Alaska Native Government & Policy

A vivid new mural greets customers who walk into Juneau coffee shop Sacred Grounds. It has lots of cool blue hues, dark trees and distant mountains. Small birds fly around in the misty sky, and seals pop their heads out of the water.

Artist Michaela Sheit.een Goade is Tlingit, Kiks.ádi and from Juneau. She has become well-known for her work illustrating a Google Doodle and winning the Caldecott Medal for illustrating the book “We Are Water Protectors.”

Sacred Grounds is owned by Central Council of the Tlingit and Haida Indian Tribes of Alaska. They wanted to commission tribal members for new art in the shop, which is why they reached out to Goade.

Goade said they had one central idea in mind for the art.

“When tribal members, and especially Elders, are visiting the building there, stopping in at Sacred Grounds, they really wanted something to help liven up the space and to help tribal members feel more at home,” Goade said.

Goade thought a seascape would be a great way to do this.

She lives in Sitka now, so she did not paint the mural in-person. In fact, the actual mural is not a painting at all, but a giant sticker.

“For me, I have a hard time painting too large with watercolor. Just the nature of the paints — they dry quickly… And you have to kind of go faster, so it’s hard,” Goade said. “It can be trickier the bigger you scale up, and then I’m also limited by paper size.”

That is partly why it was created as a large vinyl sticker instead of painted in the shop. To make the mural, Goade painted a large watercolor painting. Then the painting was scanned at a very high resolution and touched up in Photoshop. After that, the image was blown up onto a large, wallpaper-like vinyl sticker and put on the wall.

Goade still has not seen her art yet in person, but Tlingit artist Robert Mills has. He was the other artist Sacred Grounds commissioned. He is Tsaagweidí and originally from Kake.

Mills was not sure which direction he wanted to go with his art, since the project was pretty open-ended. But when he saw the misty fog in Goade’s mural, it inspired him to depict the Tlingit story of Fog Woman.

In the story, Raven courts Fog Woman, who is a supernatural being. But he mistreats her.

Despite her situation, Fog Woman creates salmon. That process of creation during hardship really spoke to Mills.

“The norm, I think, is just to be like, ‘Well, this scenario sucks.’ Go on living a melancholy life because you don’t have X or Y. But she’s speaking this thing into existence,” Mills said. “And it just kind of blows me away because you know, she eventually manifests salmon, even despite her scenario in which she’s in where she’s being subpar.”

The entire aluminum carving reads from right to left, instead of left to right. On the far right is Raven. In the center of the sculpture is a human silhouette of Fog Woman. Her hair, which is fog, is coming out of Raven’s mouth because she is trying to escape from Raven. And salmon swim out of Fog Woman’s mouth — being spoken into existence, as Mills puts it. On the very left of the sculpture is a hand.

“And the hand is like, it’s there in a way to, say, pose the question, ‘Well, is that her hand or is that Raven’s hand — who’s trying to obviously still remedy that separation?’” Mills said.

Mills’ aluminum carving of this story is mounted right below the bar where you would order a drink.

The project was more complicated than Mills anticipated. The machine used to cut the metal, called a CNC machine, required a very large file — so large that the art had to be in vector format.

“So I’ve had to learn these different formats and vectorization skills to get the formline down and vector it and then convert it and then shoot it over to a machine,” he said.

But Mills was interested in learning more about what he could do with aluminum, so he stuck with the material. In this carving, he finished the aluminum in a way that makes it swirl and move like fog.

Along with learning new techniques to carve formline, Mills mixed realism and formline together in his carving — something he said is uncommon.

Invasive plants are threatening local ecosystems in Southeast Alaska, and Skagway’s local tribal government is working to stop the spread.

Reuben Cash stood by the White Pass rail yard, a couple of hundred feet from the Skagway River, using a portable computer to map the locations of invasive plant species.

“This is a member of the pea family. It is a Eurasian plant called white sweetclover. As you can see, every little one of these flowering florescences has, you know, five to 100 flowers. And the bigger plants can have up to, I couldn’t even give you a count, but there are probably thousands of seeds produced from every single plant,” Cash said.

Cash works as the environmental coordinator for the Skagway Traditional Council, the local tribal government. Cash and his coworkers have been gathering location data and pulling up plants by the hundreds for the last few summers. The white sweetclover is a delicious-smelling plant, with white flowers that grow in bunches in gravelly patches and distressed soils.

“The pea family is what’s called a pioneer species,” Cash said. “They’re the first ones to move in after like mosses and the lichens really set the stage. They come in and they put nitrogen into the soil, so they make it possible for a plant community to flourish,” Cash said. “It can grow pretty much anywhere you throw it.”

