Tongass Voices

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

Mitch Erie is a U.S. Forest Service firefighter based out of Wrangell, but he says the job takes him all over Alaska and the country. 

The Forest Service is recruiting more firefighters now. There are 17 open positions in Moose Pass and Anchorage in the Chugach National Forest, and in Juneau in the Tongass National Forest. Applications are open through next Tuesday.

Listen: 

Mitch Erie: My name is Mitch Erie. I am currently based in Wrangell as the assistant module leader of the Fire Program.

So this is my eighth year with the Forest Service, my first year working in Alaska. Actually, I did my prior seven years working in Idaho on the Sawtooth National Forest and on the Nez Perce Clearwater. Similar jobs as to what I’ve had now, mostly based on hand crews. And this year, I wanted to try something new, so I went for it and moved up to Alaska, and I’ve been loving it so far. 

So the majority of the firefighting I do requires travel to either the interior of Alaska. I didn’t sign it up there at the start of the year on the Kuskokwim River, about two and a half hour flight to the west of Anchorage. And then just this last week, I got back from another assignment, and we were working in Colorado and Idaho. 

I’ve had a lot of moments on some pretty hard hikes where you got 50, 60, 70 pounds of equipment and stuff on your back. Where you’re you’re going up a mountain that seems to just never quite want to end, and it’s just false ridge after false ridge, and you’re kind of working your whole way up to and next thing you know, you’re sitting the top with all your new best friends and laughing and smiling and looking out across the landscape, or some shifts that never quite seem to end, and the hours keep just plugging on away and away and away. 

I formed some really close bonds with people that I still talk to you on an absolutely everyday basis. I would say, for me personally, probably the best parts can also be some of the most challenging parts. 

Living a life on the road can be challenging. Obviously, you’re away for long periods of time, you miss stuff. You miss birthdays. There’s people that I haven’t seen in a few years that I really love to and it’s just challenging with the scheduling. 

And as much as I love spending time outdoors, after two weeks outside, you’re pretty ready for a shower and a night in the bed. 

I know that I’ve definitely had some of the most awe-inspiring moments of my life in this job and without the opportunities that wild and firefighting has brought me. I mean, just this summer, I went on a flight through the Alaska Range out to our work area on the Kuskokwim River. And I don’t know if I ever would have done that in my life. And we were, we had, I think eight of us smashed into this tiny little airplane, and every single person was glued onto the window like a little kid, just awestruck at what we were flying through. And it just opens a lot of opportunities that you never otherwise see in your life, I feel.

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

Meghan Tabacek has been with Trail Mix, Inc. for four years now, and she’s done a lot of the dirty work. The nonprofit has maintained many of Juneau’s beloved trails since 1993, and she says the crews look a lot different than they used to. 

Volunteers can join in on trail work each Saturday this month. This weekend, volunteers are meeting at Black Bear Trail from 9 a.m. to 3 p.m.

Listen: 

Meghan Tabacek: I’m Megan Tabacek, and I’m the executive director at Trail Mix, Inc.

Our season starts in May, and I started in April. Luckily, I had been working with Ryan for a long time. I’ve been at Trail Mix for four years now, so I had a running start compared to other directors, but it definitely was a busy time. 

Trail mix is a very interesting kind of nonprofit. You got to know how to do the trail work, but then there’s also, like, all of the meat of running a nonprofit.

I actually was never supposed to work at Trail Mix, and then the pandemic happened, and one of the few jobs that was happening was trail work, and I’d always really wanted to do it, but I thought of — saw myself more as a guide. But then pandemic, I applied. I absolutely loved it. 

At the end of my summer, I was going into my senior year at UAS in the environmental studies program and needed an internship, so I begged Ryan O’Shaughnessy, who was the former director, for an internship. I got one, and then I just never really left. 

I loved learning — building trails is really fun. Learning about why and how we build trails is really cool. So it was just really fun, learning about all these inner workings and what goes on behind the scenes just to make a half-mile stretch of trail better. And so I was hooked. I’ve really worn all the hats there is to wear at Trail Mix. 

Almost every single weekend this entire summer, we’ve had a volunteer group out on the trails, and it’s really cool to see how much our community loves our trails and wants to spend a sunny or rainy Saturday on the trails with us. 

