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It’s looking like April for archeological field work to start at the former Institute property — or so the borough hopes — as it awaits a response from the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers and the State Historic Preservation Office on a draft plan submitted March 3. The borough last September tasked Ketchikan-based R&M Engineering to help it figure out a plan for searching the former Native boarding school site for any human remains or cultural artifacts. The Bureau of Indian Affairs operated the school 1932 to 1975. The federal government in Ju...
Public officials, community leaders and businesspeople from Wrangell and Juneau met online Feb. 11 to discuss possible solutions to Wrangell’s lack of child care options. Representatives of the Wrangell Cooperative Association, Central Council of the Tlingit and Haida Indian Tribes of Alaska, the Wrangell borough, SEARHC, Sealaska Corp. and Little Eagles and Ravens Nest (LEARN) talked through the problems. WCA IGAP Coordinator Valerie Massie, one of the meeting attendees, said she and others “saw child care and housing as the two main hur...
The Wrangell Cooperative Association was told last month it will receive $620,000 in federal funding from the Southeast Alaska Sustainability Strategy, a $25 million U.S. Forest Service investment to diversify the economy of Southeast communities. The tribe plans to spend $500,000 on a project to carve new totem poles, $60,000 on a cultural symposium and $60,000 toward cultural preservation, such as promoting traditional, healthy foods and adding the Tlingit names to signs around town. WCA plans to hire a master carver and obtain the logs to...
The Wrangell Cooperative Association has announced the candidates for its March 8 tribal council election. There are 11 candidates for four seats on the eight-member council: Heidi Armstrong, Lavina Brock, Robyn Byrd, Samuel Campus, Frank Churchill Jr., Caroline Demmert, Timothy Gillen Sr., Olivia Main, Edward Rilatos Jr., Amber Lynn Wade and Asia White are on the ballot, according to a list provided by tribal administrator Esther Reese last Friday. Rilatos, Churchill and Brock currently serve on the council. Voters are instructed to vote for n...
Parents, community leaders, borough and tribal officials are talking about what can be done to help solve Wrangell’s lack of child care options. Valerie Massie, of the Wrangell Cooperative Association, said she and others at a recent meeting all see the lack of child care and housing as the biggest hurdles to economic and community development in town. Lack of child care keeps people out of the workforce, and it seems there isn’t an employer in town without job openings. Part of the problem in establishing and running a child care center is...
The temporary, pop-up mobile towers have been ordered for the Central Council of the Tlingit and Haida Indian Tribes of Alaska's pilot project that will provide wireless internet service in Wrangell, but it will be later in the year before the system goes live. Chris Cropley is a network architect at Central Council, which is setting up the federally funded broadband service named Tidal Network. He's been there since last April. His job is a mix of disciplines - part technical, part...
The Wrangell Cooperative Association wants to move the Chief Shakes Island footbridge to allow better access for buses coming to the popular site and possibly setting aside an area for selling Native crafts. The plan would be to move the bridge access point to create more room at the harbor parking lot, along with rebuilding the decade-old wooden walkway to the island. “They envision the new access to not only clean up the former harbor parking lot but create an in/out access for buses and a place to potentially sell Native goods,” Carol Rus...
Elizabeth Peratrovich Day is Feb. 16, honoring Native rights activist Elizabeth Wanamaker Peratrovich of the Tlingit Nation who championed equal rights and whose testimony paved the way for the Alaska Anti-Discrimination Act passed by the territorial Legislature in 1945. In Wrangell, Tlingit storyteller and language expert Virginia Oliver is teaching schoolchildren at Evergreen Elementary, Stikine Middle and Wrangell High School about Peratrovich, who was born in Petersburg in 1911, and lived part of her life in Angoon. “Alaska Native children...
Five people attended a meeting for the Wrangell community garden last Wednesday, three in person and two via phone, along with project leaders Valerie Massie and Kim Wickman. The meeting was held to begin selecting committee members and discuss an action plan. According to Massie, the Wrangell Cooperative Association IGAP coordinator, Grace Wintermyer volunteered to be the primary treasurer and Sage Smiley volunteered for the secretary position. “We also reviewed a draft garden bed subscription template,” Massie said. Changes to the subscriptio...
SEARHC's announcement last week that it was shuttering the 21-year-old Alaska Crossings program in Wrangell, a wilderness therapy program for at-risk children that the health care provider took over in 2017, disappointed much of the community. The news release cited rising costs. Spokesperson Maegan Bosak, senior director of lands and property management at SEARHC offices in Sitka, said Friday she didn't have an operating cost for Crossings but would ask the finance department for the...
After nearly three months, Jeff Good can drop "interim" from his title. On Friday, the assembly announced it had selected Good as borough manager. A committee took two days in executive session to interview Good and two other candidates for the job. The interviews, closed to the public, went Wednesday and Thursday, in part because one of the candidates, Kim Zimmerman, a retired U.S. Army lieutenant colonel who serves as borough manager of Lewistown, Pennsylvania, had to reschedule his interview...
It’s taken a while to turn decades of Sentinel pages into digital images, easily accessible for online searches, but the state and Wrangell libraries are about halfway there. Issues of the Wrangell Sentinel from its founding in 1902 through 1956 are now available in free online databases, where users can look through the pages. The websites allow people to search the pages by keywords, such as looking for any news stories about their family members. The Irene Ingle Public Library has Sentinels — and its predecessors The Stikeen River Journal (1...
