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Millions of visitors flock to Southeast Alaska tourism hubs like Juneau, Ketchikan and Sitka every summer. But, when the cruise ship season comes to a close, it gets pretty quiet. 

Each town has a relatively small year-round population compared to the number of people who visit them. But, soon those populations are projected to get much smaller. 

According to a recent report by the Alaska Department of Labor and Workforce Development, Southeast Alaska’s overall population is projected to drop by about 17% by 2050 — or roughly 12,000 people. That’s about the populations of Sitka and Wrangell combined.

Compare that to Alaska’s overall population, which is projected to drop by 2%.

Brian Holst, the executive director of the Juneau Economic Development Council, said without more people moving to the region, Southeast Alaska can’t sustain its population. And, it could have adverse impacts on the region’s workforce and economy. 

“People are choosing to live elsewhere, we think in large part, because for all the attractiveness of Juneau, for too many families the price of a home and the cost of being here is just too much of a challenge,” he said.

The total population of Southeast Alaska is roughly 71,000, with close to half living in the capital city. Southeast Alaska relies on its year-round residents for a lot of things — like the tourism industry, fisheries and state jobs. 

According to the study, the loss in population comes from a mixture of increased outmigration and deaths outnumbering births in the region.

Because while Southeast Alaska’s population grows smaller, it’s also growing older. It’s actually older than most of the state. According to a 2024 report by the Juneau Economic Development Council, the over-60 population in Juneau outnumbers the under-20 population.

Fewer people in the region equals a smaller workforce, less young people going to schools and fewer people to care for the aging population. 

The Juneau School District has already been grappling with declining enrollment for decades. There are just simply fewer students to fill the schools than there were a few decades ago.

“When you have inadequate transportation in Southeast Alaska and inadequate school funding, you really eliminate two of the biggest incentives for young people to stay in Alaska,” said Juneau School Board member Emil Mackey.

At the start of the school year, Juneau’s high schools and middle schools consolidated. It was a decision made by the board in part to address the dwindling number of students. Mackey said if the younger population continues to decline, elementary school closures could be next. 

“No matter how many kids we have, we have the same infrastructure costs  — it costs the same to paint a building if there’s one student or 300 students in it,” he said. “I would believe, yes, future closures would have to be necessary.”

More people simply need to move here, Holst said. That’s hard to do as Juneau isn’t building housing fast enough to meet its changing demographics, and the cost of living and rent continues to rise. 

“It comes down to the cost of living,” he said. “While you can have a job, does it pay enough to be able to afford Juneau’s high cost of living, and more specifically, housing, or housing costs? Our housing costs continue to be very high. For young people in particular, it’s really hard to make ends meet here in Juneau.”

But, Holst said these are just projections and there’s still time to reverse course. The projections are based on the last several years of population trends. 

“I see the glass half full here. I think we have challenges ahead of us, but there are things that we can do to make our community a little bit more affordable,” he said. 

Holst said that includes things like building more affordable housing and supporting child care, which the City and Borough of Juneau has been prioritizing. On a positive note, according to the state’s study, Southeast Alaska’s communities’ wages rose the most in the state in 2023. 

This is Tongass Voices, a series from KTOO sharing weekly perspectives from the homelands of the Áak’w Kwáan and beyond.

Ariel Estrada wrote a one-man play that’s coming to Juneau this week. In fact, it’s the world premiere of Full Contact, a play that stretches from his father’s immigration to Southeast Alaska, to teaching LGBTQ+ self-defense at a martial arts dojo in New York City. 

The show’s run in Juneau kicks off Wednesday with a pay-as–you-can preview.

This transcript has been lightly edited for clarity.

Ariel Estrada: Performing this play in Southeast Alaska — it’s so wonderful to be coming back here back to my roots, basically.

Hi, I’m Ariel Estrada, and I am the writer and performer of the play Full Contact, which is performing at Perseverance Theater, December 6 through 22nd directed by Leslie Ishii. 

