Military

The remains of an Alaska Native student buried more than 100 years ago at the Carlisle Indian Industrial School in Pennsylvania will return to Alaska.

Beginning June 19, the U.S Army started the process to return the remains of 10 Native students buried at the Carlisle school.

According to a U.S. Army news release, nine students are from the Rosebud Sioux Tribe and one student — Sophia Tetoff — is identified as an Alaskan Aleut.

Sophia entered the school on June 26, 1901, and died there May 6, 1906. According to WITF, a public radio station in Harrisburg, Pennsylvania — Sophia’s remains will be returned to Saint Paul Island, Alaska.

The Carlisle boarding school operated from 1879 to 1918. The site continues to be part of the U.S. Army War College.

Clear Air Force Station has a new name. In a ceremony Tuesday, the installation near Healy was officially renamed Clear Space Force Station.

Installation officials say the name change won’t affect Clear’s main mission, which is to scan the horizon for incoming enemy missiles and to alert the U.S. missile defense system, including the base at Fort Greely, to threats.

Clear’s ability to carry out that mission could be greatly enhanced in 2023 when an advanced, $1.5 billion radar system becomes operational. Construction work on the Long Range Discrimination Radar has been completed, and the Missile Defense Agency hopes to conduct a key operational flight test for the LRDR next year.

There are no Space Force personnel at Clear. Officials say for now Air Force military and civilian personnel will continue to operate the installation.

The U.S. Space Force is the newest branch of the military, established in December 2019. The 13th Space Warning Squadron at Clear falls under the Space Force’s command. That unit is based at Buckley Space Force Base in Colorado.

Clear is the third Air Force station to be re-designated as a Space Force facility. Six Air Force bases also have been redesignated as Space Force bases: three, including Buckley, are in Colorado, two are in California and one is in Florida.

Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin this week announced the establishment of the Ted Stevens Center for Arctic Security Studies. But the center doesn’t physically exist yet. It doesn’t have any staff. And it might be located far from the Arctic.

A Defense Department spokesman said three cities are under consideration for housing the Ted Stevens Center: Anchorage, Colorado Springs and Washington, D.C.

Sen. Lisa Murkowski said she’s made it very clear to Secretary Austin that she expects the center to be located in Alaska.

“He acknowledged that he was fully aware of that,” she said.

The Defense Department has five other regional defense study centers. They are academic forums and hubs for building international alliances. One in Hawaii is named for the late Sen. Daniel Inouye. He and Sen. Stevens were close friends.

The Pentagon didn’t originate the idea of an Arctic center. It’s a congressional mandate, added by the Alaska delegation. Murkowski inserted $10 million for it in an appropriations bill.

The Pentagon spokesman said the department will “immediately” begin the work of hiring a director. The Alaska delegation has already submitted its list of preferred candidates, Murkowski said.

For years, a small American flag was all that marked the grave of George Fox. Now, his resting place will finally be recognized.

Every year, Unangax̂ elder Gertrude Svarny visits the Russian Orthodox cemetery in Unalaska and puts a tiny U.S. flag on an unmarked grave.

The grave is for her childhood friend, George Fox who was an Unangax̂ soldier who died during World War II.

“It is very powerful that Gertrude Svarny remembered him and has taken the time to honor his memory every Memorial Day to go up to his gravesite and to place the United States flag on his grave,” said Michael iqyax̂ Livingston, a cultural heritage specialist with the Aleutian Pribilof Islands Association. Livingston worked with others to get a grave marker for the World War II soldier.

“Here we are about 77 years later and his sacrifice is basically gone, almost gone. Had it not been for Gertrude Svarny, it would have been completely forgotten,” Livingston said.

Fox was born in 1920 on Unga Island, off the Alaska Peninsula about 250 miles northeast of Unalaska. He joined the U.S. Army in January of 1941 and served in the military police during World War II

The German occupation of Rome began in September 1943, and Allied forces led an offensive campaign that would eventually capture the Italian city.

Fox was killed in action in Ardea, Rome, Italy — just three days before the American forces took possession of the city on June 4, 1944. He’s the only known Aleut/Unangax̂ soldier killed in action during World War II.

