the Nome Police Department isn’t ready to let the case go cold yet.

Scott Weaver is an investigator newly hired by NPD. He said they continue to receive analyzed cellphone data provided by the FBI field office in Anchorage. As that continues to come in, Weaver hopes the Nome police can better direct their investigation.

“So, we’re still actively investigating some evidence that hasn’t even come in yet, which will help us hopefully, with some directionals and understanding where people were and who was where that could stir up a new lead for us,” Weaver said.

A spokesperson from the FBI did confirm that the Anchorage office continues to aid the Nome Police with technical assistance in this missing person’s case.

The 33-year-old, Alaska Native mother was last seen leaving a tent on Aug. 30 about a mile outside of Nome on West Beach. Okpealuk’s shoes and jacket were left behind.

Numerous search and rescue efforts, including large community searches and trained cadaver dogs, have yielded no major breakthroughs thus far. Community-organized search efforts have brought volunteers and funding from across the state, including from regional communities like Brevig Mission, Teller, Wales and Savoonga. That’s been the most impressive and most helpful aspect of the whole search for Weaver, who is used to working with large police departments in Florida.

“Look at our department, we have like six or seven people that are officers,” Weaver said. “And maybe one or two that could help on the case at that time, because we’re still handling all these calls for service. So without the help of search and rescue efforts, and all the volunteers in town and the family members, we would have been at a loss, you know, it was a big help.”

Since early September, the department has faced some criticism for what some community members perceive as a delayed search effort on NPD’s part. But the Nome police continually reaffirm they started their missing persons’ response and protocol as soon as Okpealuk was reported missing.

Kawerak Inc. President Melanie Bahnke said in September that she offered to put Nome in touch with FBI resources when she realized that Okpealuk was missing.

“Thankfully they were already in touch with the FBI themselves, so I was really pleased when I found out about that,” Bahnke said.

As November presses on and police continue their investigation into Okpealuk’s disappearance, Weaver is hoping that some technical analysis will reveal a lead sooner rather than later. But Weaver also realizes that winter is no longer on their side.

“I know it’s becoming more difficult with the snow hitting the ground now,” he said. “So search and rescue efforts are going to become more strained with the weather.”

It’s a challenge but her family maintains hope.

“We will not give up,” said Florence’s older sister Blair Okpealuk. “We want answers and closure.”

She continues to organize search efforts and stresses her gratitude for the outpouring of searchers and support for her sister. Some of that has included donations of $1,000 each from Kawerak Inc. and Norton Sound Economic Development Corporation.

Anyone with any information regarding the whereabouts of Florence Okpealuk can call the Nome police at 907-443-5262. Callers can remain anonymous.

After several days of counting votes across the country, Joe Biden claimed victory in the 2020 presidential election on Saturday morning.

The campaign circulated a victory video featuring the jobs and hobbies of Americans from coast to coast. Set to Ray Charles’ rendition of “America the Beautiful,” the video portrayed Biden’s promise to be a president for all Americans. Across various social media platforms, it was viewed over 60 million times.

About 27 seconds in, 28-year-old Jacqui Lambert fills the frame, performing an Iñupiaq dance with Cook Inlet behind her. Lambert had posted one of her dances on Instagram shortly after Indigenous People’s Day in October, and she says the video caught the attention of Alex Troutman, an independent videographer with Blackfish Media.

“He reached out and said that he was in touch with the Biden campaign, and they wanted to do this spot about America and having representation of all kinds of people across the nation,” Lambert said.

A couple days later, Lambert filmed the performance at the Carr-Gottstein Park in Anchorage. She says that because the performance was filmed in October, she thought it was going to be used to try to get out the vote ahead of the election. By the time Election Day came and went, she assumed they weren’t using it.

“It was surprising to wake up the next morning to the video announcing his victory,” Lambert said. “I knew I was going to be a part of this video, but I had no idea that it was going to be on the morning that it’s announced that he had won, after I’d been waiting for so long.”

While only featured for a couple seconds in the spot, Lambert posted the full dance for her social media followers, which had grown since the campaign video was released.

“That was… the Bow and Arrow No Song is what we call it in Kotzebue, but it’s danced across many Iñupiaq and Inuvialuit communities,” Lambert explained.