I lived in Alaska since nine years old. My dad was in the Coast Guard, and we transferred to Sitka, and he fell in love with Sitka, and he had to stay. And in many ways, I’m so glad that I have come back here, because there’s parts of my time in Sitka that are actually reflected in the play. And the history of Filipinos in Alaska is also reflected in the play.  

The short version of it is that Filipinos came up here for the salmon fisheries because there was — we called the Manongs, which in Tagalog means the brothers — who would travel up and down the West Coast.Oranges, apples, fish every year, because they were itinerant workers. 

The times when they came here in the late 19th century, there wasn’t the ability to really stay in many communities. Because they were segregated, they were kept out of being able to actually maintain a place to stay. This thankfully started easing up over time, and they were able to start settling in the places that they were being migrant workers at, including Alaska, Southeast Alaska in particular. And because of that, there’s a pretty significant Filipino population here in Alaska.

So Full Contact is my story of being in a martial arts group training heavy duty,  full contact martial arts for about 20 years of my life, and they were pretty incredible, 20 years, because that was also my coming of age in New York. I had just been doing martial arts since college, and then I got really into it when I moved to New York and ended up opening up a martial arts school with some friends of mine.

At the same time, I was also sort of coming of age as a Filipino person, right, learning more about my identity as a Filipino person, also as an LGBTQIA+ person in New York. The AIDS crisis was starting to become a manageable disease for certain communities, right? And what did that mean as part of that coming of age, right? 

And also in that background, having this martial arts organization sort of overarching the entire experience. 

It’s been a really amazing process being both the playwright and the performer, because I have to literally take off one hat in one moment and another hat in another. So the playwright in me will write something, and then the actor will come up onto the stage, start rehearsing it, and go, “Who wrote this? This is not working.” And then I had to take off that actor hat, put on the playwright hat, and working with my director, “Go, why isn’t this working? Let’s rewrite it.” 

And it’s literally happening within a 10-minute span. We’ll write an entirely new scene and figure out that what we were working on before wasn’t working, and then make it work within that 10 minutes. So it’s a fast and furious process and so much fun. Kind of reminds me of martial arts, actually.

And there’s so much of a collaborative process of being able to create this beautiful, finite experience that people will experience live for the first time. And I strongly believe in my heart that theater can do something that film and TV can’t, right? There’s that immediate communal experience that only happens in a room with people in that second and in that time, and it will go away forever after that, but will live on in their hearts, hopefully as they go out into the world and bring those lessons, or that emotional journey with them as they go out into the world and hopefully make the world a better place. 

This is Tongass Voices, a series from KTOO sharing weekly perspectives from the homelands of the Áak’w Kwáan and beyond.

Earlier this month, we heard from Master Carver Wayne Price and his apprentice Skaydu.û Jules, who are working on a dugout canoe, or yaakw, in Juneau for Goldbelt Heritage Foundation. 

Today, we hear from another apprentice: Moria Johnson-Sidney shares how carving has added stability to her life during a tumultuous time. 

This transcript has been lightly edited for clarity.

Moria Johnson-Sidney: My name is Moria Johnson-Sidney. I’m a volunteer apprentice carver. This is my first time working on a dugout. My father’s clan is Kaagwaantaan. My family’s from Yakutat and like Klukwan area, my Lingít nickname is G̱ooch Yádi.

This project, and in general, it came into my life at a very delicate time, I guess. So it’s been kind of a stabilizer for me. I’ve lost a lot of family this year. You know, lost a lot to alcoholism, different types of addictions. I’ve had a lot of issues on my own. 

And so this carving project, it’s really put things into perspective, I guess. And it’s definitely, like, kind of helped me put myself back together, I guess. But, it’s been really, really special to me. 

You know, there’s like — not to get cheesy, I guess. But, you know, some people they start going to church, or like they find God, or they make art, or they make stories. Some people make boats. I guess, just different things to kind of patch up their, you know, smaller parts of their damaged selves. 

But I’m from Yakutat. My family is from Yakutat. And they have, they have cultural things here and there. They’re in a celebration. They have the Lingít language in the schools, but they don’t have boats. 

