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Here’s how the story begins:

In October, as planeloads of evacuees from Alaska villages leveled by Typhoon Halong touched down in Anchorage, Tim Ackerman set about organizing a tribal hunting party.

They gathered their rifles and left out of the town of Haines on Alaska’s southeast panhandle, driving north along the rocky shore, scouting for sleek, dark heads breaking the smooth surface of the water.

The evacuees, the hunters knew, would soon be craving seal.

The storm hit a Yupik region 700 miles west on the Bering Sea coast, and even though Mr. Ackerman is Tlingit, he knew that Alaska Natives most everywhere took comfort in the taste of golden seal oil, rich in omega-3s and considered a medicinal soul food. It didn’t take long for him to shoot a 150-pound harbor seal, he said. The group paddled out by canoe, hooked it and hauled it in.

“Came into town, cleaned it up, wrapped it in two layers of Visqueen and tied it all shut, put some handles on it and took it out to the airport, weighed it in, and it was ready to ship,” Mr. Ackerman said.

The seal traveled by small plane to Juneau and then on an Alaska Airlines jet to Anchorage, where it was butchered and portioned for individual meals. The meals rode to a giant freezer at the Alaska Native Heritage Center, an organization at the center of an unprecedented wild food distribution effort to help more than 600 evacuees, mostly sheltered in Anchorage hotels, maintain their traditional diets as they await word on when, if ever, they can return home.

“Holed up in a hotel room and not able to go out and practice your subsistence, you’re basically separated from what you knew,” Mr. Ackerman said.

Read the rest here.

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Listen here.

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Here’s how that story starts: “At a shelter in downtown Anchorage on Saturday, Arthur Lake, 74, was still dealing with the shock of his new surroundings. Cars buzzed along one of the city’s main thoroughfares with loud mufflers and booming stereos.

Mr. Lake and his family recently evacuated from Kwigillingok, a tiny Alaska Native village along the Bering Sea nearly 500 miles away. There, homes and businesses on the soft, grassy tundra were connected by boardwalks, and men had been out hunting bearded seals and other marine mammals to get ready for the winter.

“That’s where we belong,” Mr. Lake said. He has been to Anchorage many times. But, he said, ‘it’s not home.'”

Read the rest.

The post For NYT: For Alaskan Evacuees, Home Is Gone, With No Return in Sight appeared first on Julia O'Malley.

Here’s how it starts: “Drive three hours south out of Anchorage, through two mountain passes, down a highway dotted with rural churches and the occasional moose, and you’ll arrive in Kenai, a seaside town world famous for its salmon fishing. But in Alaska, the area is also known for a specialty made at the 50-year-old butcher shop called Echo Lake Meats.

On the package, the dip is labeled “World Famous Jalapeño Cheese Spread,” but in Kenai and the neighboring town of Soldotna, people refer to it as “Echo Lake cheese dip.” To everyone else in the state, it’s just “Kenai dip.”

“You find very few people of any age bracket that haven’t had it or don’t love it,” said Erick Watkins, who owns the shop with his wife, Holli.”

Read on.

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Here’s how the story begins: Amid the hubbub of President Donald Trump and Russian President Vladimir Putin’s Alaska summit last week, Gov. Mike Dunleavy, posting on social media, posed a provocative question.

“Alaska is a leader in fresh caught wild salmon. We could also be a leader in the farmed salmon industry. Why not do both instead of importing farmed salmon from Scotland?,” he wrote, sharing an article about the value of fish farming in Scotland, where Atlantic salmon are raised in net pens in the ocean. “This would be a great opportunity for Alaska.”

The answer from scientists, wild salmon advocates, restaurant people and regular salmon-eating Alaskans has come swiftly, full of alarm and often along the lines of one of the early commenters on his post, who wrote, “Are you insane?”

Love for wild salmon cuts through partisan politics. No food is more important to the state’s culture, diet, identity and economy. As such, Alaskans don’t look kindly on farmed fish. It’s tough to find it in stores and few, if any, restaurants serve it. Farming salmon and other finfish has been banned since 1990 over concerns about environmental threats to wild stocks and economic competition. But Dunleavy, who has become increasingly interested in Alaska’s food security since the pandemic, is curious about bringing in fish farms.

Read on.

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Here’s how the story begins: On a plot carved into a forest of white spruce and aspen near Glennallen, Lakota McRoberts strolled through a collection of raised garden beds earlier this summer, calculating how many neighbors she might feed.

“I’d like it to be probably three times the size,” she said. “But last year we were able, in August, to feed 148 families, which is like 258 individuals, to give them a pretty decent basket.”

McRoberts, 25, who also works for the food bank at the Copper River Native Association, is part of the newest generation of a tribal gardening movement that’s grown quickly in recent years, driven by compounding concerns about food security in mostly Indigenous communities at the northernmost end of America’s grocery supply line.

Farming advocates in Alaska say shipped-in food has always been expensive, but the supply chain disruptions during the COVID-19 pandemic highlighted the fragile nature of stocking village groceries. Meanwhile, climate change has upended subsistence salmon fishing, derailed hunting and even left berry patches barren, making wild food harder to harvest. Volatile global economics, the threat of tariffs and shrinking support for government food assistance further heighten concerns. All of that, plus a post-pandemic bump in government funding for small agriculture projects, has stoked community food-growing projects from Metlakatla to Tyonek to the Yukon River to Kiana to St. Paul Island.

For McRoberts, who grew up in Glennallen, the community’s hunger feels urgent. Read on.

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I helped first with a story about Alaska’s relationship to Russia since the cold war.

And then I helped with a story about Anchorage’s Ukrainian refugees.

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