University of Alaska

Fairbanks historian Terrence Cole has died. Surrounded by family, Cole succumbed to cancer Saturday at his home in Fairbanks. Both scholarly and affable, Terrence Cole was a beloved and respected professor at the University of Alaska Fairbanks, where he taught for 30 years and penned key works about Alaska.

Terrence Cole and his identical twin brother Dermot were born 67 years ago and raised on a rural Pennsylvania farm. Their father, an engineer, believed in hard work and discipline and instilled those values in his six children, in sometimes unique ways, said Dermot in a 2018 interview with KUAC.

“He was a tough character in some ways, thought we weren’t tough enough, so after church on Sundays, we would have to box in the living room with a makeshift boxing ring,” he said.

The Coles also experienced tragedy when their mother died of breast cancer when the twins were nine years old.

“It was a traumatic event and it made it more so by the decision to never ever talk about it,” said Dermot.

But the twins said their father also believed in education, and all the children would eventually pursue college and professional careers. In fact, it was the oldest brother Pat’s search for a school that would draw several of the Coles north to Fairbanks and the University of Alaska.

“UAF was a good bargain, I think, as it is today, frankly. And you looked at the out-of-state tuition and what he could afford and you know hatched this plan coming up here, so we came up here,” said Terrence at the same 2018 interview.

Pat, Dermot and Terrence all drove to UAF and set down roots in the community. Pat would eventually become a city and borough administrator. Dermot pursued journalism, becoming a popular reporter and columnist for The Fairbanks Daily Newsminer.

And Terrence followed history. He received his doctorate at the University of Washington, even as he worked as an editor at Alaska Northwest Publishing. He says that dual experience influenced his approach to history.

“They wanted to do a book on Nome, and I thought, ‘Well, okay, I can do a dissertation on Nome,’ but I never told the publishing company I was doing my dissertation on Nome, and I never told the university I was also writing a book on Nome… the university would say, ‘well, it’s not serious enough.’ And the publisher would say, ‘well, it’s too serious,’” said Cole in the same 2018 interview.

Terrence returned to UAF in 1988 as a history professor. One of his students, Mary Ehrlander, also became an historian and eventually a colleague at the school. In a 2019 interview for the publication of The Big Wild Soul of Terrence Cole, a collection of writings by his students and colleagues, Ehrlander said his ability to write clearly and compellingly without jargon is a hallmark of his style.

“He really is a narrative historian and has always emphasized the story because, as he has said to our students, that is what differentiates humans from every other animal is that we tell stories,” she said.

Besides writing a series of books about notable Alaska institutions and personalities, Terrence served on the board of the University of Alaska Press. Nate Bauer directs the press. In an interview a month ago before Terrence died, he said Cole’s engaging style sometimes overshadowed his serious scholarship.

“He was a special series editor for our classic reprint series for a lot of years. And he brought just a remarkable amount of research about the history and the development of Alaska in the 19th and 20th centuries. None of his work as a scholar was lightweight,” he said.

Terrence’s lively, engaging style was also reflected in his teaching. Although he admitted it sometimes led to unexpected problems.

“Largely, I would set the classes up so that people didn’t know what I was going to do next. Now, this is sometimes a problem when you forget what you’re going to do next, which was sometimes what happened to me. I get so carried off in that bit of I was doing,” he said in the 2018 interview.

Nonetheless, he received awards for his teaching and contributions to history, along with his brother Dermot, who has also authored notable books.

Three years ago, Terrence was diagnosed with inoperable gastric cancer. Throughout his illness, he retained his humor and continued to work on his next book. On the occasion of his retirement at UAF two years ago, he found solace in the writing life.

“I heard an author one time who referred to his books … as his colleagues ,and when you make your contribution to the literature, that you’re in a conversation across the ages. I like the idea of being in the conversation with people even after you’re gone, when you have a longer frame of time reference because our lives are also short. That’s the best we can do is just put our little piece into the conversation,” he said.

Terrence has survived by his wife, Gay Salisbury and three children, Henry, Desmond and Elizabeth.

An army of hundreds of contact tracers across the state are picking up their phones each day to call Alaskans infected with the coronavirus.

One of them is Kris Knudsen. She’s roughly five months into the job. And as cases continue to soar, she says the work is getting harder.