Lambert grew up in Kotzebue and has been dancing since she was a child. She lives in Anchorage now, but continues to perform with the Kikiktagruk Northern Lights Dancers. Her performance atikluk in the video was made by May Douglas, the dance group’s elder. Lambert says she was happy that the Biden campaign made an effort to show the diversity of America by including its Indigenous people.

https://twitter.com/jacquiiwithacue/status/1325273192844324864?s=20

“It was such a relief to be able to see that embracement, where over the past few years I’ve heard so many comments,” Lambert said. “Trump has made comments about Pocahontas, not knowing the terrible story behind who she really is. And kind of arming a lot of people with this knowledge that use a Native woman’s name as an insult in this political ground.”

Lambert grew up dancing at the local NANA museum for tourists and had always been fascinated by life outside of Kotzebue, and she says she loved being a part of the diversity of the country.

“My inner child is totally amazed by this experience,” Lambert said. “It just feels a little amazing to see even the stories of all these other Americans in this video as well, and seeing the expansion of who we are. And knowing that my simple life and my simple story of growing up in Kotzebue, there was a glimpse of it shown.”

Lambert says she’s hopeful that the Biden administration will address many issues plaguing Native communities across the country, including the alarming rates of missing and murdered Indigenous women.

“Shining more light onto that and acknowledging the situation within the Native community when it comes to this violence and all of this disruption that’s happening and the way that it comes from a colonial perspective in the past,” Lambert said.

Lambert says Native advocates have been more successful in recent years in highlighting the historically testy relationship between Native people and the American government, and the incoming president would do well to learn from that history as well.

Correction: An earlier version of this story misspelled May Douglas’ first name.

As of Nov. 3, sea ice in the Bering and Chukchi Seas is the lowest on record for the last five years, even with tiny bits of ice starting to form in Norton Bay and Kotzebue Sound. One climatologist forecasts that sea ice will form late, the extent will be below average, and it will be similar to last year’s.

The Bering Strait region is on track to have the lowest sea ice extent on record for early November, based on a 15-year dataset.

It started this summer, when May through September again featured some of the warmest ocean temperatures on record. Climate specialist Rick Thoman, with the Alaska Center for Climate Assessment and Policy (ACCAP), said the good news is that summer 2019 was still significantly warmer than this summer.

“In Eastern Norton Sound, in Kotzebue Sound, those are temperatures that are seven degrees Fahrenheit or more above average for that entire five months. And you can see the entire Chukchi Sea, almost all of the Bering Sea in 2019 was significantly warmer than normal. That’s not the case this year, well actually it kind of is, in that most of the Bering Sea for those five months, did end up warmer than normal,” Thoman said.

Thoman points out that in the northern Bering Sea, sea surface temperatures have gone from 42 degrees in the early 1900s up to about 45 degrees today.

“That doesn’t sound like much to most folks, but three-to-four degrees warming of a five-month average, in the ocean…is really just incredible,” he said.

As the average temperature in the Bering and Chukchi Seas continues to climb, and with the La Niña conditions this year, sea ice extent is expected to remain below the historical average. However, Thoman says sea ice in the Bering Strait region most likely won’t be as poor as last year. Nome didn’t see sea ice offshore until late November 2019, and even then the quality was poor.

“It’s still below the recent years’ average, but not as low as last year, but that is a bad comparison for our part of the world,” Thoman said. “Even though the Arctic-wide sea ice extent average for September was the second-lowest on record, the Beaufort Sea kept our area from being as low in sea ice as we saw in 2019.”

Thoman warns that from January to March, if there are strong swings of weather patterns across the Bering Sea, those will absolutely affect sea ice growth.

“This really seems like the kind of situation where we might get three weeks of really cold weather and then the pattern changes and boom — it’s storm after storm after storm. With water temperatures above normal, if ice extent is not much better than normal, then these storms could produce a lot of precipitation,” he said.

Today, according to the National Weather Service and Thoman, a “big Bering Sea storm and associated fronts” are expected to bring a mess of snow and rain along with winds up to 40 mph to the Bering Strait region.

This storm could also raise water levels in the Norton Sound, setting sea ice development back a week or more in the Bering and southern Chukchi seas.

Unalakleet resident Emily Nanouk is fighting the U.S. government in court for the health of her family and the sanctity of her land. Nanouk’s property was contaminated by toxic chemicals which she says had detrimental health effects on her family and home.

Since the 1960s Nanouk has not only used her land in Unalakleet to raise her family, but also for subsistence activities like hunting, fishing and berry picking.  In 2003, she noticed a strange smell and dead vegetation between her property and the abandoned North River Relay Station.

