Health

The U.S. Justice Department has announced more than $86 million in grants for American Indian and Alaska Native communities to ​​support survivors of domestic violence, dating violence, sexual assault, stalking and sex trafficking.

Nearly $14 million of those dollars were awarded to Alaska tribes and tribal organizations.

The news comes after Alaska lawmakers increased state funding to the state’s Council on Domestic Violence and Sexual Assault to make up for a decrease in one if its federal funding sources and as advocates have stressed the need for even more financial support.

The grants come through the federal Violence Against Women Act, a law that funds the investigation and prosecution of violent crimes against women, which had its 30th anniversary this month. The law established the federal Office of Violence Against Women within the Justice Department; its Tribal Affairs Division will administer the grants.

Fourteen different tribes or tribal organizations in Alaska have been awarded grants so far and several of them received more than $1 million. The Organized Village of Kake was awarded $1.5 million to support Tribal jurisdiction over crimes committeed in the community, including domestic violence, dating violence, sexual assault, and sex trafficking.

Bristol Bay Native Association Inc., Aleutian Pribilof Island Association Inc. and the Yakutat Tlingit Tribe each received roughly $1.2 million to support the response to such crimes in the communities they serve.

The Yup’ik Women’s Coalition and the Healing Native Hearts Coalition each received more than $400,000 in grants to continue their work in the Yukon-Kuskokwim and Interior regions.

U.S. Attorney General Merrick Garland weighed in on the awards.

“Tribal communities, and particularly American Indian and Alaska Native women and girls, have experienced disproportionately high levels of violence for too long,” he said in a news release. “This $86 million dollar investment represents the Justice Department’s commitment to working in partnership with Tribal nations to address and prevent gender-based violence and provide safety and justice for survivors.”

The Office of Violence Against Women will have made all its grants by Sept. 30, a spokesperson said.

Since the Valdez child care center Stepping Stones closed two years ago, working parents like Brianne Skilbred have had to scramble.

“[My kids’] current child care provider that they have is their fifth in two years,” Skilbred said.

Stepping Stones was the only licensed facility offering all-day care. The only other licensed provider is a preschool that offers half-day classes a few days a week, and even that is near capacity.

Like many communities around the state, Valdez is struggling with a lack of child care — for many of the same reasons that child care providers are struggling across the country.

Skilbred is an executive assistant with the city and a mother of two young children. All things considered, she said, she’s lucky: Her boss lets her skip lunch breaks and come in early so she can pick up her kids at 3:30 p.m. during the summer. Her last babysitter gave Skilbred a two-month heads-up that she would be moving out of town.

“Some people only gave us a week,” Skilbred said. “That was a little bit harder.”

A few years ago, Skilbred said, she was asked to join the board of the relatively new nonprofit that had formed to keep the doors open at Stepping Stones. At her first board meeting, she said, they elected her president, giving her an up-close look at the challenges that led to its closure.

The main problem was staffing, she said. The center was offering hourly wages from $14 to $24 an hour, depending on experience, but in the wake of the pandemic, Skilbred said, they needed more than wages to attract employees.

“People were looking for medical benefits more than pay,” she said. “We just we can’t we couldn’t afford that. We wouldn’t be able to swing that.”

So when the director left for a better job in the Lower 48, and no one with the state-mandated credentials applied to replace her, Stepping Stones closed its doors.

And now, it’s not just that daycare is hard to find. For many people, it’s simply not available.

Susan Love, a college administrator and the chair of a city child care task force, said the lack of licensed providers sharply limits who has access.

“We don’t have any location where individuals can use state subsidies for low income or other needs or military assistance to access paid and licensed child care,” Love said.

Along with Valdez’s housing shortage, Love said it’s part of an interrelated economic puzzle that’s holding the community back in some important ways: Child care centers can’t find staff. Workers can’t find a place to live. And people who do find housing often can’t find or afford child care.

Valdez’s struggle to address the issue says a lot about just how intractable it is, Love said. After all, not every community has the trans-Alaska pipeline providing the city with more than half of its annual revenue.

“If we are trying to pull all the many resources of the town together to help solve the problem, and we’re struggling with it, I think it speaks to the complexity and the the depth of how challenging the problem is,” she said.

Still, in years past, people and businesses have made it work. But Elise Sorum-Birk, the deputy city clerk for Valdez who worked closely with the task force, said things have changed.

“I think it’s very well understood that child care as a business doesn’t really pencil out,” she said. “It might have, maybe 20 years ago, [but] it doesn’t in the current economy, and it’s just very hard to pay a living wage if you’re a child care business.”