Because it’s a non-native plant, the ecosystem hasn’t designed ways to keep it in check. Cash said if these invasive species are left to their own devices, they will eventually choke out native species.

“Normally in a plant community, you have these plants that are growing side by side with one another. And yeah, they keep each other in check so that nothing grows too abundantly. But with invasive species, there are not those mechanisms built into the community. So they just run rampant,” he said.

White sweetclover isn’t the only plant on the hit list.

“We’re actively watching the reed canary grass invasion over at Pullen Creek and really hitting heavy on the white sweetclover. We’ve been watching out for orange hawkweed. Orange hawkweed has been seen in a  couple of different spots around town. And then hopefully, we’ll be rolling out a campaign this year for the yellow toadflax, or butter and eggs, try and get the community on board and see if we can make a dent on it,” Cash said.

Yellow toadflax is a beautiful addition to a bouquet, but it’s a vining plant, and as such it’s very difficult to control once it starts to spread.

“Pretty soon we’ll have nothing but reed canary grass, white sweetclover and yellow toadflax. That’ll just be what’s here. That’s not very good for our pollinators. It’s not very good for all the higher organisms up the food chain that are all relying on the native vegetation here,” Cash said.

Imagine a roadside with all the yarrow and fireweed and lupine replaced by invasive species. It’s a scenario the Skagway Traditional Council has been battling to prevent for the past six years.

According to Cash, without the use of toxic chemical pesticides, the best course of action is to painstakingly pull these plants out of the ground.

“Pull every last one that we can find, and hope that we’ve gotten to it before it’s too late,” Cash said.

He’s also encouraging others in Skagway to join the fight. If people see an invasive species on the list, especially white sweetclover, Cash asks that they log the location with their smartphone.

“Open your Maps app, hit the little crosshair target so that it centers on your position, and then just press and hold on to the screen. It’ll drop a pen and give you the option to share that.”

Then he wants people to email email him the location.

U.S. Energy Secretary Jennifer Granholm on Tuesday announced 13 tribal energy grants, and about half are going to Alaska Native communities.

Granholm said the grants from the Office of Indian Energy will help meet President Biden’s climate goals. In total, she said, they will fund some seven megawatts of clean power generation and battery storage.

“And that will power 1,300 tribal buildings and save these 13 communities a combined $1.8 million annually,” she said.

On a Zoom conference call with reporters, Granholm gave special recognition to Sen. Lisa Murkowski for supporting the Office of Indian Energy.

Among the seven Alaska grants, the largest is $2 million to help Noatak and the Northwest Arctic Borough add solar energy and battery storage to the village’s diesel-powered grid. The smallest grant on the list goes to Akiachak – $123,000 to install energy efficient furnaces and lights in multi-use buildings.

Murkowski said even the small grants are important.

“Some may say, ‘Well, you’re just changing out lights,’” she said. “And you know what? If we can reduce the costs, if we can reduce the diesel that is used in these communities to power their communities by any increment, that puts us money ahead.”

The Office of Indian Energy was created in 2005. Murkowski says she helped expand grant eligibility in Alaska by allowing the funds to go to any census tract where most residents are Native, and by reducing the share local communities have to provide.

Granholm also thanked Murkowski for helping to negotiate an infrastructure deal, which is likely to have more money for Indian energy.

Murkowski, whose seat will be on next year’s ballot, was the only senator who participated in Granholm’s Zoom press conference.

Alaska Congressman Don Young issued a press release commending the secretary for the grants.

The other Alaska grants are:

• The Metlakatla Indian Community – $1,031,110 to complete the electrical intertie between its Annette Island community and Ketchikan.
• Native Village of Kipnuk – $855,978 for a battery storage system to improve its wind-diesel grid.
• The Village of Chefornak – $854,964 for a battery storage system to improve its wind-diesel grid.
• The Native Village of Diomede – $222,848 for energy efficiency measures in the new village store.
• The Village of Aniak – $167,948 to install energy retrofits on four multi-use buildings and the Village’s Community Center.

On June 28, the Orutsararmiut Native Council appealed the Alaska Department of Environmental Conservation’s decision to uphold a water quality certificate for the proposed Donlin Gold mine.

The council has contested the water quality certificate before. The most recent appeal comes a month after DEC Commissioner Jason Brune upheld the certificate.