“It’s not gasoline, it’s not oil, it was a sweet smell.  I knew it wasn’t right, there was something wrong.  There was no green stuff around it, there was no green willows, no berries.  [It was] dead around that area.  I knew there was something wrong,” she said.

This relay station was built as part of the White Alice Communication System to allow for early warning of any potential Soviet air attack during the Cold War and was operated by the United States Air Force. By the 1970s new satellite technology rendered these systems useless. So, the Relay Station was closed in 1978 and the Air Force abandoned the site.

“Everybody just kind of packed up and left, I guess, like when you pull out of a war zone,” said Sam Fortier, an attorney representing Nanouk.

Their case points out that in 1981 the Air Force was criticized for doing nothing more than sending a ‘caretaker’ out to the site to inspect the property.  It was discovered that barrels containing highly toxic polychlorinated biphenyls — commonly referred to as PCBs — had been left, not properly disposed of and began contaminating the surrounding area.

Nanouk and her family used the only trail leading from the main road to her allotment, which passed through the contaminated relay station site.  The vehicles they drove picked up and carried the hazardous chemicals onto her property, spreading the contamination.

Fortier says Nanouk believes the exposure to PCBs affected her and her family’s medical conditions.

“Within her own family there have been significant illnesses, those illnesses are really connected to the PCBs. In this case, the PCB level was extremely high.”

According to Air Force technicians that examined the site in 2003, in some areas, they measured PCBs at 40,000 times the level that is considered safe for humans. In addition, Fortier notes a deeper element of emotional trauma associated with Nanouk’s experience.

“It’s also important to understand that in the early days after she [Nanouk] reported the discovery, people went in with basically moon suits to clean the property.  You can imagine realizing that her husband had died because of the cancer associated with the PCBs, that she herself has had health problems, and all of her family has had health problems; only magnified her terror and the loss of use of her allotment.”

Fortier and Nanouk are arguing that this was negligent of the Air Force.  The U.S. Department of Justice, assuming responsibility, declined to comment on this case. The Air Force stated that they could not make any comment in this case due to the ongoing litigation.

Nanouk’s lawsuit was originally halted on December 12, 2018 when United States District Judge Ralph R. Beistline dismissed the lawsuit. However, Nanouk’s most recent victory on appeal in the Ninth Circuit Court means she can keep fighting. This most recent decision was made on September 4, 2020 and the finding was published just after.

Nanouk says she would like to emphasize the importance of health to anyone hearing her story.

“And I would not want anybody to go through this, any family to go through this like my family and I did … [like we] still are going through.  Health is more important than money.”

The COVID-19 pandemic has slowed court proceedings across the state and country, but Nanouk and her attorney remain persistent in pursuing this lawsuit as soon as they possibly can. This case now goes back to the United States District Court of Alaska, but the timeline for a final decision is unclear.

Researchers track the extent of Arctic sea ice every year — essentially, how far it extends from the North Pole. The Arctic sea ice pack is smallest in the fall, after melting and receding all summer and right before it starts growing again through the winter.

There’s more sea ice this fall in the Chukchi Sea than there was at this time last year. But the ice closer to Alaska’s shores is lagging behind.

Rick Thoman, a climatologist with the International Arctic Research Center in Fairbanks, broke the news about the amount of ice in the waters off the coast of Northwest Alaska this year.

“We have much more, about three times more ice in the Chukchi Sea than we did last year,” Thoman said.

Last year saw the lowest fall sea ice extent in the Chukchi Sea on record. Thoman says this year’s sea ice extent is still way below the historical average, and most of this year’s ice is in waters north of Alaska.

“When we talk about the Chukchi Sea here, we’re talking basically to about 78 North,” Thoman said, “so that’s hundreds of miles north of Utqiagvik.”

In the southern Chukchi Sea, Thoman says there’s still a lot of open water. In fact, even though there’s more ice across the entire Chukchi, the ice near Kotzebue and Point Hope is actually weaker than last year.

“Kotzebue Sound is mostly open water at this point,” Thoman said. “So especially on the Russian side, we have even less ice than we had last year at this time.”

Thoman says this year’s forecast calls for storms throughout the coast of Northwest Alaska. Stormy seas make it difficult for sea ice to form.

“We’re going to have a turn towards warmer stormier weather in the Bering and Southern Chukchi Sea,” Thoman said. “We’re going to be very late with starting to form ice south of Point Hope. And we could easily be looking at no ice in the open Chukchi Sea, north of the Bering Strait, well into December.”

Thoman says historically, that ice was formed by mid-November or even as early as October.