Food

A Fairbanks restaurant has started requiring COVID-19 vaccinations for patrons.

Lavelle’s Bistro is a fine-dining establishment right downtown in the Golden Heart City. It shut down for about six weeks earlier in the pandemic, and owners Kathleen Lavelle and Franklin Eagle worried that another coronavirus closure might put them out of business.

Eagle says after they got booster shots, the couple was traveling in Europe and noticed restaurants requiring proof of vaccination. So, he says, they decided to do the same.

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The following transcript has been lightly edited for clarity.

Frank Eagle: You know, we’re getting such positive reports from everybody who’s coming into the restaurant, a lot of people who have been shut in for 18 months or more. Basically, they’re telling us it’s their first time out. The verbal support we’re getting from our patrons is really quite incredible. As long as you stay off Facebook, everything’s fine.

Casey Grove: I definitely can relate to that. So what are folks that are opposed to this idea, or are criticizing you, how’s that gone? I mean, what have they said?

Frank Eagle: Why this virus has turned so political is beyond me. But basically, you know, it’s all about personal freedoms. And people have the right to, you know, choose what goes into their body. And I perfectly agree with them. I also, as a business owner, have the personal freedoms to run my business any way I want. And basically, showing proof of vaccination is just one of the requirements. You know, you’re not allowed to drive a car without a license. You’re not allowed to do a lot of things without being tested for it. And if people don’t want to get tested or don’t want a vaccine, or whatever, they have the right to do that. But I also have the right to stop them from coming into the restaurant.

Casey Grove: So how does this actually work? Like if I show up at Lavelle’s, then what happens?

Frank Eagle: Then we say, “Hi, do you have a reservation?” And they say yes or no. Then we say, “Do you have proof of vaccination?” And 99% of the people are pulling out their vaccination card. That’s no problem at all.

Casey Grove: I did wonder, though, like, what happens when somebody shows up, and they don’t have that? And they’re maybe not happy about it?

Frank Eagle: Some people aren’t happy about it. But basically, you know, they see the signs and it’s not like we’re police or anything. Most people have the picture of their vaccination card on their phone.

Casey Grove: I should ask, do you think that you’ve lost any business over this?

Frank Eagle: You know, when you ostracize 50% of the population? Yes. There’s no question about it. A lot of my good friends who aren’t vaccinated certainly aren’t coming in anymore. A lot of people who have medical reasons why they can’t get the vaccination aren’t coming in anymore. But then again, a lot of people who haven’t been out for 18 months are coming in. So, you know, hopefully it’ll balance out a little bit for us, economically. I just am hoping that people sort of forget about the politics of this all and, you know, perhaps some other businesses could join in this movement to try to stop the spread of this virus. Requiring masks and requiring vaccinations is one small step we can do to try to stay healthy or try not to, you know, die from this virus that is taking way too many lives. Whatever we can do to stop it and get back to normal, that would be good.

When Byron Kominek returned home after the Peace Corps and later working as a diplomat in Africa, his family’s 24-acre farm near Boulder, Colorado, was struggling to turn a profit.

“Our farm has mainly been hay producing for fifty years,” Kominek said, on a recent chilly morning, the sun illuminating a dusting of snow on the foothills to his West. “This is a big change on one of our three pastures.”

That big change is certainly an eye opener: 3,200 solar panels mounted on posts eight feet high above what used to be an alfalfa field on this patch of rolling farmland at the doorstep of the Rocky Mountains.

Getting to this point, a community solar garden that sells 1.2 megawatts of power back into the local grid, wasn’t easy, even in a progressive county like his that wanted to expand renewable energy. When Kominek approached Boulder County regulators about putting up solar panels, they initially told him no, his land was designated as historic farmland.

“They said, land’s for farming, so go farm it,” Kominek says. “I said, well, we weren’t making any money, you all want to be 100% renewable at some point so how about we work together and sort this out.”

They eventually did, with help from researchers at nearby Colorado State University and the National Renewable Energy Lab, which had been studying how to turn all that otherwise unused land beneath solar panels into a place to grow food.

With close to two billion dollars devoted to renewable power in the newly passed infrastructure bill, the solar industry is poised for a win. But there have long been some tensions between renewable developers and some farmers. According to NREL, upwards of two million acres of American farmland could be converted to solar in the next decade.

But what if it didn’t have to be an either or proposition? What if solar panels and farming could literally co-exist, if not even help one another.

That was what piqued Kominek’s interest, especially with so many family farms barely hanging on in a world of corporate consolidation and so many older farmers nearing retirement.

Last year, Boulder County updated its land use code. And soon after Kominek installed the solar panels on one of this pastures. They’re spaced far enough apart from one another so he could drive his tractor between them.

Still, when it came time to plant earlier this year, Kominek was initially skeptical.

But he soon discovered that the shade from the towering panels above the soil actually helped the plants thrive. That intermittent shade also meant a lot less evaporation of coveted irrigation water. And in turn the evaporation actually helped keep the sun-baked solar panels cooler, making them more efficient.

By summer, Kominek was a believer.

Walking the intricately lined rows of veggies beneath the panels, he beams pointing out where the peppers, tomatoes, squash, pumpkins, lettuces, beets, turnips, carrots were all recently harvested. The farm is still bursting with chard and kale even in November.

“Oh yeah, kale never dies,” Kominek says, chuckling.

Kominek’s farm, rebranded as Jack’s Solar Garden (Jack is his grandfather’s name), is part of a burgeoning industry known as agrivoltaics. It’s a relatively new field of research and Kominek’s farm is one of only about a dozen in the United States known to be experimenting with it.

But agrivoltaics is drawing particular interest in the West, now in the grips of a 22 year megadrought.

“Around the western US, water is the reason to go to war,” says Greg Barron-Gafford, a University of Arizona professor who is considered one of the country’s foremost experts in the field.