So I want to bring dugouts back home. And I definitely have a lot of family that could benefit from it: cousins who are younger than I am, who struggle with alcohol. It starts when you’re like 11, 12, 13. But, yeah, carving kind of found me. I mean, well, Goldbelt kind of kept me in the carving realm ever since I was 15. 

Basically, you know, I kind of veer off and get distracted by different things that aren’t really as important, and they always kind of finally bring me back.

This is Tongass Voices, a series from KTOO sharing weekly perspectives from the homelands of the Áak’w Kwáan and beyond.

Last week we heard from Master Carver Wayne Price, who’s currently carving a dugout canoe — or yaakw – in Juneau. Today, we’re hearing from one of the apprentices working alongside him.

Skaydu.û Jules first started learning from Price in Angoon a few years ago. They were working on the first dugout to be carved there since the village was bombarded in 1882.

Jules is from Teslin, in Canada’s Yukon Territory. She now lives in Juneau, where she’s training to become a Lingít language teacher and hopes to one day help carve a canoe solely speaking Lingít. Price said it’s amazing to hear her bringing language back to the practice of carving.

This transcript has been lightly edited for clarity.

Skaydu.û Jules: Yoo x̱at duwasáakw Skaydu.û. They call me Skaydu.û, and I’m a carving apprentice under Wayne Price. And he says I’m the language person. 

The last project in Angoon was shorter spurts here and there, when I could go over and volunteer my time.

And then ever since then, Wayne has said, because I got had the experience to go on a few journeys with him, like across the Salish Sea and through Tribal Journey, that it was time to do a dugout from bark to boat launch, which is the whole process from the log, and being able to see it all through.

And so this experience has been really full and like holistic, with so many of the teachings that I never learned from doing the whole process last time. 

I was brought into carving, probably by Wayne, mostly. Yeah, I when I came here, I moved here to go to school and learn Lingít at University of Alaska Southeast, and learned a lot from Heather Burge and X̱’unei Lance Twitchell. 

And from there, I had the experience to take a few carving classes and then a domino effect to really starting in these bigger healing projects with Wayne as my teacher mentor, my uncle, Lingít way. So it’s been a really amazing experience, and really like healing to a lot of my spirit being here. 

It’s really hard to describe it. It can really feel like a sense of really putting the community above the individual, like when you come here, you’re part of a family, and not just the people who are here on this earth, but our Haa Shuka [ancestors] are the ones who came before us, and we’re doing this for our future generation of people, so they have this teaching, and we could pass on this teaching and learn this knowledge from Wayne.

So being able to practice this and all these chips represent a lot of our people who are struggling from drugs and alcohol and mental health, and to be able to be a part of something like this is just really makes the heart full, because I know that for my own experience, it has done a lot for me and has saved my life in a lot of ways. 

I’m actually going to school to be a Lingít language teacher, and it’s a big part of my goal to do land-based teaching. So what that’ll look like is, you know, eventually, bringing a bunch of people out and doing this all in the language. So it’ll be a few years til that happens, but I’ll be done with school this year, and then we’re working on translating a lot of this knowledge into Lingít so we could start teaching our younger generations. 

The invitation is that it’s not like a closed-off group, like it’s we’re always welcome to share these teachings of the healing powers of dugouts and Wayne invites you know everyone, if they have somebody who’s struggling or they know somebody that really needs help, that they can come write their family members name down on a wood chip. And then when we do our ceremony of steaming open, the dug up will be burning those wood chips in honor of all those people who need that extra support and this healing energy. 

This is Tongass Voices, a series from KTOO sharing weekly perspectives from the homelands of the Áak’w Kwáan and beyond.

Master Carver Wayne Price has carved 15 dugout canoes, and he’s been instrumental in bringing the art of carving boats back to Lingít people.

Now, he’s working on a dugout canoe — or yaakw — for Goldbelt Heritage Foundation in Juneau.

Several carving students and apprentices are working alongside him under a big tent in Lemon Creek, using adzes to chip away at the inside of the dugout. 

For some of them, it’s their first time. Price carved his first canoe about four decades ago. 

This transcript has been lightly edited for clarity.