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Kris Knudsen normally starts a contact-tracing phone call a little like this:

“Hi, I’m a contact tracer with the State of Alaska. And I’m hoping that you have some time to talk to me today.”

Knudsen said there’s an art to the conversation.

“I don’t want to sound commanding,” she said. “I want to smile and be the nice grandma. The person you don’t want to hang up on.”

Knudsen is 68 years old, a retired University of Alaska Anchorage professor who decided to join UAA’s contact tracing team over the summer.

“My mom was a public health nurse in Bethel. So I heard about the tuberculosis epidemic growing up. This was a big, a big deal,” she said. “And, so, when this came along, I kind of felt like, I would like to do something.”

UAA is one of a statewide patchwork of organizations who have hired workers to call Alaskans infected with the virus — reminding them to stay home, asking about their symptoms and who they’ve recently spent time with.

Health officials have described contact tracing as critical to help contain the spread of the coronavirus. But, as the number of infections soars in Alaska, contact tracers, including Knudsen, are feeling the strain.

“I never would have thought we would be getting 600 cases a day,” she said. “That’s just insane.”

For weeks, health leaders have warned the continuing surge in coronavirus cases is overwhelming Alaska’s contact tracers.

Tracers can no longer call the close contacts of every Alaskan infected with the disease, as they did earlier on. Tracers also aren’t trying to pinpoint the source of infection for each Alaskan, as they once were.

Further complicating the job: A backlog in data entry at the state level means more time passes between someone testing positive and being called by a tracer — if they’re called at all.

Leaders of contact-tracing teams say they’re seeing more burnout and turnover.

The job was already hard, even without the rapid rise in cases. Knudsen has had people hang up on her, block her number and tell her the virus isn’t real.

“They’re telling members of their family who are sick — they’re telling them that it’s all a hoax, it’s just the flu, get over yourself, you know?” Knudsen said.

“And you’re kind of going — ” She let out a long sigh.

Knudsen said she talks to Alaskans who are scared to tell their employers they can’t come into work, who aren’t sure who would take care of their kids if they’re supposed to isolate away from them.

“You wake up at three in the morning and you’re going, ‘Oh, what about this family? What about this?’” Knudsen said.

And then there are the Alaskans who are really, really sick. The increase in coronavirus-related hospitalizations in Alaska is reflected in Knudsen’s calls.

“We have had more calls where there is a relative in the hospital, you know, or two relatives in the hospital, or your call is answered by the spouse at home, while the other spouse is in the hospital,” she said. “And that’s really tough.”

All of the challenges aside, Knudsen said what keeps her going are all of the stories of tracers making a difference. They’ve identified clusters of cases and worked to help get them under control. They’ve heard Alaskans struggling to breathe over the phone and advised them to get to a doctor.

Knudsen said just getting thanked makes the job worth it.

Six students at the University of Alaska Southeast are in isolation at John R. Pugh Residence Hall after testing positive for COVID-19.

Lori Klein, the school’s vice chancellor for student affairs and enrollment, said the students are doing well.

“We’re in touch with them daily, if not multiple times each day,” Klein said. “Our care team at the university is trying to provide wraparound services, including academic support, counseling, health, support for their housing situation.”

Klein said a student reported testing positive last Tuesday and subsequent testing to close contacts found the additional five cases. The university sent out an announcement about the cases on Friday.

A total of eight cases have been reported at UAS. That includes the current cluster on campus, along with a student who tested positive but returned to a home community and one case reported in August.

Klein also said the university is encouraging students, faculty and staff to rethink their plans if they’re thinking about traveling for the holidays.

“Particularly with COVID spiking in Alaska and across the nation,” she said. “However, we know that time away from school and time with family is very important to the mental health and well being of our university community.”

The university is asking everyone who may have been exposed or have even mild symptoms to report them immediately so they can test those individuals and find close contacts.

The City and Borough of Juneau reported 27 new positive cases of COVID-19 on Monday. The city currently has 49 active cases and no one is being treated for COVID-19 at Bartlett regional hospital.

An earlier version of this story reported that a total of seven COVID-19 cases have been reported at UAS. The total number of cases reported as of Wednesday is eight, according to the university.

Karen Carey is the new permanent chancellor of the University of Alaska Southeast. Carey has been interim chancellor since July when former Chancellor Rick Caulfield retired.

University of Alaska President Pat Pitney announced Wednesday that Carey will now lead UAS, which has campuses in Juneau, Ketchikan and Sitka.