Sorum-Birk said standards of care are higher — state regulations set minimum requirements for buildings and staff. Inflation has pushed the cost of living higher, so workers are looking for higher pay. And parents don’t always have money to spare.

“It’s just this very sensitive time of life, and there’s just not a lot of value put on it economically,” she said.

It’s a big task for a city to solve a decades-old economic problem, but Valdez is trying. Valdez is considering whether to rework part of its city-owned elementary school into a child care center. City officials are also working on a program with the local college to reduce the cost of getting certified to run a child care center.

Next up is finding someone to run the center and a sustainable funding and management model. That’s definitely easier said than done — but work is underway.

ANCHORAGE, Alaska — Despite Alaska’s small population, a 2018 report by the Urban Indian Health Institute identified it as the state with the fourth-highest number of missing and murdered Indigenous women and girls, and Anchorage as the city with the third-highest number of such cases in the nation.

A new law aims to address some of the reasons for those high rates.

Experts say the causes are complex but clearly the lack of any law enforcement in a third of rural Alaska villages is an issue. Then, where there is law enforcement, there are various layers, including: Alaska police departments, village public safety officers, Alaska state troopers, and sometimes the Federal Bureau of Investigation.

In a 2021 report, the nonprofit Data for Indigenous Justice said when jurisdictions overlap, the result is not dual coverage, but an “unwillingness by either system to assume responsibility for the safety of Indigenous people.”

“One sentiment that illustrates the issue is that law enforcement and criminal prosecution often mobilize to address hunting violations more quickly than they do for cases of homicide against Indigenous people,” the report stated.

In an effort to change course, Alaska has a new law addressing missing and murdered Indigenous persons (MMIP).

Kendra Kloster, who is Tlingit, is co-director of law and policy with the Alaska Native Women’s Resource Center. The center is part of the Missing and Murdered Indigenous Women, Girls, and Two-Spirit Relatives (MMIWG2S) Working Group. The other group members are the Alaska Native Justice Center, Alaska Native Heritage Center, Data for Indigenous Justice and Native Movement.

Kloster said the bill addresses issues identified through working with and listening to Indigenous peoples. “So these ideas and these things that have come up are things that we’ve talked with our tribes about, we’ve talked about with our communities. And these were kind of some of the things that rose to the top that we really needed to do to really look into cases to develop our resources, to really understand what else we can do better.”

She continued, “we collaborate with a lot of other organizations across the state that are doing really great work on this as well, and talking with families who we really appreciate them sharing stories and their information. It’s really hard to do that. But without them, we wouldn’t be able to identify all the different things that really need to be addressed and kind of the loopholes. And so it really takes our whole communities coming together to make this change.”

Kloster said much more is needed — for example, 911 services that are available and responsive, better and more accessible data, and wellness and trauma services—but this new law is the result of efforts beginning in 2018.

Gov. Mike Dunleavy signed Senate Bill 151 into law on Sept. 3. In a prepared statement he said, “this legislation is a continuation of Alaska’s mission to recognize and solve missing and murdered Indigenous persons cases. My administration will continue to support law enforcement, victim advocacy groups, Alaska Native Tribes and other entities working together to solve these cases and bring closure to victims’ families.”

“Senate Bill 151 represents a pivotal moment in our fight to end the crisis of Missing and Murdered Indigenous Peoples,” bill sponsor Sen. Donny Olson (D-Golovin) said in the prepared statement. “By bringing diverse voices together and enhancing our investigative efforts, we are making a clear statement: every life matters, and we will not rest until justice is served for all our missing and murdered loved ones. This legislation is a critical step in the state’s dedication towards healing our communities and ensuring that no family is left without answers.”

“The Alaska Department of Public Safety has led the local, state, and federal government efforts in Alaska of reducing instances of missing and murdered indigenous persons and will continue to invest resources into all of our MMIP initiatives,” Alaska Department of Public Safety Commissioner James Cockrell said in the statement. “With Senate Bill 151 becoming law today many of the initiatives that we started within DPS will now be codified into Alaska Statute and carried on into the future. Your Alaska State Troopers are committed to continuing to aggressively investigate cold case homicides and suspicious missing persons cases that involve Alaska Native victims.”

The prepared statement states the new law:

• Creates a nine-member MMIP Review Commission to review unsolved cases and submit a report to the Legislature every three years with its recommendations and findings;

• Requires indigenous cultural training for new police officers;

• Requires the Alaska Department of Public Safety to conduct a one-time assessment of its protective and investigative resources for identifying and reporting MMIP cases; and

• Requires the Department of Public Safety to file a missing persons report to the National Missing and Unidentified Persons System database within 60 days after the first report is filed with state and local law enforcement.

