The dual edge of isolation: escaping to and surviving in rural Alaska

Looking at the shore off a cruise ship,
Alaska. Photo credit: Anna Tong (2012)

When I was 12 years old, I went on an Alaskan Cruise. Our cruise stopped in Juneau, Ketchikan, Skagway, Sitka, and Haines. While in Ketchikan, a tour guide showed us around town and talked about what it is like to live in Alaska. My cousins and I asked the tour guide what they like to do for fun in Alaska. He replied that many locals enjoy nature, go fishing, and hunt.

When we asked about movie theaters and TV shows, he mentioned that the town didn’t have a theater, and many locals lacked televisions or internet access. As teenagers, we contemplated at the thought of being so disconnected. While I could not imagine myself living in Alaska, this is the reality for some.

It made me wonder, who would live in Alaska? The Census Reporter estimates that Alaska’s current population is just above 740,000 with a predominantly white population (57%), and Native Alaskans (13%) representing the next highest percentage. While the population seems to be increasing, the working-age population is declining.

Tourists visiting Nugget Falls in Juneau, Alaska. Photo Credit: Anna Tong (2012)

Alaska has long captured the American imagination as the ultimate frontier for a fresh start. The state actively incentivizes newcomers through the Permanent Fund Dividend, which pays residents simply for living there for a calendar year. Beyond financial perks, the profound remoteness of the state offers a unique social refuge. People fleeing restrictive pasts (such as having a criminal record) often migrate to the state specifically because of its remote nature and anti-establishment culture.

For some, this seclusion provides a necessary second chance. J.T. Perkins III tells a reporter for The Marshall Project about how he recommends for someone with a criminal record to flee to Alaska to avoid restrictive public registries and social stigma. J.T. also describes the community created within insolation fosters an environment where neighbors judge each other by current actions rather than past mistakes. However, this "leave me alone" culture has a devastatingly dark side for vulnerable populations.

While property crime in the state has dropped to its lowest levels since 1985, violent crime remains staggeringly high. The Alaska Beacon discusses how Alaska’s rates of violent offenses have outpaced the national average since 1993, driven heavily by very high rates of rape and aggravated assault. In fact, the rate of reported rape in Alaska has consistently hovered between three and four times the national average for the last decade according to the Alaska Beacon. The Alaska Justice Information Center also reported in 2021 on the FBI's Uniform Crime Report comparing Alaska's rates to rates nationwide. It is no surprise that the crime rates in Alaska are so bad considering the lack of law enforcement (read more about that in an earlier blog post here).

This social crisis is compounded by a severe lack of public infrastructure, another direct consequence of rural isolation. NPR investigated the conditions of rural schools in Alaska. Because shipping heavy equipment and housing skilled workers is astronomically expensive, basic maintenance of schools are frequently abandoned by the Alaskan government. As a result, rural Alaska Native communities are left with schools that are literally collapsing into the permafrost, filled with black mold and structural hazards. 

This structural neglect extends to basic household utilities, with more than 200 rural Alaskan communities currently facing inadequate access to water. Residents without piped water are forced to survive on less than six liters a day, severely impacting public health.

Conclusion
Ultimately, the isolation of rural Alaska acts as a double-edged sword. It functions as a hiding place for social outsiders or people with a criminal record who are seeking to relocate, while simultaneously trapping its marginalized residents in a cycle of violent crime and infrastructural decay. 

Reflecting back on that cruise I was on in 2012, it’s wild to think that my biggest concern was just a lack of internet or a local movie theater. I was completely blind to the harsh realities of what extreme isolation means for the people living there.

Rural health "slush fund" distributions announced

Fall River Mills, California
(c) Lisa R. Pruitt 2018

The Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services announced this week the establishment of the Rural Health Transformation Program in relation to Trump's "One Big Beautiful Bill" passed in July--and the so called "rural slush fund" that was a last-minute addition to that law.  An earlier post about that late addition to the law is here, also noting that it was added in part to secure the vote of U.S. Senator Lisa Muskowski's (Alaska) support for the law.  

The Rural Health Transformation Program website touts it as 

empower[ing] states to strengthen rural communities across America by improving healthcare access, quality, and outcomes by transforming the healthcare delivery ecosystem. Through innovative system-wide change, the RHT Program invests in the rural healthcare delivery ecosystem for future generations.