Carey said Thursday she’s still a little bit in shock.

“I was working away here at home and President Pitney sent me an email and said she wanted to speak with me, and would I be willing to serve as chancellor in the permanent position? And I was very surprised,” she said.

Carey and President Pitney had discussed looking for a permanent chancellor next fall.

Typically, the university conducts a search to fill chancellor positions. But Carey said she believes Pitney wants to make sure the university continues to move forward.

“We’ve gone through a lot with the budget cuts and COVID and everything that’s been happening to the university over the past five or six years, and I think that she just wants to have things be stable,” Carey said.

UAS and the entire UA system experienced a tumultuous start to the year. Classes moved online abruptly due to COVID-19 last spring. Then UA President Jim Johnsen stepped down in June and the UA Board of Regents considered merging UAS with the University of Alaska Fairbanks.

The board voted not to move forward with that plan, but it raised concerns for many people about the future of UAS.

UAS Faculty Senate President David Noon said he’s happy with Carey’s appointment. He agreed that it would bring stability to the campus.

“Having a full time rather than an interim chancellor, I think is an important sign from the university leadership that UAS is going to remain independent, separately accredited to serve all the needs of Southeast Alaska,” Noon said.

Before becoming interim chancellor, Carey served as UAS provost since 2016. She has a Ph.D. in school psychology and arrived in Juneau from California State University Channel Islands.

Carey said enrollment at UAS dropped this fall, but not as much as she expected.

“Certainly COVID has thrown, you know, us all for a loop, and there’s not much we can do about that until we get a vaccine,” she said. “But overall, I think the morale on campus is really good. Even though no one’s on campus, except for a few people.”

She said 120 students are living on campus this semester, and about 30% of classes are happening in-person across the three campuses.

Those classes are observing strict social distancing, and use plexiglass shields between students and instructors when possible. Masks are also required on campus.

Carey said they may expand in-person classes in the spring, but she expects most will continue online.

Correction: A previous version of this story misspelled former UA President Jim Johnsen’s name. 

As Alaska experiences a new wave of the coronavirus, contact tracers are working around the clock to track exposures. But what if there were a faster way to predict when a wave would happen, before new COVID-19 cases started rolling in? Researchers at the University of Alaska are partnering with communities around the state to figure out if we can make haste by testing waste.

Sitka’s wastewater flows into a treatment plant on Japonski Island. And while it may not look pretty, what gets washed down the drain can provide clues about how Sitka is faring in the pandemic.

Sitka’s environmental superintendent Shilo Williams says a machine pulls a liter of water from the wastewater stream once a week.

“We collect it in a sample container, and we put it in a cooler and we ship it up to the lab,” she said.

That cooler is sent to Dr. Brandon Briggs’ office. He’s an associate professor who runs a research lab at the University of Alaska Anchorage.

“What we’re trying to do is find the viral particles that are within the waste water. So when somebody has been infected, we’ve found that some of that virus is actually shed into the wastewater,” he said. “So we can actually go through and start trying to detect that.”

His team is partnering with Dr. Eric Bortz, a virologist who has studied coronaviruses for over a decade.

Briggs says in May, the lab began collecting wastewater data from communities around the state, first focusing on Anchorage and Fairbanks. And what they found in the wastewater lined up with the number of cases being reported by the Alaska Department of Health and Social Services. When there were lulls or spikes on the state’s coronavirus dashboard, Briggs’ team saw the amount of viral particles in the wastewater change, too.

“We were actually able to track that within the wastewater. So the amount that was being tested with the clinical testing, we were able to track that quite well,” he said.

Briggs hopes they can use the information to help communities predict and prepare for new COVID-19 waves a couple of days before public health officials start seeing rising case counts.

“We should be able to see the virus within the wastewater a couple of days before usually somebody goes and gets clinically tested for it,” Briggs says.

But the method does have its limits. Briggs says how much of the virus a person sheds tends to change throughout the course of an infection, and one recent study showed some people may not shed the virus into wastewater at all. And there’s a threshold. There have to be a certain number of cases in a community before Briggs’ team will be able to detect the virus in their samples.

“There’s also dilution. So everybody is depositing into the sewer system, so to be able to detect that, it can’t be diluted that much,” he said. “So with the two or three cases we saw from Sitka, that seems to be below our detection limit.”