The legislation takes effect Jan. 1.

ICT originally published this article. ICT is an an independent, nonprofit, multimedia news enterprise. ICT covers Indigenous peoples.

Expanded access to mental health care was a primary concern for the state legislators and nonprofits serving children and families who responded to a survey for the Alaska Children’s Caucus.

The bipartisan group of lawmakers whose focus is policy that improves early childhood outcomes met on Friday afternoon. The caucus formed last winter.

Sen. Löki Tobin, D-Anchorage, who led the meeting in Anchorage, said that throughout the last legislative session, the testimony from Alaskans about their need for support of mental and behavioral health services was overwhelming.

“We know that Alaska is No. 1 in all of the bad things, and one of those bad things is suicide, death by suicide, and we know that Alaska Native youth are disproportionately impacted by that,” she said. “And so I think we have a real opportunity to figure out some ways that we can intervene, that we can disrupt that and hopefully we can give services and supports to families.”

The recommendation came from a survey that Alaska Children’s Trust helped conduct, which asked respondents for policy and funding recommendations.

Sen. Elvi-Gray Jackson, who last session sponsored a bill that would have made mental health education a core part of curriculum in Alaska public schools, said she would renew her effort in the upcoming legislative session. The Senate approved SB 24, but it got stuck in the House Finance Committee and did not make it to the House floor for a vote before the end of the session.

“I look forward to bringing that bill forward again during the next legislative session that begins on Jan. 21,” she said.

While increased access to mental health care outside of school hours was the top policy recommendation, it was closely followed by a recommendation to expand pre-kindergarten opportunities to include child care and Head Start providers. Other recommendations included providing paid family leave and insurance benefits for all state employees and creating an online resource that lists the benefits available to parents of young children.

Respondents suggested lawmakers fund those efforts and others by increasing funding for the state’s child care grant program and child advocacy centers, establishing an early educator wage stipend, and increasing funding for the Parents as Teachers program, among other ideas.

The Alaska Children’s Caucus, which was revived this year, has bipartisan co-chairs from both chambers, including Tobin, Sen. Cathy Giessel, R-Anchorage, Rep. Mike Cronk, R-Tok, and Rep. Maxine Dibert, D-Fairbanks. The next caucus meeting has not yet been scheduled.

Dr. Janet Shen has been a pediatrician at the Children’s Clinic in Anchorage for almost thirty years. And she said in the past few weeks, she’s seen more cases of whooping cough, or pertussis, than in the rest of her career.

“Mostly it’s children [or] teenagers who have had a cough for weeks,” Shen said. “They’re not necessarily very sick, but it’s been a cough that doesn’t go away. We are also seeing younger patients, toddlers, infants, who have coughs.”

Alaska is in the middle of what state epidemiologists are calling an epidemic of whooping cough. In the past few weeks, the total number of cases in the state has risen to 286, the most since the last epidemic, in 2012, when there were almost 400 cases.

She said, especially now that respiratory virus season is starting, it’s hard to tell the difference between whooping cough and a lingering virus, but she said many patients she’s screened have tested positive for the pertussis bacteria.

“With pertussis, the earlier you test them, the better the prognosis is in terms of being able to offer treatment and, of course, to stem the transmission of the disease,” she said. “So I think we’re trying to err on the side of good public health and testing more people.”

She said some of her patients testing positive are vaccinated and some are unvaccinated. And she said she worries most about families with infants. About a third of babies under one who get whooping cough will be hospitalized and 1% of hospitalized babies will die from it.

Joe McLaughlin, chief of the Alaska section of epidemiology, said vaccination is the best way to protect yourself and the people around you.

The unvaccinated population is at increased risk for pertussis, and when they get pertussis, they’re at increased risk for more severe disease. But, he said 45% of the state’s cases are in vaccinated people.

McLaughlin said about two thirds of reported cases in the state are kids under 15 years old. 16 people have been hospitalized, most of them babies, and one baby has died of pertussis during the statewide epidemic.

He said the public health aim is to protect those most vulnerable to pertussis: infants, pregnant women and people who are immunocompromised.

“We do that through trying to achieve herd immunity, and that’s where everybody who’s eligible for vaccination gets vaccinated A, to protect themselves, but B, to protect their loved ones and their community,” McLaughlin said.

Mclaughlin said it’s important for adults to make sure they’re vaccinated against whooping cough- only about two thirds of Alaskans are. And he said it’s especially important for pregnant women to get vaccinated during their third trimester.

“It helps protect the woman, the pregnant woman, but it also, more importantly, helps protect the newborn infant once they’re born, because you get that maternal transport of antibodies,” McLauglin said.