When Fox’s body returned to Unalaska, Livingston said his funeral service was at the Russian Orthodox Church.

“He’s buried right next to his mom,” Livingston said. “And his mom was Russian Orthodox and he was Russian Orthodox, too.”

The grave of his mom, Emma Fox, is marked with a large solid black stone with her name on it.

And at 91, Gertrude Svarny, who is an accomplished Unangax̂ artist and culture bearer, continues to visit the grave of her friend.

But he never received a marker. Fox’s grave has been unmarked for more than 70 years, and his name is missing from World War II killed in action memorials in Alaska.

“We really don’t know why this grave was not marked,” Livingston said. “Times were different back in the 1940s. It was basically open-faced racism against people of color, including soldiers of color. And so that might have been a play in it”

“When you compare Private George Fox’s grave, two other graves — for example, out at Fort Richardson National Cemetery — those are, those graves are immaculate lawns and very beautifully placed stones and flags and sidewalks,” Livingston said.

Livingston and others worked for at least five years to get Fox a marker. They managed to get some records from the National Archives. And applied for one.

“We were able to enlist the help of United States Sen. Dan Sullivan. And since Sen. Sullivan’s office got involved and helps us, has helped us in the project, we have finally able to get some resolution from the Veterans Affairs,” Livingston said.

This May, the U.S. Department of Veterans Affairs approved the order of a gravestone for Fox.

“We’re just grateful that the stone is being ordered and hopefully it will arrive in Unalaska soon,” Livingston said.

Livingston estimates the stone will arrive about mid-July, and this will likely be the last Memorial Day without a marker for George Fox’s grave — besides a small U.S. flag from a friend.

Alaska is well known for its seafood — halibut, cod and salmon destined for the dinner table. But there’s one seafood product that you don’t want to eat. And it may have been harvested for the CIA: a lethal toxin used as an alternative to cyanide.

In May 1960, Francis Gary Powers’ U-2 spy plane was shot down over the Soviet Union during a high-altitude reconnaissance mission. In his pocket was a modified silver dollar containing a hidden needle loaded with a lethal dose of shellfish toxin.

At the Kodiak Area Marine Science Symposium, oceanography Patricia Tester said she might know where the poison, known as saxitoxin, came from.

Saxitoxin causes paralytic shellfish poisoning. It paralyzes muscles by interfering with signals from the body, which can stop respiration.

Tester says she learned about saxitoxin experiments from a trove of documents found in Kodiak that revealed tests on mice in the 1950s involving shellfish toxins. The research was conducted in a facility in Ketchikan that no longer exists.

The documents Tester reviewed include a contract for clams and a shipping receipt to the U.S. Army Biological Warfare Laboratories at Fort Detrick in Maryland.

“In one of the files, there was a Department of Defense contract for toxic shellfish,” she said. “And this is what led to the detective journey that brought us through the Cold War history. The contract was from the Department of Defense and it was for toxic clams written in Oct. 6, 1952.”

The contract was for $10,000 of toxic clams — closer to $100,000 today — to be shipped to the East Coast.

“The department worked with the CIA to actually develop a replacement for the cyanide poison pill that was provided to US covert agents and spies during that time,” Tester said.

Cold War enthusiasts might remember that, under Nixon’s orders, the United States destroyed its stockpile of biological weapons in 1969. But in practice, the CIA interpreted the instructions liberally. During a 1975 congressional committee investigation, the CIA admitted it had kept a small stockpile of saxitoxin. And this was the same saxitoxin that Powers carried on his flight over the USSR.

Tester says it is possible to save somebody who has acute saxitoxin poisoning by putting them on a respirator and giving the toxin time to work its way out of the body. But the amount carried in Powers’ needle would likely be lethal within minutes.

The document Tester found doesn’t determine definitively that Powers carried saxitoxin from Alaska, but Tester says that her research indicates that it’s likely.

“There could have been another order, either earlier or later than the one I found,” she said. “There could have been orders for toxic clams off the East Coast, which happened as well, I think for the first time down in the Woods Hole area in the Massachusetts area about 1972. But that would have been, you know, pretty late in the game for them to have been doing anything like that.”