So far in Sitka, they haven’t seen any traces of the virus in the wastewater. Shilo Williams says two test results have come back so far. That checks out: While the rest of the state’s coronavirus infection rates have soared, Sitka’s rates have been low this October.

“There are labs across the country that are analyzing COVID-19 in wastewater, so it’s great that we’re able to keep it in state and have a good working relationship with the folks at UAA,” Williams said. “And I think it’s great that we can help researchers learn more about the virus by doing this study.”

Williams says they’ll continue testing for COVID-19 at Sitka’s wastewater treatment plant through the end of the year. The wastewater reports will be published weekly on the city’s COVID dashboard.

A new study headed up by two University of Alaska Fairbanks archeologists proves for the first time that people who lived in Interior Alaska more than 11,000 years ago ate salmon in addition to big game like bison. The study is based on a chemical analysis of tissue samples from those ancient people that provides the most detailed information yet about their paleo diet and culture.

Lead researcher Carrin Halffman said the most important takeaway from the study she co-authored is that it shows the people who lived in this part of Alaska near the end of the last Ice Age had a more diversified diet than previously known.

“What I think this study has really done is overturn that traditional notion of Ice Age Alaskans as strictly big-game hunters, focused almost exclusively on the very large animals, like bison and elk,” she said in a recent interview.

Halffman used a technique called stable isotope analysis to reveal that salmon probably constituted about a third of what the ancient people ate during the summer. The discovery of salmon in their diet also confirmed what some members of the team had theorized back in 2015 — that those salmon species had returned to this part of the world as the ice sheets receded.

“It wasn’t until recently that we knew that salmon were even running in the rivers of Interior Alaska at this early date, at the tail end of the Ice Age,” she said.

Study co-author Ben Potter says Halffman’s stable-isotope analysis in turn revealed much about the life of the people he calls Ancient Beringians — the foragers who crossed over the land bridge from Asia to North America many thousands of years ago. Potter said it shows the ancient peoples’ survival strategies weren’t based solely on hunting big game.

“What this study shows is a much more realistic picture of the way these ancient foragers would’ve operated,” he said. “Which is, they’re modern humans, just like us. They’re smart. They’re going to be evaluating what’s locally variable, in different seasons.”

Potter said the study published last month in the journal Science Advances is based on solid archeological evidence derived from the isotope analysis on multiple samples of well-preserved tissue. The samples were taken from two of the ancient people who lived at the seasonally occupied hunting camp known as the Upper Sun River site, located near what’s now known as Birch Lake.

He said it’s much more accurate than analyses conducted on animal bones around the campsite, the technique that archeologists have relied on until recent years. Bones of salmon and other fishes often don’t show up using that technique because they’re less dense and disintegrate much more quickly than the bones of land animals.

“This is really our first direct glimpse, our first direct measure, quantification, of these ancient paleo diets,” he said in a joint online interview with Halffman.

Potter, who’s now affiliated with the Arctic Studies Center at Liaocheng University in China, said the isotopic analysis and other evidence gathered by the 15 researchers who contributed to the study reveals a number of details of their lifeways. Those include the time of year the people were at the camp – around late July or early August, when the salmon were running.

“That’s pretty cool,” he said. “That’s pretty amazing that we can do that.”

Potter said that all that evidence has helped the researchers discern the ancient people’s understanding of the seasons in which food was available, and where to find it at those times.

“This study provides a foundation,” he said, “like a baseline to begin to talk about the possibilities of subsistence strategy, seasonality, movement.”

Those kinds of sweeping big-picture findings are important, said Halffman, an affiliate research assistant professor with UAF’s Anthropology Department. But so too are the findings that the general public can appreciate about the everyday lives of two of those ancient peoples.

“One really interesting aspect of our study is the glimpse that it provides into the lives of two ancient Alaskan women over a very short time period — a single summer season,” she said.

That’s because the tissue samples used for the analysis came from two very young infants who died and were buried at the site. So, Hallfman said, the diet revealed by the isotopic analysis was actually that of the two infants’ mothers.

“I think people can really relate to that time scale, and really imagine these women living in Ice Age Alaska 11,500 years ago.”

Potter said the excavations and research at the Upper Sun River Site were conducted with the assistance and support of the Tanana Chiefs Conference and the Healy Lake Tribal Council.