Its stated goals are: 

• make rural America healthy again
• sustainable access
• workforce development
• innovative care
• tech innovation

At the end of this post, I cut and pasted from this website more information about the structure and requirements.  For now, however, I want to focus on details of the distribution.  First, all states got a share of the distribution,  and the states that fared best were Texas, Alaska, California, Oklahoma and Montana.  That said, the award amounts to the states did not vary dramatically.  The average amount awarded to each state was $200 million, with the range from $147 million (New Jersey) to $281 million (Texas).  Here's an excerpt from the CMS announcement of the awards, which went to all 50 states.  

This unprecedented federal investment will help states expand access to care in rural communities, strengthen the rural health workforce, modernize rural facilities and technology, and support innovative models that bring high-quality, dependable care closer to home.

It includes this long quote from Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy, Jr.:  

More than 60 million Americans living in rural areas have the right to equal access to quality care.  This historic investment puts local hospitals, clinics, and health workers in control of their communities’ healthcare. Thanks to President Trump’s leadership, rural Americans will now have affordable healthcare close to home, free from bureaucratic obstacles.

It also features this direct quote from Dr. Mehmet Oz, the CMS administrator:  

Today marks an extraordinary milestone for rural health in America. Thanks to Congress establishing this investment and President Trump for his leadership, states are stepping forward with bold, creative plans to expand rural access, strengthen their workforces, modernize care, and support the communities that keep our nation running. CMS is proud to partner with every state to turn their ideas into lasting improvements for rural families.

Roll call covered the matter, with a focus on Texas.  Some key excerpts follow: 

Twenty percent of [a state's] score [on the application for the competitive part] was determined by a state’s policy actions, including vows to pursue waivers to ban SNAP users from buying certain items like soda and candy, reinstating the presidential fitness test for schoolchildren and requiring that medical schools teach students about nutrition, among other things. States could lose money in future years through a “rescoring” process if they don’t follow through on those initiatives, Oz said.

The remaining 30 percent is based on the strength of the ideas that states proposed in their applications.

Projects highlighted by CMS on Monday include ones that aim to expand access to preventative, primary, maternal and behavioral health care. States also are pursuing “food as medicine” initiatives, models to address chronic disease prevention and programs to shore up their health care workforce.

Critics had argued the amount of funding available is nowhere near large enough to offset reductions in federal Medicaid spending made by the reconciliation law, which amounts to $911 billion over 10 years. Sen. Susan Collins, R-Maine, who voted against the bill, had pushed for at least $100 billion in rural health funding.

The $50 billion would offset only about 37 percent of the estimated loss of federal Medicaid funding in rural areas, according to KFF, a health policy research organization.

But Dr. Mehmet Ozi is quoted as saying the funding is not intended to offset the reductions:  

The purpose of this $50 billion investment in rural health care is not to pay off bills.  The purpose of this $50 billion investment is to allow us to right-size the system and to deal with the fundamental hindrances of improvement in rural health care.

This excerpt from PBS Newshour coverage hits more squarely at the politics of the matter and what the Trump administration's CMS is trying to accomplish with these awards in relation to its wider "Make America Healthy Again" agenda: 

Several Republican-led states — including Arkansas, Iowa, Louisiana, Nebraska, Oklahoma and Texas — have already adopted rules banning the purchase of foods like candy and soda with SNAP benefits.

The money that the states get will be recalculated annually, Oz said, allowing the administration to "claw back" funds if, for example, state leaders don't pass promised policies. Oz said the clawbacks are not punishments, but leverage governors can use to push policies by pointing to the potential loss of millions.

"I've already heard governors express that sentiment that this is not a threat, that this is actually an empowering element of the One Big Beautiful Bill," he said.

Carrie Cochran-McClain, chief policy officer with the National Rural Health Association, said she's heard from a number of Democratic-led states that refused to include such restrictions on SNAP benefits even though it could hurt their chance to get more money from the fund.

"It's not where their state leadership is," she said.

Next, I quote from the analysis of a rural health care consultant working out of Texas, which came across my LinkedIn feed: 

Just reviewed the state allocations from CMS’s landmark $50B Rural Health Transformation Program, and the per‑rural‑person math is fascinating. I'm a CPA and I love excel...so you know I had to create my end of year fun facts related to the CMS awards for RHTP.

If you missed the announcement, here is a link to the full article. 

For context, the average award across all states is $1,957 per rural person.
Texas received $329 per rural person — a solid, meaningful investment in our rural communities. 

N.B.   It is not clear how this consultant is defining "rural" for purposes of these calculations.  