I am not the buffest person in the world, and I was really nervous about that when I first started working for Trail Mix — and this is actually something that’s been really, really cool over the past five years at Trail Mix — is you used to have to be pretty buff. I mean, it wasn’t a straight up requirement, but in years prior, we hired just people who are great at trail work and were really strong. 

And then a couple years ago, during the pandemic, we made this shift of saying, “What if we just hired really good people and taught them how to be trail workers?” Because, turns out, you can teach good people how to be good trail workers, but you can’t teach good trail workers how to be good people. 

So if you were to look at photos of Trail Mix 10 years ago, it’s primarily 25 to 30 year old white men — maybe a couple women, very infrequently. That was actually one of the reasons I almost didn’t apply to Trail Mix, is because I didn’t see any women in the photos. 

And over the past five years, you know, we’ve seen a huge swap in our demographics. This year, we have more women and nonbinary people working at Trail Mix than men. 

One of the great things about trail work is there’s always workarounds. You know, you can’t lift something up with your hands? Ask a partner, and maybe you’ll do a team lift. Something’s too big for the whole team to lift? We’re gonna set up a grip hoist and use mechanical advantage to lift this thing. So there’s really all sorts of workarounds. And, oh, you’re not comfortable with chainsaws? That’s fine. There’s always other tasks. A lot of tasks go into making a trail happen. And so there’s always a place for everyone on the trail. 

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

Nutaaq Doreen Simmonds is an Inupiaq actor and language teacher. She was seen by more than 12 million people playing an auntie to Jodie Foster’s step-daughter in the latest season of True Detective. She’s also appearing in a comedy set in the Arctic — North of North — debuting next year on Netflix.

She plays the grandmother, Aaka Mary, in Cold Case, a play opening at Perseverance Theater this weekend.

Content warning: This interview contains mentions of suicide and violence against Indigenous people.

Listen: 

Nutaaq Doreen Simmonds: I gave you my Inupiaq name, Nutaaq. My other name is Doreen Simmonds, and I’m from a place that was known as Barrow for a hundred years, and we just got the name back, Utqiagvik, which means “a place to pick roots.”  

Oh, it was a friend of mine who emailed me something about auditioning for a part in True Detective. She came over with her phone, with her phone, and she helped me do the audition, rather then and there. And they liked it, so I got the part.  

Aaka Mary. I’m the grandmother to the young lady who is looking for her Auntie’s body, Aaka Mary’s daughter.

It happens to be a cold case. She’s been missing for about nine months.

And Aaka Mary doesn’t know too much — not too much about English and gets confused and takes, kind of takes it out on her granddaughter. She’s just a grumpy, grumpy old lady.

There’s still two sisters who were brutally killed. It still hasn’t been solved, and that was 20 some years ago. And also my favorite Auntie’s granddaughter, who was killed and wasn’t found all winter, until people who were walking the beach several miles down found her body. 

It brought back memories, and there are others.  

I had to laugh at myself the way I was before, when I finally found myself, and it was through my older sister. I was near offing myself when I called my sister at midnight. And through her suggestion, I found that myself — this skin and bone was really not the real me. There was a bigger part of me, like an iceberg. 

For most of my life, I thought of myself as that part, and found there was a bigger, deeper part of me, and I began to be kinder to myself and to others. And it took a while, but I learned to be comfortable with myself and not be so judgmental toward others, because I was learning to be kind to me.

And so in that process, I learned to look back at myself how I was before I learned to forgive myself for having been that way.

I grew up very, very, very shy. My grandmother called me Nipailuktaq after a bird that would — very quietly — would swoop down and scare the heck out of us while we were in the tundra because we’re too close to her eggs.

This was an opportunity for me, because I had just finally — at my late age — finally admitted I’m an artist, and I need to work as an artist and acting is an art.

My son, he tells me, “Mom, we just don’t know what you’re going to do from one thing to the next.” But he said, “I have never heard you talk so happily about a job you’ve had before.”

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

Sh Dei Wooteen Jeni Brown is a Missing and Murdered Indigenous Peoples’ advocate. Last week, she offered a training that honed in on one aspect of violence that people sometimes overlook — stalking. 

For Brown, this work is personal. She’s a survivor and she’s lost family members to domestic violence. And often, a stage of that increasing danger is stalking. 