“Water is the reason we have to have real big arguments about where we’re going to get our food from in the future,” he says.

Barron-Gafford’s research in the Arizona desert showed some crops grown underneath solar panels needed 50% less water. He and other scientists have their eyes on the infrastructure bill and are pushing to get some of the estimated $300 million included in it for new solar projects to go toward agrivoltaics.

“If you really want to build infrastructure in a way that is not going to compete with food and could actually take advantage of our dwindling resources in terms of water in a really efficient way, this is something to look at,” Barron-Gafford says.

Researchers say there needs to be financial incentives for family farmers to add solar to their portfolio, if solar gardens like Byron Kominek’s are really going to take off and become mainstream.

In Kominek’s case, he literally bet the farm in order to finance the roughly $2 million solar arrays.

“We had to put up our farm as collateral as well as the solar array as collateral to the bank,” he says. “If this doesn’t work, we lose the farm.”

But farming is all about taking on risk and debt, he says. And early on anyway, it’s looking like his bet could pay off.

“That humming [you hear] is the inverters making us money,” he says, pointing toward an electric converter box mounted near a row of kale. A series of wires carry the power out to the county highway and onto the local Xcel Energy grid.

The inverters here generate enough power for 300 homes to use in a year. Kominek hopes to soon grow enough food beneath the panels to maybe feed as many local families.

Copyright 2021 NPR. To see more, visit https://www.npr.org.

Alaska has an ambitious goal: to turn its growing mariculture business into a $100 million industry by 2040.

It has a long way to go. But federal and state agencies are taking steps toward making products like seaweed and shellfish easier to grow and market.

Marine research organization Alaska Sea Grant will spend the next two years investigating how to better preserve kelp to make commercial ready-to-eat products, using a $50,000 grant from the U.S. Department of Agriculture.

Sea Grant is looking into a technology called high-pressure processing. It uses pressurized water to knock out pathogens, like E. coli, and preserve food for longer,

“It’s really a growing way of food preservation that’s starting to catch on,” said Chris Sannito, seafood technology specialist with Sea Grant. “More and more products in the supermarket are processed this way.”

Currently, seaweed is cleaned through steam blanching — the same method you might use to preserve your vegetables.

High-pressure processing, on the other hand, can triple a product’s shelf life and is used to preserve all sorts of food products, from grocery store guacamole to juices.

“The bacteria are kind of squeezed down and, at a certain pressure, they cannot survive that,” Sannito said.

But it’s expensive. That’s where the USDA money comes in.

Sea Grant will send seafood products to a research facility that already has high-pressure processing equipment in Kentucky. There, researchers can conduct kitchen tests and shelf-life studies on seaweed products to make sure the technology works.

The study is part of a concerted push to bolster the mariculture business in Alaska.

Mariculture is the farming and enhancement of seaweed and shellfish. Right now, that industry is largely kelp and oysters, including 13 shellfish farms in Kachemak Bay. NOAA valued Alaska’s mariculture industry at $1.4 million in 2019.

Sannito is based in Kodiak, where he said there’s a lot of interest in kelp.

“Mainly from fishermen that are looking to diversify their year,” he said. “And seaweed is kind of nice because you’re able to plan it out in the fall and then harvest it usually before the busy summer season starts.”

There are also several registered kelp farmers across Kachemak Bay, according to a mariculture map from Alaska Ocean Observing Systems. Others dot the coastline along Prince William Sound.

Sannito said the high-pressure processing process is exciting, in part, because it doesn’t add anything to the food or change it in any way. That’s in contrast with other methods of preservation, like adding heat or acid.

“This is a very high-tech approach to creating products very wholesomely, so we’re not adding anything,” he said. “We’re just using the laws of physics to preserve food.”

He said there are some Alaskans already turning seaweed into value-added products. Barnacle Foods in Juneau makes seasonings and hot sauce from kelp. Sannito is working with Taco Loco in Anchorage to develop seaweed tortillas.

Still, mariculture is a relatively new industry in Alaska. And a big challenge, advocates say, is permitting.

That hurdle was outlined in a recent report, created by the Alaska Mariculture Task Force. Gov. Bill Walker convened that task force in 2016 to turn Alaska mariculture into big business.

NOAA Fisheries and Alaska Sea Grant just released a 40-page document and database detailing the permitting process for new mariculture farmers. NOAA said it hopes those resources will reduce that barrier for new growers.

Sea Grant’s funding for the processing project is through the USDA’s Specialty Crop Block Grant Program.

Six other Alaska applicants won grant money through that program this year, including the Homer Soil and Water Conservation District. The district plans to work with aging and disabled farmers on new ways to grow strawberries — a perennial crop whose harvest can be hard on farmers’ bodies. District Manager  Kyra Wagner said the district will work with farmers to develop alternative methods of growing strawberries, like towers, and will install successful project designs in Homer and at the Kenai Peninsula Food Bank in Soldotna.

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The smell of curry, dumplings and butter seeps through the windows outside of Pel’meni in downtown Juneau. The restaurant is an Alaskan take on a classic Russian comfort food — dumplings.

Yana White is from Russia and moved to Juneau from there in 2009. White said that she likes the food at Juneau’s Pel’meni shop but to her, it is missing the taste of Russia. 

She grew up making pelmeni with her family once a month on Sundays. It was a laborious process that took hours, rolling out every circle of dough and putting the meat filling in for a hundred or so pelmeni. As a kid, she would make up any excuse to get out of making pelmeni. 

But looking back now, she misses those times. For White, making pelmeni isn’t really about the food.

“It’s more about the family time that I had with my parents,” White said. “It’s the idea of togetherness, you know, when you sit together in the kitchen, and you talk about life. You talk about your school. You talk about your family members. And at the same time you’re making this nutritious, filling food.”