To put that in perspective:
Rhode Island: $31,525 per rural person
Just above Texas: Ohio ($345), NC ($360), PA ($390), MI ($413)
Next tier below RI: NJ ($5,343), AK ($4,949), MA ($3,332), DE ($3,231)

Texas’s total award is $1.4 billion over five years — the largest in the country. While we weren’t guaranteed the top spot, the hard work by the Texas team at HHSC on the application positioned us to lead in rural innovation.

I was personally hoping for closer to $2.1B, but we’ll take this $1.4B and put it to work transforming the rural health landscape across Texas. Huge congratulations to the HHSC team and all our partners who made this possible.

Here’s to an innovative, data‑driven 2026 and beyond for rural Texas! 🌟

Finally, I'm pasting here the details on the program (as promised above), which is essentially the call for applications: 

Program Structure

RHT Program funding is $50 billion to be allocated to approved States over five fiscal years, with $10 billion of funding available each fiscal year, beginning in fiscal year 2026 and ending in fiscal year 2030.

• 50% to be distributed equally amongst all approved States
• 50% will be allocated by CMS based on a variety of factors including rural population, the proportion of rural health facilities in the State, the situation of certain hospitals in the State, and other factors to be specified by CMS in the NOFO

Uses of Funds

States must use RHT Program funds for three or more of the approved uses of funds:Promoting evidence-based, measurable interventions to improve prevention and chronic disease management.

• Providing payments to health care providers for the provision of health care items or services, as specified by the Administrator.
• Promoting consumer-facing, technology-driven solutions for the prevention and management of chronic diseases.
• Providing training and technical assistance for the development and adoption of technology-enabled solutions that improve care delivery in rural hospitals, including remote monitoring, robotics, artificial intelligence, and other advanced technologies.
• Recruiting and retaining clinical workforce talent to rural areas, with commitments to serve rural communities for a minimum of 5 years.
• Providing technical assistance, software, and hardware for significant information technology advances designed to improve efficiency, enhance cybersecurity capability development, and improve patient health outcomes.
• Assisting rural communities to right size their health care delivery systems by identifying needed preventative, ambulatory, pre-hospital, emergency, acute inpatient care, outpatient care, and post-acute care service lines.
• Supporting access to opioid use disorder treatment services (as defined in section 1861(jjj)(1)), other substance use disorder treatment services, and mental health services.
• Developing projects that support innovative models of care that include value-based care arrangements and alternative payment models, as appropriate.
• Additional uses designed to promote sustainable access to high quality rural health care services, as determined by the Administrator.

This KFF Health News site tracked the states' applications for these funds.  

Rural public media struggling in the face of funding cuts

We became aware this summer, when the Trump administration announced cuts to public broadcasting and the abolition of the Corporation for Public Broadcasting, that rural areas would be hit especially hard.  This is because rural stations are more reliant on federal funding.  Rural areas also tend to have fewer media outlets, which means that those supported by public dollars are less easily replaced by the private sector--including in the reporting on weather and natural disasters.    

This week, Reveal reported on the closure of a public radio station, KYUK, in the Bethel/Kuskokwim Delta region of Alaska.  Here's an excerpt: 

When a typhoon hit Alaska, public radio station KYUK was on the air, broadcasting critical information about conditions, evacuations, and search and rescue operations. An estimated 1,600 people were displaced, and many were saved in the biggest airlift operation in state history.

“The work that we do in terms of public safety communication literally does save lives,” said Sage Smiley, KYUK’s news director.

KYUK is small, scrappy, and bilingual. It broadcasts in English and Yugtun, the language of an Indigenous population that lives in villages along two massive rivers. The station airs NPR content, but also high school basketball games, local call-in talk shows, and even a show hosted by the volunteer search and rescue team, answering listeners’ questions about ice conditions and safety. The station is a lifeline for this unique region.

KYUK covers an area the size of the state of Oregon, but after Congress passed the Rescissions Act over the summer, it lost 70 percent of its operating budget. Republicans have targeted public media since its inception in the late 1960s. But this is the first time they have successfully ended the Corporation for Public Broadcasting, wiping out more than $1 billion in funding for public media.

For more on that typhoon in mid-October, see NPR's coverage here. 

Getting to the bottom of the rural health "slush fund"

When the U.S. Senate passed Trump's "Big Beautiful Bill" a few weeks ago, considerable attention was paid to the sweetheart deal the administration had made with Alaska Senator Lisa Murkowski.  Initially skeptical and critical of the bill because of the impact it would have on rural Alaska (read more here), Murkowski eventually signed on to support the act after the Trump administration made concession to Alaska, including a $50 billion program for rural health.  