Content warning: This interview contains mentions of domestic violence and violence against Indigenous people.

Listen: 

Sh Dei Wooteen Jeni Brown: You don’t have to be quiet. We’re not in the day and age where you’re quiet about this. If they’re doing something that makes you uncomfortable, speak up. Everybody has a warrior inside them, and it’s time for them to wake up. 

My name is Jeni Brown. My Lingít name is Sh Dei Wooteen. I am T’aḵdeintaan from Hoonah, originally Glacier Bay. 

[The trainings] started because I am an advocate for missing and murdered indigenous people, and I’m an advocate for people that are incarcerated. I’m an advocate for recovery. And I feel like this training, the stalking awareness and prevention training, ties into domestic violence, sexual assault, missing and murdered. It all plays a part — like a beginning. You know what I mean?

Sometimes it’s re-traumatizing. Sometimes it’s healing, because I’m not a person that’s gonna sit there and be quiet about things like this. You know what I mean? Like it needs to be brought to the light. We’re no longer in the generation of what happens in the home stays in the home. 

I’m a firm believer in like, “No, you did wrong. We don’t deserve that.” A lot of the self-care that I do is — I’m in counseling. I do counseling with the Community and Behavioral Services with Tlingit and Haida, and I have a good support group. 

I talk to my pastor, I talk to my friends. I’m really well supported. I talk to my sponsor. I’m really well supported in things that I do. You know what I mean, which makes me feel like I am the one that needs to reach out and show people. You know what I mean? 

I’ve said many times in many interviews before that I want to be the light so that people from the dark can see the light and come towards that. To be the path and help people, because I don’t want to stand on a platform by myself. You know what I mean? I feel like we all deserve to be on that platform. 

It kind of really opened my eyes, because I’m a person that likes to be doing awareness trainings in our community, to be like, “Hey, this happens in our community. Please don’t turn a blind eye. It could be your neighbor. It could be somebody that you see every day and not know.”

People use it very loosely, like, when people say, “Oh, I was stalking you on Facebook last night.” Like, we need to end that kind of language. You know what I mean? Because it’s something; this is something serious. 

What happens when the victim gets a restraining order, and the stalker comes forth and kills them, you know what I mean? And nobody took them seriously, because everybody uses it so loosely. “Oh, I was stalking you at the store,” or if you see somebody more than once at the store, “what are you stalking me?” You know what I mean? Like the language in itself needs to stop. 

I always have the saying that my door is open, my phone’s always on, my door is always open. If this is happening, don’t be afraid to reach out. I know that our services in Juneau are limited, but it doesn’t mean that we don’t have a community that cares. 

There’s always somebody — I feel like every person should have that one support that is there through thick and thin, and will answer at the drop of a dime at three o’clock in the morning. And I like to be that person, because I don’t want somebody to feel like they’re alone. 

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

James Houck has shuttled tourists around town on his bike for seven years as the owner of Juneau Pedicab. It’s his retirement job, he says, and he loves running a tourism company that doesn’t emit carbon or use fossil fuels. 

Listen: 

This transcript has been lightly edited for clarity.

James Houck: My name’s James P. Houck. I’m a retired Coast Guardsman who lives in his favorite place on Earth. I run a human-powered tourism business. We call them pedicabs, and we take passengers from the docks and the hotels around town, and we bring them into Juneau and show them the best of the best. That’s pretty easy to do in such a wonderful place. 

The great thing about being retired and having a pension is, while you’re busier than you’ve ever been in your life, you get to choose how you spend all those hours. 

I think it’s important for them to know that we are doing our level best to accommodate the number of people who want to come and visit, and that if we are saying that we’re at capacity, we are at capacity. This is a town that does not boast. It’s a town that does not hyperbolize. And we can feel it. 

And I don’t really think people have a feel for what their impact is when they pull in here, and I think the city of Juneau is doing a good job of trying to mitigate some of that. You know, we’re looking at electrifying these two docks so that the ships don’t run their generators all day long while they’re sitting here.

Well, it’s a giant game of dodgem, and we smile and we laugh and we sing and we never raise our voices at people. And so far, knock on wood, we have not impacted anyone. We haven’t run over anyone’s toes. We haven’t run into anything. And in eight years, that’s a phenomenal record. 

