Sorted by date Results 301 - 325 of 8107
Though the Wrangell School District has had its challenges filling various positions throughout the years, one position ⎯ the activities director ⎯ has seen yearly turnover with four people in the position in the past three years. Lifelong resident X'atshaawditee Tammi Meissner is the latest hire for the part-time contract, and she is committed to staying in the job "for the foreseeable future." Meissner, who also works as the community navigator for the Central Council of the Tlingit & Hai...
In an effort to recognize the building’s impact on the town, Parks and Recreation staff will dedicate the community center to Wrangell athletes of the past, present and future. The event will take place at noon on Nov. 9 and will be sandwiched between the fourth and fifth grade all-star basketball games against Petersburg. Devyn Johnson, Parks and Rec’s recreation coordinator, said that after the department’s recent upgrades and capital improvement projects, dedicating the community center felt like the right thing to do. “We’ve been putting a...
Borough officials hope to go out for bids as soon as this week for repairs to the sewage treatment plant deepwater outfall line which was damaged by a boat anchor in September. State and federal environmental officials “seem agreeable” to the borough’s plan to cut out the short, damaged section of 12-inch-diameter plastic pipe, then reconnect the undamaged pieces to restore flow, said Tom Wetor, Public Works director. Until the line is repaired, the borough will continue with its temporary solution of dumping treated water from the sewag...
This year’s take of 131 moose in the Wrangell-Petersburg area was down by 10 kills from last year’s harvest. But 131 was still good enough to rank as the third-highest harvest on record for the area, according to the Alaska Department of Fish and Game. The season ran Sept. 15 to Oct. 15. Last year’s take of 141 moose in the Wrangell-Petersburg area was a record, passing the previous high of 132 in 2021, according to Fish and Game. The five-year average is just over 120 moose a year. Of this season’s 131 moose, 120 were legal and 11 illegal...
The assembly unanimously voted to raise annual boat launch fees for Wrangell’s harbors at the Oct. 22 meeting. The fees — which have remained stagnant for years — now mirror other Southeast towns’ equivalent fees. The annual launch permit for those with a boat stall will increase from $28 to $35. For those without a stall, the fee will increase from $55 to $70. Per the borough’s figures, the average annual Southeast launch fee for those without a stall is just over $74. The borough is also eliminating the commercial launch permit category...
There can be a lot of numbers in music. This is the 50th year of the Southeast Honor Music Festival and Tasha Morse's 17th year as Wrangell music teacher. More than 110 students from around Southeast spent 19 hours in full rehearsals at Music Fest. Three Wrangell students were selected for the event held Oct. 20-22 in Petersburg. All had to audition to win a spot, Morse explained. There is no judging at the annual fall event. "This one is just making music for music's sake," she said. Wrangell's...
The spring chili cook-off went so well, The Salvation Army decided to stack up the bowls and spoons and get ready to do it again Nov. 9. There will be prizes for the best chili. And while the event is a fundraiser for the community food pantry, it also is an opportunity for people to get together and socialize, said Salvation Army Capt. Chase Green. “There was a lot of excitement” at the April cook-off, which drew 18 entries, he said. “People asked, ‘When are you going to do it again?’” He hopes for 25 chili entries this time. The event is set...
Jeremy Bynum, Grant EchoHawk and Agnes Moran are running to fill the state House seat vacated by 10-year incumbent Dan Ortiz, who decided not to seek a sixth term. The election is Tuesday, Nov. 5. If no candidate gets more than 50% of the votes in the first count, the third-place finisher will be eliminated and voters who picked that candidate as their top choice will have their votes recounted using their second choice. Whoever has the most votes in that second count will win the seat...
Rosita Worl, president of the Sealaska Heritage Institute, an anthropologist and cultural leader, is one of 10 Americans to receive the 2023 National Humanities Medal. Worl, 87, who is Tlingit, is a longtime leader in Alaska’s Native community, advocating for subsistence practices and promoting cultural traditions on a national level. Born in Petersburg, she has conducted research throughout Alaska, including fieldwork in the Arctic. Worl has also taught at University of Alaska Southeast. She has a Ph.D. in anthropology from Harvard U...
President Joe Biden on Oct. 25 formally apologized to Native Americans for the “sin” of a government-run boarding school system that for decades forcibly separated Indian children from their parents, calling it a “blot on American history” in his first visit to Indian Country. “It’s a sin on our soul,” said Biden, his voice full of anger and emotion at the event in Laveen Village, Arizona. “Quite frankly, there’s no excuse that this apology took 50 years to make.” It was a moment of both contrition and frustration as the president sought to...
The differences between Democratic incumbent Rep. Mary Peltola and her Republican challenger Nick Begich were on full display Oct. 21 during the final planned debate of Alaska’s U.S. House race. The Anchorage Chamber of Commerce sponsored the debate. Begich, a businessman who lost to Peltola in 2022, is again vying for Alaska’s lone U.S. House seat against Peltola, a former state legislator who won the seat in 2022 after leading an intertribal fish commission for several years. The outcome of the race could have far-reaching impacts in det...
The Alaska Federation of Natives voted to endorse the reelection of Democratic U.S. Rep. Mary Peltola and to oppose the ballot measure that would repeal the state’s open primaries and ranked-choice voting. The votes came Oct. 19, the last day of its annual three-day convention in Anchorage, which had the theme this year of “Our Children, Our Future Ancestors.” The delegates from tribes, nonprofit tribal organizations and regional and village Native corporations passed 18 resolutions on issues ranging from a call for Congress to amend feder...