On Marketplace (American Public Media), Sarah Jane Tribble of Kaiser Health News breaks down how this so-called "slush fund" would work.  Here are some key excerpts about the so-called Rural Health Transformation Program: 

The Rural Health Transformation Program calls for federal regulators to hand states $10 billion a year for five years starting in fiscal year 2026.

But the “devil’s in the details in terms of implementing,” said Sarah Hohman, director of government affairs at the National Association of Rural Health Clinics.

“An investment of this amount and this style into rural — hopefully it goes to rural — is the type of investment that we and other advocates have been working on for a long time,” said Hohman, whose organization represents 5,600 rural health clinics.

People who live in the nation’s rural expanses have more chronic disease, die younger, and make less money. Those compounding factors have financially pummeled rural health infrastructure, triggering hospital closures and widespread discontinuation of critical health services like obstetrics and mental health care.

Nearly 1 in 4 people in rural America use Medicaid, the state and federal program for low-income and disabled people. So, as Senate Republicans heatedly debated Medicaid spending reductions, lawmakers added the $50 billion program to quell opposition. But health advocates and researchers doubt it will be enough to offset expected cuts in federal funding.

Senate Majority Leader John Thune, a Republican from South Dakota, which has one of the largest percentages of rural residents in the nation, led the push to pass the budget bill. His website touts support for strengthening access to care in rural areas. But his office declined to respond on the record to questions about the rural health program included in the bill.

The story also notes Tribble's efforts to get comments from Senator Susan Collins of Maine, another state with a significant rural population.  Senator Josh Hawley of Missouri, having voted for the "big beautiful bill" is pushing for a reversal of its cuts to Medicaid and an increase in the "rural program," which presumably refers to the $50 billion fund. 

From the think tank, libertarian sector, Tribble gives us this note of skepticism: 

Michael Cannon, director of health policy studies at the Cato Institute, a libertarian think tank headquartered in Washington, D.C., said the money was set aside because of politics and not necessarily for rural patients.

Here is a further quote from Cannon:   

As long as it’s a government slush fund where politics decides where the money goes, then there’s going to be a mismatch between where those funds go and what it is consumers need.

I can't help wonder by what factors and with what algorithm Cannon determines "mismatch." 

Here's a full report from KFF on the so-called rural health slush fund.  

Cutbacks to public media likely to hurt rural communities the most

The disporportionate impact that federal funding cuts to public media will have on rural communities has been a theme of several publications in recent weeks, all in the run up Congress' vote to do just that--take back $1.1 billion previously allocated in support of public media.  

The first item I want to highlight is this July 11, 2025 episode of The Daily (New York Times audio), "Is Congress about to Kill this Local Radio Station?"  It discusses the likely impact of the proposed cuts on a public radio station, KFSK, in Petersburg, Alaska, population 3,000, in the southeast part of the state.  Jessica Cheung of The Daily sets up the interview with KFSK Station Manager Tom Abbott:    

Small rural stations, like KFSK, rely on federal funding to exist. And in a town like Petersburg, that is conservative, a town that voted for Trump by almost two to one in the last election, people are grappling with the Republican Party that is now trying to defund an important resource within the community — a radio station that a lot of people love. So I wanted to talk to Tom about what that’s been like, what’s at stake, and just what a station like KFSK offers people.

They start with a discussion of the place, including its beauty, economy, wildlife, and remoteness. 

Tom Abbott:  We also don’t have any chain stores here. Everything is mom and pop. Even though if you go to the post office, you’ll see a lot of Amazon boxes coming across the counter, because on occasion, there are things that can’t be found here, just because it’s a small market and it’s a small community. And that’s what brings us back around. radio. That’s why there’s only public radio here.

Jessica Cheung:  And if you turn the dial in Petersburg, can you hear any other radio station out there?

Tom Abbott:  Yeah, you can catch 88.5, which is the Lutheran Church.

Jessica Cheung:  And that’s it?

Tom Abbott:  Yeah, they broadcast for the shut ins that can’t make it to their service on Sunday. And that’s the only other service that’s on the FM dial. And there’s nothing on the AM dial.

What follows in the interview is a description of a service that reminds me of the "party line" feature on the local radio station I listened to while growing up in the Arkansas Ozarks.  On KFSK, it is called Tradio.  Here's an excerpt: 

Tom Abbott:  Where the caller calls in to the radio station. We put them on the air. And they either make an announcement about an event coming up. Maybe they’re having a garage sale on Saturday.