White still makes pelmeni but not as often as she would like. Recently, her daughter asked to make pelmeni with her. White hopes to make pelmeni with her soon, just like White did with her parents and grandparents in Russia. 

“My daughter loves them, and she doesn’t eat them with traditional condiments such as sour cream or vinegar. She eats them with ketchup,” White said.

The pelmeni you find in Juneau are not quite traditional. They have a lot more toppings besides vinegar and sour cream — lots of butter, curry powder, cilantro and sriracha. And on the side, there’s a slice of fluffy rye bread.

The nontraditional toppings are additions that the owner Dave Bonk made. Bonk bought the restaurant in 1998 from an American expatriate who started the restaurant with the primary goal of trying to sell it and get back to Russia. 

“We went there one night after hours and he said, ‘Yeah, you wanna buy, you wanna take this over from me?’ And he’d only been doing it for like a month or two,” Bonk said.

All he wanted in return for the restaurant was a plane ticket to Russia. 

At first, business was slow. The first day of business for him was July 3, the busiest night of the year. That night he only sold three orders.

But he built a reputation throughout the years. He said part of the reason for his success is that he never advertises.

Bonk used to make all the dumplings by hand. Sometimes it would take all night. Eventually, he converted a German sausage machine to make pelmeni, so he does not have to do that anymore. 

“It’s by far the most, been the most fun I’ve had in anything, any job or any kind of occupation. It’s also been the hardest thing I’ve ever done,” Bonk said.

One moment that really sticks out to Bonk to this day was when there was a huge line out the door to Pel’meni in 2001. He didn’t have TV where he lived at the time on North Douglas. Bonk asked people what was going on because that line wasn’t normal. 

That was the day of 9/11. Someone in line told him what happened. When he asked them why they all came to Pel’meni, they said that it was the place they felt most comfortable. Or that they didn’t know where else to go. 

This really showed Bonk what kind of place he had created with Pel’meni. And that day still remains one of the busiest lunches he’s ever had. 

The restaurant has become a staple in the Juneau community. People who grew up in Juneau still reminisce about the times when pelmeni used to cost $5.

The current manager of the Juneau Pel’meni is Leighton Bullock. He has been the manager since April of this year.

“Like realistically, it’s one of the chillest spots in the world,” Bullock said. “You can always come in and get some good food that’s gonna make you feel good. And you’re gonna want to come back when you walk out the door.”

Pel’meni is open pretty much every day of the year. Bullock said the restaurant has been open every day since 2011, even during the pandemic.

It is also one of the few restaurants in downtown Juneau that is open late. That, combined with the low price, has made it a popular spot.

“You know, you get your high schoolers and you get your hipsters and you get your late-night partiers that come in and they’re just tossing numbers to you and saying, you know, ‘I need three. I need four. I need five,’” Bullock said. 

For a long time, Pel’meni was just a Juneau thing. But it grew. First to Bellingham, where the owner Bonk lives now. 

When Bonk moved down to Bellingham, Mark Moore took over the Juneau location. After working there for a long time, he was given the blessing from Bonk to expand Pel’meni. 

Moore first opened up a shop in Sitka and now he has a new location in downtown Anchorage, on 434 K St. 

David Clark lives in Anchorage but has been to Juneau many times and is a big fan. During his latest visit to Juneau’s Pel’meni, Clark had not been to the Anchorage location yet and was not sure how to feel about it. 

“Yeah I would say, you know, it’s pretty solidly a Juneau thing,” Clark said. “I’m not sure how well it’s gonna, how long it’s gonna stay in Anchorage.”

Clark remembers the first time he had Pel’meni in 2014. He flew to Juneau to do some advocacy work in the Legislature, and everybody on the trip with him told him to go to Pel’meni. Once he tried it, he was hooked.

“It’s not just about gastronomy or, you know, what’s particularly like vibrant compared to another place,” Clark said. “For me it’s really just about what memories do you make here.”

One of his favorite recent memories was when he went to Pel’meni after hanging out with friends at a downtown outdoor bar. 

“We ended up closing out the shop, you know, just sitting and laughing and talking about anything and everything,” Clark said.

Later that week, Clark went to Anchorage Pel’meni for the first time to see how it compared to Juneau. 

The Anchorage shop is across the street from the Hotel Captain Cook in downtown and it’s set up to feel familiar for Pel’meni regulars. There is a vintage cash register at the counter and the essential question from the dumpling-slinger. 

“Would you like meat or potato?” dumpling slinger Edouard Seryozhenkov asked Clark.

Waiting for his order, Clark looked around and said it is pretty easy to tell he is at a Pel’meni shop.

“Of course, just like in Juneau, there’s kind of like a little library going on of records and there’s also a record player …” Clark said. “This is definitely like a newer building I would say. So it doesn’t have that same rustic kind of homey feel like the Juneau Pel’menis does.”

Behind the counter, it was dumpling slinger Edouard Seryozhenkov’s second week on the job. Seryozhenkov is Russian, born in Anchorage, and grew up making similar dumplings with his family, though he’s never been to the flagship shop in Juneau. 

“Here you dress them with all kinds of stuff like curry powder and sriracha sauce and cilantro,” Seryozhenkov said. “The Russian style is a little richer, more soupy. Yeah, to each their own.” 

He said the first weekend the shop was open, it was slammed. Lunchtime on a weekday is pretty slow, but Seryozhenkov said that doesn’t mean the dumplings won’t catch on in Anchorage.

“I think this place works best late-night. Like, for sure, this place, like a Christmas tree, it’s all lit up. And if you can get people to walk here from the bars, it’s going to be poppin’,” Seryozhenkov said.

A few minutes later, dumplings on the table, David said the only noticeable difference between the two shops is the half-slice of bread that accompanies the pelmeni. In Juneau, it’s marbled rye, but in Anchorage, it’s plain old white bread until the rye comes in.