Powers never used the poison. He was captured after ejecting from his plane and ultimately returned to the United States in a prisoner exchange about two years later.

No other cases of operational use of saxitoxin by the CIA have come to light.

On April 8, members of the National Guard and other state officials visited the village of Tuluksak to meet with tribal leaders and community members. The visit came nearly three months after a fire destroyed Tuluksak’s water plant. During the meeting, council members shared their current needs and discussed potential spring flooding.

Snow swirled around the airstrip as a Black Hawk helicopter made its descent. The helicopter carried Maj. Gen. Torrence Saxe, the head of the Alaska National Guard. Also on board were other guard members, officials from the Alaska Department of Environmental Conservation and a representative of the governor’s office.

Tuluksak Tribal Council members met the group, piled them into trucks and took them to the Tuluksak school. They passed the charred remains of the town’s former water plant on the way.

The guard convened a town hall to learn more about Tuluksak’s ongoing water insecurity and to discuss how to prepare for potential flooding during breakup.

This was the second time in nearly four months that state representatives visited Tuluksak. A National Guard tribal liaison and a specialist from the Department of Homeland Security and Emergency Management visited Tuluksak on Feb. 22, five weeks after the fire.

At the school, the principal gave a tour of the temporary water plant facilities.

“This is the water coming from the river, filled up into these two containers,” he explained, showing the system in the school’s shop.

During the tour, tribal council members told the visitors what the community still needed following the fire. That included more bottled water and possibly help to deliver a portable water plant from the Yukon-Kuskokwim Health Corporation in Bethel that would provide a larger volume of drinking water to the town. They also voiced concerns about breakup threatening food and water supplies.

Saxe listed concerns of theirs to follow up on.

“If it were to go bad here, what that means for water, COVID mitigation, potential evacuation, we’ve gotta, of course, get you water. But we’ve gotta get you to safety first,” Saxe said.

Then, the group moved to the empty gym for an awards ceremony where tribal council member Kristy Napoka and tribal administrator Elsie Allain received the Alaska Community Service Award from the National Guard.

The two awardees coordinated obtaining and distributing privately donated bottled water and helped get emergency water filtration systems installed. Both women said that the meeting went well.

“Better than I expected,” Napoka said. “It seemed to me that they were hinting us that they are going to assist us.”

Napoka said that in the initial months following the fire, Tuluksak wasn’t getting tangible assistance —  like bottled water — from the state.

Allain said that it wasn’t necessarily a good sign when the state called.

“It was becoming like a pattern that I noticed,” Allain said.

Allain said that the community needed drinking water from the state after the fire. But instead of sending water, the state would call the tribe to ask if water had been donated from somewhere else.

“That’s when it occurred to me that State of Alaska is monitoring the situation but not planning to step in,” Allain said.

Often, bottled water donations were sitting in a warehouse in another city. The state also checked that the store had water to sell, which it did for around $60 a case. The state has said that Tuluksak residents always had enough water. The state has also said instead of providing immediate aid after crises, it prefers to focus on long-term rebuilding and recovery. The state did declare a disaster three and a half weeks after the fire. Two weeks after that, it paid for the delivery of privately donated water.

Allain and Napoka asked Saxe about these phone calls. He said that he would have the director of emergency management call them back.

Towards the end of the meeting, which covered a lot of difficult topics, Napoka cracked a joke. She said that it was good to share a laugh, and Saxe agreed. Saxe said that now that they’ve met in person, he hopes that they can establish a relationship.

“It’s easier when I know people and I can hear direct from them,” Saxe said.

Saxe also outlined some next steps the departments he oversees could take to better equip the region for future disasters. He will consider adding an emergency manager in Bethel, whose office would be housed at the armory and could more easily and quickly respond to regional emergencies with regional partners, like the Yukon-Kuskokwim Health Corporation or the Association of Village Council Presidents. During his visit, Napoka and Allain also both volunteered to be village emergency coordinators. There are also hopes to hold a training for village volunteer emergency coordinators this summer.

Editor’s note: KYUK’s Olivia Ebertz was also on board the National Guard helicopter that transported members of the guard and state representatives to Tuluksak.