Archived Recording:  And we have tons of stuff — chairs, dozens of hand tools, fishing poles, sporting goods. There’s books and movies. And you name it, we got it.

Tom Abbott:  Well, this week, we’ve got a lot of fishing poles. Or this week, we’ve got a lot of baby clothes, something, whatever it may be.

Archived Recording:  Yes, good morning. This is Earl. I got a 2012 Nissan red vehicle with low mileage.

As Cheung expresses it, 

This is basically Facebook Marketplace on the radio.

At some point, Abbott starts talking about how the station ceased live broadcasts of some meetings during the pandemic because what some residents were saying at the meetings constituted misinformation, as locals stated their opinions about public health measures.

Cheung then turns to the likely effect of the proposed federal budget cuts on KFSK. 

Tom Abbott:  Our service would be drastically altered. The CPB funding that we receive is 30 percent of our budget. As public radio does, we rely on membership donations. And that is our largest single source. Our second largest single source funding is CPB funds.

Jessica Cheung:  And without that 30 percent you get from the federal government, what are you contemplating?

Tom Abbott:  As far as the expenses go, personnel expenses are 65 percent of our budget.

Jessica Cheung:  And how many personnel do you have on staff right now?

Tom Abbott:  Five, and there’s two high school kids that help us out when we’re doing live broadcasts in the evenings. And going forward, I foresee KFSK eliminating all staff except for two. And both of those I would like to see it remain two reporters. If you were to go down to one reporter, you’re on an endless cycle of burnout.

Jessica Cheung:  And is it my understanding that with 30 percent cut, you could still survive? Or is taking KFSK off the air an option you’re contemplating?

Tom Abbott:  I don’t think you’d ever have to go off the air, because the infrastructure is here, the antenna is here. But it wouldn’t be locally run anymore. It just couldn’t be. 

Right now, we have 27 individual public radio stations in the state of Alaska. I think that’s going to go down to two, maybe three if this rescission goes through. It’s not going to happen immediately, but it’s going to go that route. And that’s what’s under threat here.

Then Abbott discusses how some NPR reporting has been received by locals. There's a lot here, and I'm just going to include a very brief excerpt:

Tom Abbott:  [W]hat we have control over is local. I have no control over the editorial content of NPR. I have no control over that whatsoever.

In fact, I have, myself, as a station manager, contacted them many times over the years with complaints. I think there are certain subject matters that are covered heavily that are not necessarily representative. They’re certainly not representative of the audience that I serve.

Jessica Cheung:  Is there a specific story that you’re thinking about, maybe one that you wrote to NPR about?

Tom Abbott:  I don’t know. What comes to mind is the propensity for the LGBTQ+ stories. I don’t believe that the percentage of the stories that that subject matter has is equivalent to certainly the service area that I have. And I’m not saying that people are not caring about others. I’m not saying that at all.

I get the editorial decision on it. It’s under threat. But I’m just saying, what is pertinent in your personal life? And I think this holds for Kansas, Nebraska, Oklahoma, wherever you are. Small town, rural areas, to me, it sounds like the editorial decisions are being made for the audiences that are in New York, Chicago, Philadelphia, the big metro areas.

And on occasion, there is a great story that NPR does that covers small-town America or relates to small-town America plenty of times. I’m not saying that they totally have a blind eye towards it. I just think the target audience that NPR has is metro areas.

Jessica Cheung:  And what would you rather hear get coverage by NPR?

Tom Abbott:  Well, what’s the effect of the tariffs on the farmers of America, the seafood industry of America? That would really resonate here locally.

Following on this excellent and very comprehensive podcast focused on KFSK in Alaska, the New York Times editorial board published on July 16, "This is Why America Needs Public Media." Here, I'm just going to excerpt the part that mentions rural places, as well as an acknowledgement that NPR's programming (as distinct from local programming) may not reflect "the citizenry that is subsidizing them": 

When the private sector doesn’t provide an important service, the government often steps in. That is why the framers established the U.S. Postal Service; they believed no one else would deliver the mail to the entire country. Many places in America, especially in rural communities, would not have a library without public funding. Police departments, the military, Medicare, Social Security and public education offer other examples.

* * *

Republicans complain, not always wrongly, that public media reflects left-leaning assumptions and biases. And they can fairly tell NPR and PBS to do a better job of reflecting the citizenry that is subsidizing them.