But in large crowds, how we get through is we ring our little bell and we sing songs like “Joy to the world, all the boys and girls.” When the people hear that kind of discord, they’re like, ‘What the heck? How could a person sing that badly and be so loud?’ And they get out of the way in a hurry.

And then when I find a spot in the crowd where it looks like I can get away with it, I pull over and I show off our rain chimes. So the rain is captured in the bowl and funneled into the tube, and about every quarter inch of real rain fills the tube all the way to the top. It gets top heavy, leans down to dump its water and then rings a gong on the rebound. This one is C sharp, the longest ones are F sharp, and the shortest ones are A sharp, forming the chord F sharp major.

Now back in 2017, the first day I operated, it probably rained an inch and a half, and I was cruising down this dock, and one of them went off. And I’d never seen them before. No one had told me about them. I nearly jumped off my pedicab into the weeds. 

I looked in the mirror and said, ‘James, you worked from the time you were 12 until you were 18, roofing houses, and then you never worked again until you were 44, because the Coast Guard treated you so well. Why would you pick a job where you had to work?’ And the next day, I put in an application with Kris McClure to run one of his pedicabs, and he called me up and he said, ‘Is this a joke?’ I said, ‘What’s funny about it?’ He says, ‘I have never heard of anyone with a master’s degree from Princeton wanting to run a pedicab.’ I said, ‘Well, I want to run a pedicab, and I will be out there every day if you give me a job.’ That’s when he told me he married a woman that didn’t like Juneau and he needed to get out. Three weeks later, I wrote him a check, and I had to figure it out from there.

I thought that I was going to be running short run taxi services, and my customers would say, ‘Hey, what’s this?’ I’d say, ‘Well, I can tell you about that, but I’d have to charge you for the time.’ They’d say, ‘Okay, do it. Tell me about it.’ So that’s how I got in the business of turning this into a tour company. 

So now, instead of running from the Franklin dock as fast as I can to get to the Red Dog Saloon, I ride two or 300 feet and I stop and I tell a story. I ride another two or 300 feet and I stop and I tell a story. I still burn over 4000 calories a day, and can eat whatever the heck I want, but I figured out a way to do it without a battery, without a motor, and be able to do it — I hope — until I’m in my 60s and 70s. So we’ll see. 

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

Every summer, the docks of downtown Juneau are packed with tourists. Among the visitors are people like Diosdado Valdez, who prepares the onboard entertainment for one of the cruise ship companies. Valdez has been coming to Juneau for over 30 years, and in that time, he’s found another family off the ship.

Listen: 

This transcript has been lightly edited for clarity.

Diosdado Valdez: Yeah, I am Diosdado, just Diosdado Valdez from the Philippines. Yeah, we are in a cruise ship in Juneau. And, you know, I love Juneau. I’ve been coming here since 1993. 

I have a very good friend. He was my friend at home. He asked me if I want to come to work with him, also. So I said, ‘why not?’ At first, I said, ‘only one contract.’ But then when I started, then I realized, this is the job I wanted. 

I am a production manager, and I’ve been working for this company for almost 32 years now. We are in charge of the show. If we have a comedian today, so that’s for the night. And on the daytime, there are daytime activities that we need to do. 

I go home after each contract in the Philippines. I live in Mindanao, that is in Bukidnon. I work for six months, and then get to go home for two to three months, then back to work again. 

When I started here, there is this oriental restaurant there, and the owner of that became my friend. Every time I get to Juneau, I do the dishwashing because I want, I just like to be with them. And he loves that, too. And every time I come back to the ship, I get food. He gave me food because he owns the restaurant. Play billiard, and karaoke. You know, karaoke is the most fun. That’s all I want to have when I’m in Juneau, just to see my friends.

Tasha Elizarde: Can you tell me about the first friend that you made when you started working on the cruise ships?

She is a local. We just met like, walking on the street. They kept asking me to go with them on that tram. I said, ‘Can we do it next time?’ Until this time, we haven’t been there. Yes, for years now. I admit that maybe I’m lazy. 

Since then, until this time, we are friends. Her son is my godson. And I love coming back here because of the people in Juneau. Hospitable, nice, friendly. The Juneau family is my family.