“They definitely taste fresh. I honestly can’t really tell the difference between Juneau and Anchorage,” Clark said.

Still, Clark said he is not sure the Anchorage Pel’meni will take off in the same way as Juneau’s or whether it will fill a similar niche as a community-building, late-night spot. He says only time will tell. 

Correction: An earlier version of this story misspelled expatriate as “ex-patriot.”

Seven subsistence hunters from Pilot Station in Southwest Alaska spent seven nights stranded at a fish camp after the lower Yukon River unexpectedly froze, blocking their way home.

On the eighth night, Thursday, the U.S. Coast Guard airlifted them out and flew them north to Nome.

The next morning, at the hotel where the group had stayed the night, two of the hunters walked to the lobby. Signs said masks were required, and a hotel worker asked them to put theirs on.

The men said they’d been stranded on the Yukon for a week and didn’t have any masks. They’d left the fish camp with the clothes on their backs and what they could fit in their pockets, which meant their phones and GPS.

They were wearing the same clothes they’d worn for a week and a half.

“Same socks, same shorts,” said Rex Nick, one of the hunters laughing and stretching out his legs, which were covered in torn, black Carhartt bibs.

“It was really good to take a shower,” said Robert Myers, another hunter. “I feel clean, but my clothes are dirty.”

The men had left Pilot Station 12 days earlier to boat down to the coast to hunt seal and beluga whale. Nick originally wanted the hunting trip to be over a weekend for students in the village.

“Some of the kids don’t get a chance to go out hunting, or some of their parents might not have a boat or a father-figure type,” Nick said.

The group delayed the trip for weeks waiting for a break in the weather. Finally, it cleared on Oct. 25. Because it was a Monday, they didn’t take students out of school, but one hunter brought his 14-year-old son. There were two brothers and two father-son pairs in the group. The rest are friends.

With the low chum run on the Yukon River, salmon fishing was almost entirely closed this year. The trip was a chance to gather more than moose for their families.

“Nobody is starving,” Nick said. “But it’s good to have that extra food for the winter ahead.”

Nick is 43 years old. Myers is 38. They’ve made this trip many times in their lives, often multiple times a year. The seven hunters loaded into two boats and made the three-hour trip to the coast. The plan was to go down Monday, hunt Tuesday and return Wednesday.

And, at first, the plan worked out. They went down and took three seal and two beluga.

But on Wednesday, Oct. 27, when they were set to return home, they awoke to a frozen river.

“The ice was so thick flowing down the river. It was forming so fast. It was freezing so fast. Just amazing. I’d never seen anything like that,” Nick said.

From all their years on the river, they never expected it to freeze so early or so quickly. There had been no ice when they left home. Using an axe, oars and their body weight, they hacked the boats free and used the weight of the skiffs to push open a path upriver to Alakanuk. A trip that would’ve taken an hour and a half in open water took five hours.

They stayed the night in Alakanuk.

The next morning, Oct. 28, ice was flowing downriver, but other boats were moving between the sheets. The hunters decided to head home. Everything was fine until they reached a narrow part of the river near Emmonak.

The ice jammed, turned jagged and began crashing into the boats.

“That’s the first time I really got scared,” Nick said, “when I thought the ice was going to either damage my boat and sink my boat or flip my boat over. I’ve never been scared like that by ice before.”

Nick is second-in-command of Pilot Station Search and Rescue. He said he knew that it was too dangerous to keep going. The group decided to stop and found a friend’s nearby fish camp, about 20 miles east of Emmonak. The hunting group would remain there for the next seven nights.

“God bless the family that had that fish camp,” Nick said.

The camp had containers of frozen rain water, a wood stove, firewood and food.

“Oatmeal, coffee, some noodles, dry eggs, things like that,” Nick said.

The group also had their seal and beluga meat and food from their camping trip. Another friend had a fish camp just a five-minute walk away. It had a cell phone booster and a generator. They used it to contact their families.

The group also had a VHF radio and a Garmin inReach satellite device. The first day at the camp, they texted nearby friends about their situation, but no one could come overland or by river to help. The trails were not yet fully frozen. Their friends contacted Alaska State Troopers.

On day three at the camp, Oct. 31, the troopers flew over and dropped food, supplies and medication needed by one of the hunters.

And to Nick’s relief: Copenhagen Fine Cut Snuff. With tobacco, he said, he eats less. There was another treat too.

“We got some Halloween candy. They left a note on there [saying], ‘Happy Halloween,’” Nick said.

The group stayed together in one of the fish camps in a single room about 12 feet by 20 feet, sleeping in sleeping bags from their camping trip. Staying together conserved firewood and concentrated heat. Also, Nick said, “There’s safety in numbers.”

Each day they rationed their food, water and firewood, only burning wood before going to sleep and a bit when waking up. During the day, they created their own entertainment.

“We took out our .22s and started killing mice. We probably killed about 50 mice,” Nick said.

One day a hunter killed a beaver, which they boiled into soup. Another day they found a fox in a snare that had been set by the owner of the fish camp and killed it. Once they set a net in the river but didn’t catch anything. Time moved slowly.

On the fifth day at the camp, Nov. 2, a pilot twice tried to land. In a video Nick took on his phone, the small red and white plane swoops close to the beach. Nick urges it on.

“Come on. You can do it. Land. Come on,” he said in the recording.

When the wheels look a few feet above the snowy riverbank, it veers back up and flies away. A trooper spokesperson said that 20-knot crosswinds prevented a landing.

Emmonak Search and Rescue coordinated another food drop for that day. This one contained ground beef and other hearty food.

By now, the hunters had become frustrated with the rescue response. State troopers were coordinating the effort, but Nick said that they would not hear from them for entire days at a time.