The U.S. Forest Service is hiring. Tory Houser, acting district ranger, is looking to hire for four positions at the Wrangell Ranger District. A recreation manager, a wilderness and recreation technician, an Anan Wildlife Observatory crew manager, and a fisheries biologist. The recreation manager is a permanent position. “That's the person who will go and maintain cabins and campsites and help with trails and help us get a lot of those projects done,” Houser said. The biologist will be working on fish streams and habitat, and work with the Wra...
Patrons of the Irene Ingle Public Library will now have more time to peruse the aisles, take advantage of the free Wi-Fi and checkout their favorite books. Thanks to a grant through the American Rescue Plan Act, last year's federal pandemic aid spending bill, the library is extending its hours to six days a week. The funds have also made it possible to hire a third person to help with the pages of responsibilities. Library Director Margaret Villarma said the $14,040 grant is through the...
The assembly could decide this week on a new borough manager. The three finalists were scheduled for interviews at a special assembly meeting Wednesday afternoon, and assembly members could take action in public after talking with the candidates in private. The finalists scheduled for interviews were Jeff Good, who has been working as interim borough manager since Nov. 1; Alexandra Angerman, CARES Act coordinator at Wrangell Cooperative Association; and Kim D. Zimmerman, a retired U.S. Army lieutenant colonel who serves as borough manager of Le...
Posted Wednesday afternoon, Jan. 12 Alaska Crossings, a program that helps at-risk teens and takes them on guided wilderness expeditions throughout Southeast, is closing its Wrangell base of operations and moving to Sitka. Crossings has been based in Wrangell since it was founded in 2001. The SouthEast Alaska Regional Health Consortium took over the program in 2017. SEARHC announced in a press release Wednesday it would permanently shut down Crossings in Wrangell. “SEARHC made the extremely difficult decision to permanently close Crossings i...
Wrangell has been selected for the initial start-up of Tidal Network, a newly formed enterprise of the Central Council of the Tlingit & Haida Indian Tribes of Alaska that will bring wireless broadband internet service to underserved areas. The new service could start in Wrangell by late spring. The Central Council plans eventually to extend the new service throughout much of Southeast. The focus is to reach homes and businesses that lack access to reliable internet service, Chris Cropley, a network architect with the Central Council, said last...
There were about 1,000 stories in the Wrangell Sentinel last year, covering state and local budgets, the ailing state ferry system, ongoing pandemic and more — including a new owner for the Sentinel. On Jan. 1, Larry Persily bought the newspaper — for the third time over the past 45 years — with a promise to return the operation to Wrangell, expand the paper and its staff, and focus on more local news. “We plan to add more news from around Southeast and the state, but not at the expense of crowding out news of Wrangell. It’s not one or the ot...
Pieces of rigid foam — polystyrene — broken away from harbor floats installed in the 1970s and 1980s are bobbing along Wrangell’s waters and washing up on beaches along Zimovia Strait. Holdovers from the Shoemaker Bay harbor float replacement project in 2018, the pieces were part of 60- to 80-foot-long old floats that the borough sold in 2018 when it should have trashed them, Port Director Steve Miller said. While records were kept of the individuals who bought the old floats, it’s now impossible to identify who owns the debris floatin...
The contractor hired by the borough for survey and design work of the former Institute property has signed up a subcontractor to advise on historical and archaeological ground searches, which are required before the borough can move ahead with permitting for residential development of the 134-acre site. Interim Borough Manager Jeff Good and Trevor Sande, principal at R&M Engineering, in Ketchikan, which is doing the survey work, have met with representatives of the State Historic Preservation Office (SHPO) and U.S. Army Corps of Engineers to...
Wrangell's community garden has a chance to grow once more. On Dec. 8, eight people gathered in the community gym classroom to discuss forming a committee to oversee the direction the project will take. "That's really what tonight is all about, is not making any decisions or appointing anyone to a position exactly, but we really just want to find out who is serious about being on the committee and if you don't want to be on the committee, that's OK, there's plenty of volunteer (opportunities)...
JUNEAU (AP) — The U.S. House has passed legislation to extend a year-end deadline for Alaska Native corporations to use federal coronavirus relief funds. The U.S. Supreme Court in late June ruled the corporations were entitled to receive the CARES Act funds, but delays in disbursing the money have been many corporations in a bind to spend the funds by Dec. 31. The House bill, however, isn't the same measure that earlier passed the Senate. For the bill to become law, the same version has to pass both chambers before going to the president for s...
The Wrangell Institute was a big part of history — for the Native students who went to school there, for the community and the state. The Bureau of Indian Affairs boarding school, which operated at the site above Shoemaker Bay from 1932 to 1975, was among several federal- and church-run schools common across Alaska for much of the 20th century. Many of the schools, including the Wrangell Institute, graduated a generation of leaders who served important roles as Alaska Natives gained recognition and rights long denied. But, sadly, many of the s...
The Wrangell Cooperative Association blessed a tree harvested from ancestral Native land on Etolin Island and headed to the Governor's House in Juneau for Christmas display. The blessing in front of the Chief Shakes Tribal House on Thursday, Nov. 18, was a partnership of the WCA, U.S. Forest Service Wrangell Ranger District, and U.S. Coast Guard, which provided the Elderberry, a 65-foot buoy tender, based in Petersburg, to transport the 14-foot-tall lodgepole tree. The Elderberry left for...
Nicole Hammer is faced with a child care conundrum that has no easy solutions. As her unemployment benefits run out, she needs to find a job. But finding someone to watch her son is proving to be difficult. Without a day care center and with few home-based child care providers, Wrangell parents have had to get creative when it comes to finding someone to watch their children while they work. In some cases, they've had to quit working. Or, in Hammer's case, she can't accept a job offer until she...