He said anyone with an infant should find out whether people in contact with the baby have any lingering cough symptoms. He said adults can get TDAP boosters, which includes vaccination against pertussis, every ten years.

McLaughlin said people who are concerned they might have pertussis should talk with their healthcare provider, especially if they are high risk, connected to someone who is high risk or if they’ve been around someone who has tested positive.

He said cases of whooping cough are rising in Anchorage and in Southwest Alaska, but statewide, cases are declining and we may have already seen the worst of the statewide epidemic.

Kathy Bell, a nurse and the director of healthcare services for the Anchorage School District, said 13 cases of pertussis have been reported in the district as of Sept. 17 at eight different schools. She said she’s happy that no single school has seen a huge outbreak.

“It’s spotty, like one school has one, one has two, another one has one,” Bell said.

But she added, “there’s no way for me to know who’s reporting it and who isn’t reporting it.”

Bell said the Anchorage school district has ordered 200 TDAP vaccines, which vaccinate adults against tetanus, diphtheria, and pertussis. They’ll be offering them for free at pop-up vaccination clinics which are open to staff and members of the community. The clinics will be held Sept. 23 and 25 from 2 to 5 p.m. at the district’s education center.

The Tikahtnu mall in Anchorage also has a pop-up free vaccine clinic. And across the state, vaccines are available for free or low cost through public health centers, pharmacies, and healthcare providers.

Editor’s note: Anna Canny reported this story for NPR’s Climate Solutions Week. 

Growing up in rural Alaska, Eva Dawn Burk recalls hunting, trapping and going to fish camp every summer, gathering traditional foods with her family.

Burk is Alaska Native, Dene’ and Lower Tanana Athabascan. She grew up in the small villages of Nenana and Manley Hot Springs along the Tanana River in Interior Alaska, where her family and neighbors relied on the land to fill their pantries and freezers.

But that way of life is increasingly threatened. Alaska is warming faster than any other U.S. state as a result of human-caused climate change. Heat waves and other shifting weather patterns are causing chaos in ecosystems that Indigenous hunters and fishermen have long relied on, disrupting everything from the migration of caribou and reindeer to the abundance of wild-berryharvests.

“It doesn’t matter what part of the state that we look at,” says Burk, now a community food activist and a student of sustainable agriculture at the University of Alaska Fairbanks. “Climate change is wreaking havoc on the habitat and on our fish and wildlife.”

But the warmer temperatures and changing seasons have also had another impact: Climate change is making agriculture more possible in many parts of Alaska. That’s driving a new enthusiasm for farming across the state.

Few of the state’s rural villages have farms or even community gardens. So in 2020, Burk decided to start a training program to teach aspiring Alaska Native farmers how to grow their own food.

The goal, she says, is to help Alaska communities that are being most affected by climate change — and to shore up food security as traditional foods become more unpredictable.

“An Indigenous value is to be prepared for the future,” Burk says. “What our program is doing is working to prepare some of the most vulnerable communities.”

“You can’t farm in Alaska”

Alaska isn’t usually considered farm country. Much of the state has cool summers, harsh winters and a short growing season, which can make it challenging to grow anything other than hardy crops like cabbages and potatoes.

But climate change is bringing higher temperatures during many parts of the year and longer frost-free summers.

First frosts are already arriving later in some parts of the state, allowing growers to keep their crops in the field longer. Research done at the University of Alaska Fairbanks predicts the growing season could be weeks or even months longer by 2100.

Hotter summers could support larger yields, and milder winters could shift the state’s plant hardiness zones, which describe the crops most likely to thrive in a region. By 2100, the hardiness zones in Fairbanks may resemble those in modern-day Kansas or Kentucky, the UAF study found.

Even now, Alaska farmers and gardeners are experimenting with crops that have historically been extremely difficult to cultivate.

“We’re successfully able to grow things like artichokes and field-grown tomatoes, peppers and corn here in Fairbanks,” says Glenna Gannon, a professor of sustainable food systems who runs crop trials at UAF. “I don’t think 30 or even 10 years ago that would have been successful.”

The state’s tiny agriculture industry is growing fast. The number of farms in Alaska has nearly doubled over the last two decades — from just about 600 in 2002 to almost 1,200 by 2022.

But Alaska growers like Gatgyeda Haayk still encounter a lot of skepticism.

“I hear that a lot. Like, ‘You can’t farm in Alaska,’” says Haayk, an instructor at the Indigenous-led agriculture training program at Calypso Farm and Ecology Center, just outside Fairbanks. “Even when I first came here, I didn’t think of myself as a farmer.”