Trooper spokesperson Austin McDaniel said troopers “maintained consistent and frequent contact with the group directly via a satellite communications device and through their communication with third parties that the group was communicating directly with.”

McDaniel also said, “We had our search and rescue coordinator, who was a lieutenant here in Anchorage, working on this day in and day out. We had a trooper out in Emmonak working on trying to find solutions to get these folks out of there every single day.”

The hunters said they had heard planes flying every day they were at the camp. Flight logs show planes landing each day in nearby Emmonak, except for one day that the hunters were stranded.

Nick said he expected a quicker rescue. The longer someone is stranded, he said, the more likely that person will be in danger. He’s helped look for many people with his village’s search and rescue group.

“The very first day we find out somebody is missing, we’re working on trying to get him home. We’re out there looking day or night, storm or clear skies,” he said.

He questioned whether the response was slowed because the group had supplies to survive the elements. McDaniel, the troopers spokesman, said no.

“The amount or quantity of supplies played no role in the efforts made by troopers to respond to extract the group,” McDaniel said.

Nick also questioned if because the group was all Alaska Native that slowed the response.

“Well, that’s absolutely not the case,” McDaniel said. “We perform search and rescue missions across the state, and there’s never any consideration given to the race, gender, any of those. None of those questions ever come up when we’re planning a response to a search and rescue operation.”

Regardless, Nick said, being stranded for a week took a toll on the hunters, as well as their wives, children, friends and community.

“All these years you help people so much, and when it comes down to needing help, it’s like it’s not there. Just beat you up inside. It just hurts,” Nick said, his voice cracking.

One of the hunters missed his cousin’s funeral. Nick missed his daughter’s 12th birthday. He said that the worst part of the ordeal was the worry it placed on his wife.

On the eighth day at the camp, Nov. 4, the hunters were about to burn the last of the firewood when they saw a U.S. Coast Guard plane overhead. It dropped food and a handwritten note that said to bring the radio with them when the H60 picked them up and to enjoy the pizza. The bag contained seven slices. The note ended with a big smiley face.

They turned on the VHF. The pilot told them to stay on channel 16. A helicopter was coming. Hours later, past 8 p.m. on the eighth night at the camp, they heard the chopper.

“It was getting louder and louder, and we’re like, ‘Where is it? Where is it?’ Then all of a sudden, we see lights,” Myers said.

The helicopter circled and landed. The hunters climbed aboard. They left behind their boats, supplies and seal and beluga meat. They said that everything is well stored, and they’ll return in spring to gather their belongings. The Coast Guard flew them north to Nome.

The hunters said that everyone in the group was healthy, but the Coast Guard told them they’d be taken to the hospital to be checked out. A Coast Guard spokesperson said that it’s not required for paramedics to accompany rescue missions.

When they landed in Nome, Nick said that a trooper picked them up and then asked them where they wanted to go. They never went to the hospital.

“We were freaked out when they asked us where we wanted to go. We thought they had a place for us. We didn’t know what to say. They asked if we had family or friends. We don’t know nobody here,” Nick said.

A trooper spokesperson didn’t respond to a question by publication of this story about why the officer didn’t have a plan to house the men.

The trooper took them to a hotel, where the hunters paid $450 plus tax for two rooms for the night. The next day, a trooper spokesperson told KYUK that the troopers would cover the hunters’ lodging and airfare home.

Troopers and the Coast Guard said that they rescued the hunters as soon as their resources and the weather allowed. The helicopter had to fly from the Coast Guard base in Kodiak.

On Nov. 6, after spending two nights in Nome, a plane flew the group to Pilot Station. They landed around 1:15 p.m. It had been 13 days since they left home.

The hunters thank everyone who helped them, especially the owners of the fish camps where they stayed.

KYUK reporter Olivia Ebertz contributed reporting to this story.

Rosita Worl unexpectedly grew teary eyed as she looked at the coho salmon a younger family member had brought her.

The silver fish was a sight she was used to, but one she had learned wasn’t always guaranteed.

“I just cried that our traditions were still viable, and that he was able to still bring food to me as an elder,” she said.

Worl, Tlingit, was born in Petersburg, Alaska, during the 1930s. She was brought up in a subsistence lifestyle, living off the land in Southeast Alaska as her ancestors had. As she grew older, the ceremonies, traditions, and community need for subsistence stayed constant, but the laws surrounding it changed.

She recalled the first time she realized this, as if it were yesterday. She was fishing with other kids from her village as they always did, when state officials suddenly told them that the familiar process was illegal.

“We didn’t know that it was against the law. They confiscated the fish and we couldn’t believe it. We kept saying, ‘what value is it to you to take that fish away and not return it?’ Whereas to us it meant winter food,’” she said.

Decades after this incident, similar legal disputes over subsistence are still occurring. The Alaska Native Claims Settlement Act was intended to protect this Indigenous community right, but the matter did not end up being resolved. As the 50th anniversary of the landmark legislation approaches, the question still remains: what can be done to protect subsistence rights today?

‘An unsettled and unsettling landscape’

While Indigenous land claims were being settled during ANCSA, many Alaska Natives fought to include subsistence rights in the final bill. The pairing appeared natural. After all, the legislation addressed traditional lands, which seemed inseparable from the hunting and fishing that accompanied them.

However, outright subsistence protections were left out of the final legislation, due to disagreements and a pressured timeline to develop oil. Instead, ANCSA ended up extinguishing all aboriginal hunting and fishing rights as part of the settlement. Congressional intent was for the Secretary of Interior and state of Alaska to “take any action necessary to protect the subsistence needs of the Natives.” Many believed this would be sufficient, but it soon became apparent that more concrete protections were needed.

The omission is viewed as one of the largest unintended consequences and unresolved portions of ANCSA.