Wayne Price: When I first finished that one, we threw it in the water, and I paddled from Skagway to Chilkoot, and that was in the 80s. How cool is that? You know, that’s the first dugout back in the waters in a long, long, long, long time. You know, I was just young and ignorant and dumb, just jumped in and took off, and we made it. We happened to make it. 

That was the beginning of bringing dugouts back to our communities where they belong, where people have a chance to use it.

My name is Wayne G. Price. My Lingít name is Kaajis.yoodzi.áxk. I come from the village of Kake, Alaska on my mom’s side, and Klukwan on my dad’s side.

We have a pretty select crew, and they worked real hard, through — no matter how windy, tarps blown away, pouring down rain. We kept going.

Everything we’re doing is a tribute to the ancestral heritage that we’re trying to keep alive. 

You got to imagine 40 to 60 dugouts in front of each community, all up and down the coast, all made out of a tree. The Northwest Coast is famous for ocean-going dugouts, and that’s a tough, tough pair of shoes to fill. 

And you know, because a lot of people can claim to make a dugout, you also have to make it safe, because your kids are going to be in there, your wife’s going to be in there, your husband will be in there. 

I never had a mentor, and everything I’ve learned is by repetition. And I’m still learning. You know, this is my 16th dugout, and I’m still learning. You still learn this and that about each individual dugout.

And that’s with my apprentices, they’re all going to be next. They’re going to be next. When you look for a dugout to be built, you’re going to be looking in their direction, and they’re going to know. They’re going to have all the knowledge that it takes to be able to successfully put a yaakw on the water, safely.

They’re learning. They’re learning every step of the way. And I’m very proud of them. They’re doing a fantastic job. I look forward to in the future that we could have several yaakws in every village again.

What a good time that’s going to be. 

Working on my 16th dugout. Nine of them are still in the water, being used today, all over in the Yukon and then Southeast Alaska. I’m the only one that can say that. 

Nothing easy about a dugout. It’s hard work. It’s hard work making them. It’s hard work making them float. It’s hard work to keep people safe. It’s hard work outfitting them and pulling.

All I’m doing is trying to accomplish what’s been done for time immemorial. So I’m just trying to match what has already been done. I don’t know who figured it out first. I’d like to meet him someday. 

A group home in Juneau for women experiencing addiction or leaving incarceration has just reopened after being rebuilt following flood damage. T’áa Shuyee Hit Haven House is now accepting applicants. 

Haven House is run by the Central Council of the Tlingit and Haida Indian Tribes of Alaska. Christina Lee is the operations manager for Tlingit and Haida’s Reentry and Recovery program. She says Haven House is a place for new beginnings. 

“The women in our community, and everywhere, need to know that there’s a safe place to come,” Lee said. “Need to know that there’s an opportunity to start over.”

Up to nine women can live there and it costs $600 a month. Each resident gets their own room and must participate in programs that support mental health and recovery. 

The group home in the Mendenhall Valley originally opened as a nonprofit in 2015. Tlingit and Haida had just taken it over in 2020 when, months later, the entire house flooded and was shut down. 

After rebuilding from the ground up, Tlingit and Haida began accepting applications for residents last month. 

The program doesn’t allow children to live in the house with their parents, but kids can visit. The same goes for romantic partners. 

The program is voluntary and requires participation in programming, so Lee said their applicants tend to be more self-selecting. They’re women committed to their healing and recovery. 

“They have to be able to do chores and be responsible, as long as they can live in a community with other women and be able to hash out any differences that there is,” she said. “That’s kind of what we’re wanting.”

Lee says the program lasts two years, but if life circumstances change, it can be shorter. 

Tlingit and Haida President Chalyee Éesh Richard Peterson says programs like Haven House mean that women can take steps away from old, harmful patterns. 

“We’re excited that it’s a place that’s going to create a supportive environment, hopefully to reduce relapse, reduce recidivism,” Peterson said. “And help our folks break those cycles that have kept them trapped in difficult situations.”

The application process is ongoing. More information can be found on the Tlingit and Haida website, or by calling 907-463-7266.