Haayk runs a community garden in Metlakatla, a Tsimshian village of about 1,500 people in Southeast Alaska.

She first came to Calypso as a student, learning skills like seed starting and garden planning. Now she’s eager to pass that knowledge along.

Alaska farmers will not be exempt from the downsides of agriculture in a hotter world, like increased risk of drought or pests.

But in Haayk’s eyes, farming is still one of the best ways for Alaska Native villages to adapt to climate change. Alaska Native people make up more than 20% of the state’s population. As Alaska’s agriculture industry grows, Haayk wants to see more Indigenous-led farms and gardens.

“I feel like it’s time for the Indigenous people to be the pioneers of this change,” Haayk says. “We know this land best.”

She also thinks Alaska communities need to be less dependent on the Lower 48. Alaska currently depends almost entirely on produce grown elsewhere: Almost 95% of the state’s food is imported. Most grocery supplies arrive in Anchorage on barges. From there, everything must be transported to the state’s far-flung communities, many of which are not connected to the road system. Supplies are delivered by smaller boats or planes.

All of that means groceries are much more expensive. And shipping delays during the COVID-19 pandemic and recent natural disasters have demonstrated how fragile the system can be.

Those are all issues Eva Dawn Burk hoped to combat when she founded Calypso’s Indigenous-led farmer training program a few years ago.

Fresh veggies for remote villages

The Calypso Farm and Ecology Center was founded in 2000, just as the current wave of interest in Alaska agriculture was starting. It’s a small farm, nestled on 3 acres of land in the boreal forest just outside Fairbanks. But it grows hundreds of varieties of fruits and vegetables, just a few hundred miles from the Arctic Circle.

Burk first visited Calypso in 2019.

“I was really in shock and awe,” Burk says. “I was like, ‘How come we haven’t ever built something like this in one of our villages?’”

By 2020, Burk had launched the Indigenous agriculture trainings, building on Calypso’s existing suite of educational programs.

Burk views growing food as a natural complement to hunting, fishing and gathering wild foods. She hopes the training program will spur more farms in rural communities, where growers will tend to crops on the same land where they smoke salmon and tan animal hides.

Burk and her partners at Calypso have already helped develop a small statewide network of Alaska Native farmers and teachers. Late last year, the nascent program received a boost with nearly $750,000 in funding from the U.S. Department of Agriculture’s Beginning Farmer and Rancher Development Program.

On a drizzly day in August, this year’s training was well underway.

Tom Zimmer, who owns Calypso Farm, dug a hole in the deep brown soil and held out a small apple sapling to a group of trainees from across the state.

“Whoever plants this, in four years you get to come back and have some apples,” Zimmer said.

Bernadette Pete raised her hand. Pete took three flights to get to Calypso Farm, traveling for 12 hours from her hometown in Western Alaska for a weekend of lessons.

She and the other trainees were learning about transplanting and seed starting, composting and soil health, and irrigation. Between lessons, they spent the weekend camping and harvesting food for meals they cooked together.

Pete stepped up, pulled the tree roots from their plastic covering, and plopped the sapling into the ground.

“Write my name on it!” she said, laughing, as she packed the soil with her heel.

Fresh apples are one food it can be hard to get back home, Pete said, along with many of the veggies she snacked on that weekend, like sugar snap peas off the vine and celery straight from the ground.

Like almost all the students who come to Calypso, Pete has stories about how the environment around her home is changing. Her hometown, the Yup’ik village of Alakanuk, sits at the mouth of the Yukon River, near the Bering Sea.

The community of about 700 people relies on wild foods like seabird eggs, berries, moose and especially salmon, which have been hit hard by climate change.

The decline of sea ice in Arctic and sub-Arctic communities like Alakanuk is making hunting more difficult and dangerous, and more extreme fall storms in Western Alaska have destroyed not only homes but also the gear used to get food. Salmon populations in the Yukon River have collapsed, driven at least in part, scientists say, by warmer river temperatures.

“I notice fall flooding, a lot more rain, less fish,” Pete said.

Endless rainstorms last summer drenched the salmon on Pete’s drying rack, being preserved for winter. She had to throw much of it away.

Since salmon stocks have crashed, the region’s only commercial salmon-processing plant has started pivoting to agriculture, putting up greenhouses in Alakanuk and surrounding villages.

With the knowledge she gained at Calypso, Pete is eager to get planting.

“Everyone here is so eager to teach you. It’s like they know every plant and how it grows,” Pete said. “I want to grow lettuce, potatoes, sugar snap peas.”

“I want my own little greenhouse.”