“I think the ongoing, unsettled nature of subsistence has caused people to take pause; to see and ask themselves whether that part of ANCSA was a shortcoming,” said Margie Brown, Yup’ik, in an interview with University of Alaska Anchorage.

Around 10 years later, there was a second chance to protect subsistence with the passage of the Alaska National Interest Lands Conservation Act (ANILCA). While ANCSA determined the future of Native lands, ANILCA designated what would happen to the rest of state. Through the act, approximately 222 million acres of Alaskan land were put into conservation units such as parks, preserves, wildlife refuges, and national monuments. The decision meant that around 60% of the state was under federal control, making it the highest acreage of federal land ownership in the country by a long shot. Even states known for their national parks hardly compare — Alaska’s federal land is more than that of California, Oregon, Washington, Montana, Wyoming, and Idaho combined.

This time, subsistence was explicitly addressed. ANILCA protected the customary and traditional uses of fish and wildlife for food and other noncommercial use, and made subsistence the priority use on federal lands, above sport or commercial fishing and hunting.

But there was a catch. ANILCA designated subsistence to be a priority for rural residents, not Alaska Natives. Under this law, urban residents could still practice subsistence, they just wouldn’t receive priority status during times of shortage. The rural distinction was a compromise meant to protect Native subsistence, while not discriminating on the basis of ethnicity —something that several influential non-Native groups in the state opposed.

The state of Alaska set out to replicate this policy on non-federal lands, but urban hunters and fishers who considered it unfair were determined to fight it. After a few years of legal disputes, the Alaska Supreme Court ruled in their favor, deeming the rural distinction unconstitutional. The decision meant that any Alaskan resident could practice subsistence on state lands, if the state approved subsistence use in the area for that season.

Today, this dynamic has resulted in a vague and often-clashing dual system. The federal government regulates subsistence on the 60% of Alaskan land under federal control, while the state regulates subsistence on the 30%of Alaska which is under state management, the 10% which is privately owned, and navigable waters.

“You’ve got three different land jurisdictions in Alaska: you’ve got the state lands, you’ve got the federal lands, and then there’s this 40 million acres of Native lands,” said John Sky Starkey, Cheyenne River Lakota Tribe, a lawyer who has spent decades representing Alaska Native organizations in subsistence cases.

Since ANILCA passed, there have been several lawsuits between the state and federal government that have put this system to the test.

“Although the laws can potentially provide protection, the implementation of the laws is greatly lacking. And the legal meaning of the laws is also still in flux,” he explained. “In both the federal and the state regulatory regimes, Alaskan Natives have really very little say in what the regulations are going to dictate and the restrictions that they’re going to cause.”

Subsistence, a practice which past generations participated in without question, had now become a complex legal puzzle.

“It’s a very unsettled and unsettling [legal landscape] for Alaska Native people,” Starkey said.

‘An embodied way of life’

“We don’t think about subsistence as merely a quantifiable event. Subsistence is a whole structure, it’s a way of life,” explained Haliehana Alaĝum Ayagaa Stepetin, Unangax̂. Stepetin grew up subsistence fishing and hunting in her homelands on the Aleutian Islands. Today, subsistence is part of everything she does: her PhD research in Native American studies at the University of California Davis, her teachings at the Alaska Native Studies program at the University of Alaska Anchorage, and her performance and choreography of traditional Unangax̂ dance.

“It’s an embodied knowledge, an embodied way of life. And when we dance about these activities, we’re extending that process of subsistence,” she said.

From the Athabascans in the interior to the Inupiaq in the Arctic, this sentiment is consistently echoed. The practice itself looks different across the varying Alaska Native regions. Some communities hunt seals and whales along icy coasts, others fish for salmon during the long days of the midnight sun. The ceremonies might vary, and the passed down stories might differ. But despite these contrasts, all tribes have one aspect in common: subsistence means more than just food security, it also has greater cultural significance.

“Subsistence is absolutely critical to our survival. Without it, we don’t exist out here,” said Steve Ivanoff, Inupiaq, a subsistence hunter and fisherman from Unalakleet, a village of about 600 people in Western Alaska. For him, subsistence meant the community gathering and sharing of food from nature.

It can be difficult for those who aren’t familiar with subsistence to fully understand this concept.

“A major issue is that the general public, overall, does not understand the full significance of subsistence hunting as one, our basic food security, and then also the cultural dimensions of it,” explained Worl, who has a PhD in Anthropology and a renowned career in subsistence research and advocacy. She currently works as the president of Sealaska Heritage Institute and spent years on the Alaska Federation of Natives’ subsistence committee.

Worl believes some of the disconnect stems from antiquated views of Indigenous people, in which others expect them to be solely traditional, rather than the reality of modern people living in current times, who also practice their traditions.

“These spiritual things, they’re important to our cultural survival. And I don’t know that people realize that, because they see us driving cars and dressed up in modern clothes,” she said.

Stepetin also encountered misunderstandings surrounding subsistence, both as a teacher and a student.

In her PhD program, she found that the term “subsistence” was often corrected to “sustenance,” and that people viewed it in the same light as agriculture.

“It’s always surprising to me that people don’t know what subsistence is, which is really just living a balanced and sustainable lifestyle with your local ecosystem, and stewarding that ecosystem for returns to come for generations in the future,” she said.

As a teacher of Alaska Native studies, she tries to emphasize this point for students who might be unfamiliar with the tradition.

“All of our our pedagogy revolves around transfers of subsistence, which includes sharing, storytelling, dance, song, and eating together,” she said. “It permeates into every single part of an Alaskan Native existence. So I try to make it clear in my curriculum.”

She starts by encouraging her students to think beyond what’s represented in mainstream culture, which can be a challenging exercise for anyone.