Invasive European green crabs have likely found a lasting home in Washington’s coastal waters and parts of Puget Sound. The question now is whether the state can pinch down hard enough on the aquatic pests to prevent serious harm to native wildlife, shoreline ecosystems and the commercial shellfish industry. Washington’s Department of Fish and Wildlife, tribes, shellfish growers and local conservation districts are all taking part in the battle against the unwelcome crustaceans. “This is one of the rare environmental issues that every...
Four decades ago, in days before the internet and automatic voter registration, Alaska Natives turned out to vote at high levels. That participation has eroded badly, a situation that should be reversed, said Michelle Sparck, director of an Alaska nonpartisan organization called Get Out The Native Vote. Alaska Natives are not fully realizing their power if they do not vote, she said. “They say that anytime you look at a white male in this country, you know they’re a voter. We should be in that kind of category,” Sparck said in a prese...
In a brief “tele-rally” Oct. 21, Republican presidential candidate Donald Trump urged Alaskans to vote for U.S. House candidate Nick Begich, saying that control of the closely divided House could come down to a single vote. “Control of the House of Representatives is so important, and Alaska, you could very well be the vote,” he said. Begich is seeking to unseat incumbent Democratic Rep. Mary Peltola, and polling shows the candidates are running close together. Most seats in the 435-person U.S. House tilt strongly Democratic or Republican; Alas...
This November, when the President steps out on Pennsylvania Avenue and looks toward the West Lawn of the U.S. Capitol, he's going to see a Christmas tree from the Tongass National Forest. Better yet, Wrangell High School students were tasked with keeping it alive. Members of the T3 program (Teaching Through Technology), a federally funded teaching nonprofit, teamed up with a local inventor to make sure the tree continues to absorb water on its nearly month-long journey from Wrangell to Washingto...
A major copper-and-gold mining project in the rugged mountains of northwestern British Columbia - upriver from Wrangell - is poised for a boost from the Canadian government. Canada's Department of Natural Resources last month announced that it plans to inject about $15 million U.S. into a massive copper and gold development just 25 miles from the Alaska border. The project is perched above tributaries of the Stikine River - a major salmon-bearing waterway that flows into Alaska waters. The...
Two thousand and ninety to one. Those were the odds of winning the only elk-hunting permit on Zarembo Island this year - the first time in nearly 20 years the state Board of Game has permitted elk hunting on Zarembo after they were urged to do so by the Wrangell Fish and Game Advisory Committee. Quite literally against all odds, Wrangell resident Curtis Kautz won the lottery. His prize? A 31-day window to try and bag a creature Kautz described as smart, skittish and fast. "They're hard to sneak...
Alaskans will vote Nov. 5 on a ballot measure that would increase the state’s minimum wage to $15 an hour by 2027 and require that workers get paid for up to seven sick days a year. To backers who collected signatures to put the question before voters, Ballot Measure 1 is about fairness for workers and overall state economic vitality. But opponents in business groups warn that the measure, if passed, would bring dire consequences. To Sarah Oates, CHARR’s president, the consequences of Ballot Measure 1 would be bad. “This is going to kill small...
Tickets are on sale for “You Can’t Take It With You,” the fall community theater production at the Nolan Center. The comedy is scheduled for 7 p.m. Friday and Saturday, Nov. 1-2. A volunteer cast of about 15 people, with an additional 10 people working on the set, staging, sound and lighting, are practicing their lines, building the set and getting ready for the show, said Hailey Reeves, co-director. “It’s definitely a group effort,” she said last week, with full dress rehearsals planned for next week. In a first for the Nolan Center, tic...
Jenya Anichenko just wants to know what happened. In 1908, the Star of Bengal - an iron-sided sailing ship carrying 138 people - sank off the coast of Southeast Alaska's Coronation Island. The ship was carrying 106 Chinese, Japanese and Filipino salmon cannery workers, and 32 white crew members. The crew's survival rate was over 50%, but just nine percent of the Asian cannery workers survived. Anichenko's talk explored possible reasons for the racial discrepancies in the survival rates, as well...
Alaska Seafood Marketing Institute (ASMI) officials hear that processors have mostly cleared out their overflowing inventories of Alaska salmon from the 2022 and 2023 seasons, but the problem remains that Americans don’t buy enough seafood to sustain consistently profitable sales, particularly in years of strong salmon runs. And while last year’s problem was an oversupplied market, which pushed prices paid to fishermen to as low as 20 cents a pound for pink and chum salmon, this year’s harvest may come up short of a robust supply, Greg Smith...
A 30-year-old nonprofit received a five-year, $7.5 million state grant this year, which will enable the organization to do more to share seafood with Alaskans. SeaShare has grown from its 1994 beginnings as a small group of Alaska commercial fishermen who distributed bycatch to food banks into an organization that has shared seafood in 20 states this year, said Hannah Lindoff, the Juneau-based executive director. Though bycatch species still are a part of the organization’s volume, the percentage has declined over the years. Looking at the b...
The federal government board that manages subsistence will be expanded with three representatives of Alaska Native tribes, under a new rule the Biden administration made final on Oct. 16. The new Federal Subsistence Board members are to be nominated by federally recognized tribes. They need not be tribal members or Native themselves, but they must have “personal knowledge of and direct experience with subsistence uses in rural Alaska, including Alaska Native subsistence uses,” according to the rule. The term “subsistence” refers to harvest...
Alaska legislators have voted to ban large signs in the state Capitol, a move that followed large protests over Gov. Mike Dunleavy’s decision to veto a multipart education bill earlier this year. Under a new policy, visitors to the Capitol “are permitted to hand-carry a paper-based poster board or placard type sign up to 11×17 inches in the Capitol corridors and lobby.” The policy prohibits signs on sticks and posts — all signs must be held by hand. “A sign will be confiscated if it is used to disturb, or used in a manner that will imminently...