Donlin was first issued its state water quality certificate back in the summer of 2018. The certificate is a big one for the company. It says that mine runoff won’t negatively impact the water quality in the area of the proposed site, which sits about 10 miles north of Crooked Creek. The certificate is critical for Donlin because it’s attached to another permit from the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers, which the mine needs to start construction and actually begin mining. Now the matter is going to court.

The council first filed an informal review in August 2018, just days after the Army Corps issued its permit. Lawyer Tom Waldo, who works for Earthjustice, the law firm representing ONC, said that they take issue with the certificate on three main points.

“The mine, as proposed, would not comply with water quality standards for protection of salmon habitat, for temperature, and for mercury,” Waldo said.

After the state informally reviewed and then reissued the water quality permit twice, Earthjustice called for a formal review process about a year ago. In April 2021, Administrative Law Judge Z. Kent Sullivan recommended rescinding the water quality permit.

In his decision, he wrote that “salmon and salmon habitat in a large segment of Crooked Creek will be significantly and detrimentally impacted by the project.”

But Brune upheld the state water quality certificate in May 2021. Donlin applauded the decision at the time and reaffirmed their support in a press release following the appeal.

ONC Executive Director Mark Springer said that the certificate would have far-reaching, negative impacts on the region.

“The upper Kuskokwim environment, and the entire Kuskokwim reach, and the fish in the Kuskokwim, and all of the people who live here and who have depended on salmon and smelt for thousands of years,” said Springer.

Waldo says the appellate court’s decision could be released in around a year, and the decision would likely be appealed once more after that. If the state water quality certificate is permanently rescinded, the permit from the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers will be as well.

“I think it is very likely that whoever loses in the superior court, it’s very likely that party would appeal to the Alaska Supreme Court,” said Waldo, who added that because this involves a state permit, the case can only reach the level of the Alaska Supreme Court.

The U.S. Supreme Court ruled Friday that Alaska Native regional and village corporations are eligible to receive federal CARES Act funding intended for tribes.

At stake in the case is about $500 million that the Treasury Department was going to distribute to Alaska Native corporations until several tribes filed a lawsuit. But both sides say the case was about more than money.

For the tribes, it’s about guarding their sovereignty as governments. They argued that since Alaska’s for-profit Native corporations aren’t tribes, they should not get a share of the $8 billion coronavirus relief fund that Congress reserved for tribal governments.

The 6-3 decision was written by Justice Sonia Sotomayor.

Mike Williams read it with dismay. He is the senior chief of the Akiak tribe, in Western Alaska.

“I’m definitely disappointed but continuously being hopeful and we’ll continue to fight to protect our tribal sovereignty, period,” he said.

For Williams and tribal leaders in the Lower 48, the case is emotional. The tribes feel that the Alaska Native Corporations are trying to horn in on their sovereignty.

“But it wasn’t about the ANCs horning in on anything,” said attorney Lloyd Miller, who has brought cases to assert Alaska tribal self-determination. “It was whether members of Congress intended to include the ANCs in this pool of money. And the court’s conclusion was that members of Congress did intend that.”

Here’s how the CARES Act defines tribe: It says “tribe” has the same meaning it does in an older law, the Indian Self-Determination and Education Assistance Act, also known as ISDA. That’s a 1975 law that allows tribes to contract with the U.S. government to provide services that used to be done by federal agencies.

Had the case gone the other way, the corporations say, it could have upset long-standing health care and housing programs.

Consider Doyon, the Native corporation for the Interior. Under ISDA, Doyon is a tribe for purposes of receiving Native American housing allocations, which it passes on to the Interior Regional Housing Authority.

“Especially in urban Alaska – Anchorage and Fairbanks in particular – this case had the potential to disrupt that provision of services,” said Doyon CEO Aaron Schutt. “That was the important issue from the start.”

Alaska’s cities have a lot of Alaska Native residents, but Schutt said the local tribes were often decimated so the corporations play an important role.

“The history of Fairbanks is, it’s one of those areas where there’s no federally recognized tribe because the last big pandemic 100 years ago pretty much killed all the Native people in the Fairbanks-North Star borough,” he said. “So the history is tied together.”

The biggest service provider among the ANCs is Cook Inlet Region Inc. It founded the nonprofit Southcentral Foundation, which partners with tribal organizations to run the Alaska Native Medical Center in Anchorage.

None of the 12 regional ANCs or the 174 village corporations know exactly how much it will get of the $8 billion tribal CARES Act fund, although collectively it totals about half a billion dollars. Schutt said Doyon has asked, but Treasury hasn’t produced a number.

“As we sit here today, knowing we’ve now won the case, we still only have six months to deploy money,” he said. “We don’t know how much it is. So that’s going to be a challenge.”