“It takes a lot of introspection to even be able to understand that there’s a whole other way of living and thinking and being in the world that exists,” she said. “So really, it’s a philosophical question of, “Can I get these students to think in a different way?’ And to think critically and to think deeper about the ways that people have adapted to living in place over time.”

For many Alaska Natives, the highlight of subsistence is the generational bonding formed over passed down knowledge and shared experiences.

“It’s an important part of our wellness, our health, and our healing culture. It’s the very center of who I am as an Alaska Native person,” said Jody Potts, Han Gwitch’in Athabascan. “And it’s important for me to be raising my kids this way.”

But in recent years, the legal landscape has made the crucial generational component more difficult to fulfill. Subsistence life is usually tied to the village one is from. In the summers, people travel to their fish camps — settlements near one’s village where people fish, oftentimes in the same location their ancestors had practiced subsistence. In the winter, they trap or hunt in areas located near their village as well.

Today, an increased number of Alaska Natives have moved away from their family’s village to urban areas, such as Anchorage, for employment or educational opportunities. However, many still have ties to their home village, and return for key community events, such as subsistence practices and celebrations.

“They want to continue to engage with their village and their kin and everybody around subsistence activities. They want to bring the kids up with that culture. And because of this rural priority, if they live somewhere other than in the village, then they’re cut out, which causes a great amount of consternation to people,” Starkey said.

If the federal government exercises its authority to close a river to subsistence fishing to anyone who’s not a qualified rural resident, that means their own family can’t come out to fish camp anymore, says Starkey. Because federal subsistence protections extend to rural residents, urban Alaska Natives aren’t included.

“It’s just becoming a real tool for assimilation,” he explained.

Even those who do qualify for the rural precedent can have their access removed. For example, in 2006, the Federal Subsistence Board terminated the Southeastern village Saxman’s rural status and grouped it in with the larger town Ketchikan. For 10 years, the small community of 400 worked to restore their subsistence access before it was finally granted.

It’s situations like this that reveal how the rural precedent can be unpredictable, and demonstrate why some Alaska Natives would favor a law that more directly protects their subsistence practices.

“This does not mean that non-Natives from Anchorage and Fairbanks can’t go out and take a moose or go fishing,” wrote Thomas Berger in his 1985 Report of the Alaska Native Review Commission. “What it does mean is that I believe Congress should entrench Native subsistence rights, so they cannot be placed in jeopardy by any future state action.”

The argument that Berger made almost 40 years in his report to the Inuit Circumpolar Conference is still being debated today.

Basic rights, different wavelengths

In theory, the current legal setup is designed to provide equal hunting and fishing opportunities for all Alaskans. But some argue this approach doesn’t account for pre-existing societal inequities.

Most Alaska Native villages are located in highly remote areas, disconnected from roads and far from other communities. Food must be shipped in by plane or boat, and the unconventional transportation route can cause prices to skyrocket. Expensive airfare and unpredictable weather conditions can make grocery deliveries unreliable.

“There is currently this notion that all Alaskans, regardless of whether or not they’re living a subsistence way of life, are subsistence users. And if everyone is, then it dilutes the so called priority for real subsistence users. If everybody is a subsistence user then what does priority mean?” Starkey said, referring to the state’s subsistence laws.

Worl sees cases of these inequities all the time. For example, during the pandemic, transportation to the village of Kake was interrupted, meaning the coastal town was unable to get a steady supply of commercial goods during the health crisis. In light of the urgent situation, the village applied for an emergency subsistence use permit. The request was initially denied, briefly approved, then stalled by a lawsuit from the state government.

“It just seemed like it should be a basic right. But we must be on different wavelengths than other people,” she said.

To make matters worse, it occurred at a time when the health qualities of subsistence food were especially sought after.

“There was this great concern for elders who were more susceptible to getting COVID,” she said. “And the community really wanted them to be able to have this healing food.”

The case demonstrated how Alaska Native subsistence rights can often become tangled in legal conflicts focused on state vs federal power. Matthew Newman, an attorney for the Native American Rights Fund, says they should be two separate issues.

“Unfortunately, the board’s effort here has been attacked as part of a much different battle between the federal government and the state of Alaska about who gets to control fish and game management,” said Newman said in an interview with High Country News.

For those worried that an increase in subsistence practices could lead to a strain on natural resources, data says otherwise. Subsistence users take just 1% of the fish and game harvested in Alaska, according to the Department of Fish and Game, with the vast majority going to commercial fishers and hunters instead.

A worsening situation

The Alaska Native subsistence debate has been occurring for years. But the stakes are even higher in recent times, when a changing climate has altered everything from salmon runs and hunting seasons, to migration patterns and berry growth.

“There are so many threats to our subsistence and our traditional ways of life, be it climate change, be it laws, [other] hunters, and the stress on the resource,” explained Potts.

Many subsistence based communities have been impacted by this first hand. For example, the Yukon River has seen two consecutive years of record breaking low salmon runs, consistent with a decade of downward trends. Around 40 communities in the area rely on subsistence fishing. The situation was so dire that emergency shipments of salmon and other food had to be flown out to particularly afflicted regions.

This dismal data isn’t surprising news to subsistence users. Many have been seeing warning signs for years. Stepetin described how her dad taught her to observe the signs in the land, and note the interconnected nature of the wildlife that surrounded them. This knowledge was based on thousands of years of passed down insights. For instance, when there wasn’t enough snowfall, there would likely be a shortage of berries.

“We’re already Indigenous scientists and already know this. We don’t need outside sources to tell us what’s going on. We can tell them that we’re witnessing and experiencing a changing climate and returns of salmon and the different fish,” she said.

The value of traditional knowledge was apparent to outside perspectives as well. Through his legal work on subsistence, Starkey has witnessed countless times where Indigenous customs predicted food shortages, or traditional management prevented overfishing.

He views this as another reason Alaska Natives should have an increased role in subsistence management.