Schutt said another looming challenge is to heal the rift this case has created between the tribes and Alaska Native corporations.

Editor’s note: This article has been updated with more information from tribal leaders. The headline has also been updated.

A new smartphone app hit the market last week, with the potential to transform the debate over Alaska’s ocean resources.

The Skipper Science app will allow users along Alaska’s entire coastline to contribute observations about changes in fish and animal populations, which can then be collected and quantified as data for Alaska’s science-based resource management.

Anywhere the Alaska Board of Fisheries meets, there is always a certain amount of frustration among some who testify because their years of experience — sometimes over many generations — don’t seem to carry much weight in data-driven management decisions.

In Sitka this is particularly acute around herring season, where subsistence harvesters have noted drastic declines in the abundance of the species over many decades, while 40-odd years of data collection by the Alaska Department of Fish & Game suggests everything is okay.

“I wonder if all the scientists that are here can figure out what’s going to happen when the herring’s gone,” said Coho clan leader and elder Herman Davis when he testified before the Board of Fisheries in Sitka in 2015.

Skipper Science was created for exactly this purpose. Developed by the Aleut Community of St. Paul Island, it’s a way for Alaska’s harvesters and managers to at least speak the same language.

“How do we take what has historically been called anecdotal and create some structure around it that is rigorous, has scientific repeatability?” asks Lauren Divine, Director of Ecosystem Conservation for the tribal government of St. Paul Island in the Bering Sea.

Divine and a team of collaborators have built the Skipper Science app in an attempt to convert the thousands of informal-yet-meaningful environmental observations by fishermen and others into hard numbers that can be brought to the Board of Fish, the North Pacific Fisheries Management Council or any other agency that makes decisions that impact fisheries.

The idea is that, scaled up over many harvesters, the observations of someone like Herman Davis can carry the weight of scientific data.

“This is the way that, you know, an Indigenous person takes on life and living and engaging in traditional harvests and relationships with the ecosystem. It is very non-quantitative,” she says. “And so we’re very far behind the times really, but yet there’s no weight that’s historically been given and the respect given to the more social science on, and you know, non-western scientific side of things. And so we were really working to, to shift that paradigm.”

Divine and the Aleut Community of St. Paul are not new to this. About 15 years ago the tribal government established the Indigenous Sentinels Network to monitor changes in animal populations and the environment in the Bering Sea. They’ve since developed a half-dozen apps and utilities, one of which is called Citizen Science.

Skipper Science is built on the Citizen Science platform, but the goal is to make it coastwide, “From the Beaufort to Baja,” as Divine says.

To extend their reach, the Aleut Community of St. Paul needed a partner. Enter Lindsey Bloom, who works with the Juneau non-profit, SalmonState.

Bloom works within SalmonState’s Salmon Habitat Information Program — or SHIP. A coastwide advocacy organization, SalmonState and the Aleut Community of St. Paul have similar goals: quantifying informal observations.

“We’ve been working through the SHIP program for many years now to help bring fishermen’s voices and perspective and knowledge and information to the table when it comes to decision making around not only policy and habitat related policy, but we think the information from fishermen can be really helpful in a number of ways to fisheries managers, whether they’re at the state or federal level,” she says.

Bloom and her husband are drift gillnetters. She’s been using the beta version of Skipper Science. The way she explains it, the app takes something that in the past might just have been a few minutes of dock talk after a fishing trip and compiles it into a database.

“It could be a marine mammal sighting, it could be a change in water temperature, that’s unusual. It could be algae blooms. You know, there’s many, many sorts of categories of data that could be observed or reported,” she said. “You’ll just pull up your app, you’ll hit a button that says ‘record an observation.’ In my phone, in my case, it actually just loads in my GPS coordinates right then and there. And I can describe what I’m seeing and how it’s different from what I’ve seen in the past, and perhaps take a picture and upload that as well and send it in.”

The Skipper Science app works anywhere, whether or not it’s connected to the internet. Observations will be cached until users are back in range. Individual observations are also private and password protected, so users can go back in and review past observations. The overall dataset, however, is the property of what Lauren Divine is calling the Skipper Science community. Divine and other researchers will compile it and prepare reports as needed based on the information.

The app is free. Divine has considered the possibility that it will gain traction and explode into an enormous amount of work. She says she’d welcome that event.

“That would be such a dream of mine,” she said. “This is honestly such an untapped area of really rich information that could totally change the way you know that we approach fisheries management from subsistence to personal use to recreational to commercial and it has such amazing potential.”

The Skipper Science app is available for download for both iPhone and Android.