“It’s not just for the sake of Alaska Native people, that Alaska Natives need to be much more meaningfully engaged in land management. It would benefit everyone,” he said.

50 years later, an ANCSA amendment?

From the very start of the legislative process, it was evident that many expected ANCSA lands to be tied to Indigenous subsistence. When ANCSA first passed and the various Alaska Native corporations began choosing the lands they would own, some corporations, such as Ahtna, specifically selected areas that were best for subsistence, says Starkey. Thousands of years of knowledge went into the decision. Decades later, Ahtna has had to consistently fight for hunting and fishing rights on their own lands.

“In one lifetime, we went from being the only inhabitants of our region to co-managing the resources of our homeland alongside state and federal actors,” said Ahtna chairman Ken Johns, Udzisyu Caribou clan, in an essay for the Anchorage Daily News.

It’s another example of the unsettled dynamic between subsistence and ANCSA. But there are still possibilities for change down the line.

“I think that there needs to be amendments made to the Alaska Native Claims Settlement Act that reinstates our Aboriginal hunting and fishing rights,” Potts said.

There are a few potential solutions. One change would be to enable Alaska Natives to manage and harvest ANCSA lands, as they initially believed they would be able to.

This could be accomplished through an amendment to ANCSA legislation. Many in the community, like Potts, believe this is a good compromise: if Alaska Natives aren’t legally given priority to subsistence hunt and fish on all Alaskan land, then they should at least be able to receive priority on their own lands.

Unfortunately, the amendment process would likely be extremely expensive. Already, Alaska Native subsistence advocacy has cost millions of dollars, says Worl. Furthermore, many of the Alaska Native organizations that could lead the process already are inundated with other pressing legal matters.

“There is an estimate that we’ve spent around $20 million trying to protect subsistence, because it seems that every time we try to do something, we end up with a lawsuit. And it’s still ongoing,” Worl said.

This is where the Alaska Native corporations have been able to help: funding. Any legal battle would most likely be a sort of David and Goliath dynamic, where subsistence users would have to go against resource-heavy opponents such as the state and federal government, or special interest groups like sports hunters that receive outside funding from national sporting organizations. Many villages simply don’t have the resources to counter these larger groups. But the Alaska Native corporations, which have more assets and organizing capacity, might be able to provide more assistance.

Another option would be to amend ANILCA, so that Alaska Natives have priority to subsistence hunt and fish on federal lands in addition to rural residents. This would also likely be a lengthy and expensive process.

The third option is to implement a co-management solution, which would enable Alaska Natives to have greater influence over state and federal subsistence laws.

“In both the federal and the state regulatory regimes, Alaskan Natives have very little say in what the regulations are going to dictate and the restrictions that they’re going to cause,” Starkey said. “They’re left out of control of one of the most important aspects of their way of being. And that’s just wrong. It’s been a huge problem from the beginning.”

As it currently stands, there are three Alaska Native representatives on the federal subsistence advisory board, and one representative from the BIA. However, these voices are often outvoted by the 5 other representatives that don’t have ties to Alaska Native communities. The setup can cause critical subsistence decisions to depend solely on the current administration.

“If your way of life depends on who’s in office every four years, either as a governor or president, what kind of security do you feel about that?” asked Starkey.

Worl also saw a need for a more concrete co-management policy.

“We’ve been pushing and pushing for increased co-management. I know some regions have more success with co-management, but it should be addressed on a statewide level,”’ she said.

This strategy has worked in other locations. In Washington, salmon and steelhead fisheries are managed cooperatively by Western Washington tribes and the Washington state government. The arrangement involves an annual agreement on salmon fishing seasons and on hatchery production objectives in Puget Sound and the Washington coast.

While the region still experiences the type of salmon population challenges that are becoming increasingly common today, the co-management approach has seen positive results overall.

“I don’t know of a better working relationship between a tribe and a state agency,” Scott Chitwood, Jamestown S’Klallam Tribe’s natural resources director, told the Northwest Indian Fisheries Commission in 2007. “By working well together, we’ve been able to make real progress toward recovering Dungeness chinook.”

Even sports fishers who had initially been against a co-management relationship eventually saw the value of Indigenous-led fishing policies.

“I had a lot of sports fishermen come directly up to me. And they put out their hand and they said, ‘Would you please tell the Yakama Nation thank you? Because we know if it wasn’t for their tribe, there’d still be no fish in that river,’” recalled Carol Craig, Yakama, in a 2016 NMAI interview.

As the Alaska Federation of Natives rolls around this year, Worl and others will be including a resolution to amend ANCSA to protect subsistence rights. Considering the cost it would take to change the law, coupled with the many other advocacy campaigns Alaska Native organizations are already handling, she isn’t optimistic that it will pass. But giving up doesn’t seem like an option, either. She’s hoping that increased emphasis on social and environmental justice might just make a difference this year.

“I was thinking this would be the perfect time to try to pursue it when people are looking at social justice and social equity. But again, it takes money to be able to push these things through Congress. So I just don’t know what it’ll take to move it past a stalemate,” she said.

Until then, Indigenous Alaskan communities will continue passing on their traditions despite legal barriers, just as they have done for centuries.

“It’s a sustainable way of life,” Stepetin said. “And we will keep it alive as long as communities with this knowledge continue to transmit it to the next generation, and keep these stories and lessons of subsistence alive within us.”

This story is part of a joint project between Indian Country Today, Alaska Public Media, and Anchorage Daily News on the 50th anniversary of the landmark Alaska Native Claims Settlement Act. Funding for ICT’s ANCSA project is provided in part by the Alaska Center for Excellence in Journalism and the Solutions Journalism Network. Stay updated on ICT’s ANCSA project using #ANCSA50 at https://indiancountrytoday.com/tag/ancsa-50.