* * *  

We are reminded of the excesses of the “defund the police” and “abolish ICE” movements on the other side of the ideological spectrum. They adopted a fatalistic view of vital government services, suggesting that their imperfections justified their elimination. They were wrong, and so are the conservatives who want to defund public media.

* * *

Public media, like every other major institution, is imperfect. But it improves the lives of millions of Americans, and it strengthens American interests. 

I earlier commented on NPR's political bias here.  To be clear, I completely trust NPR's reporting on factual matters, such as whether the 2020 Presidential election was stolen.  It was not.  I simply think that the entity's editorial slant is often far enough to the left of middle America to fuel distrust by many--as suggested by some of the patrons of KFSK.

Finally, today, NPR's Frank Langfitt reported from Dunmore, West Virginia, under the headline, "Cuts to public media will smash budgets of some local radio stations."  I'll just include some key excerpts here:  

[S]ome of those hardest hit by Congress' decision last week to clawback $1.1 billion in federal funds are small radio operations that provide local news and information to rural communities.

One is Allegheny Mountain Radio, a cooperative of three stations which cover Pocahontas County, West Virginia as well as Bath and Highland counties in Virginia. Allegheny Mountain is not an NPR member station, but it does run NPR's daily newscast, a quick run down of top stories.

* * * 

Allegheny Mountain's mix of programming includes local news and information as well as gospel, country and blues shows. A recent episode of the Noon Hour Magazine reported on a $5,000 signing bonus to attract new teachers and how the energy demands from data centers could eventually affect this remote region where people sometimes have to drive 60 miles to reach the nearest shopping center.

Allegheny Mountain relies on funding from the Corporation for Public Broadcasting (CPB) for up to 65 percent of its annual budget of about half a million dollars. Smith says his stations do have financial reserves, but the hole in their budget could become existential.

Langfitt quotes station's general manager:

There is only so long that you can continue to exist when you are operating in the red. ... At some point that well runs dry.

One bottom line, this quoting the NYT editorial:

[T]he “national” part of NPR (or National Public Radio, as it used to call itself) that chafes conservatives may well be just fine without federal funds.   

It is local stations, trying to provide local programming, that will suffer most from these cuts, along with their listeners.  

One other detail worth noting on the Congressional vote to claw back the public media funding:  Senator Mike Rounds (R) of South Dakota had previously indicated that he would oppose the cuts but decided to support the package after "top Trump administration officials" said they would steer unspent funds 'to continue grants to tribal radio stations without interruption' for next year."  Yet, Loris Taylor of Native Public Media commented: 

There is currently no clear path for redirecting these funds to tribal broadcasters without significant legislative and administrative changes.

Op-ed by Alaska legislators decries likely effect of "Big Beautiful Bill, "especially in rural areas

Bryce Edgmon and Cathy Giessel of the Alaska legislature have published an op-ed in today's New York Times, "Our State Cannot Survive this Bill:"  One of the legislators is a Republican and the other an Independent, and they focus on their bipartisanship.  In some ways, this piece echoes analysis we are seeing about how many "red states" will suffer particularly under Trump's "big beautiful bill," but it also features some Alaska specifics.

Here's the lede: 

Across the country, state lawmakers like us are bracing as the federal government considers a bill that will throw state budgets into chaos and add red tape that our social service agencies do not have the capacity to administer. If the budget reconciliation bill passes Congress in anything like its current form, we will be left to deal with the fallout.

The likely impacts from the “big, beautiful bill” are particularly ugly for our home state, Alaska: Nearly 40,000 Alaskans could lose health care coverage, thousands of families will go hungry through loss of benefits from the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program, or SNAP, and the shift in costs from the federal government to the state will plunge our budget into a severe deficit, cripple our state economy and make it harder to provide basic services.

And in these paragraphs, the writers get around to the rural angle: 

The benefits of Medicaid and the SNAP program permeate the entire fabric of the Alaska economy, with one in three Alaskans receiving Medicaid, including more than half of the children. In remote Arctic communities, Medicaid dollars make medical travel possible for residents from the hundreds of roadless villages to the communities where they are able to receive proper medical treatments.

We fear that if this bill passes, a village in rural Alaska might lose its one and only grocery store because of a drastic decline in SNAP dollars. It might also lose its sole health care clinic or hospital because it cannot sustain its services with decreased Medicaid reimbursements. The reconciliation bill does not take into account the uniqueness of Alaskan lifestyles and geographic remoteness.

The legislators explain that the federal cuts will cause costs for many services to be shifted to the state budget, which will cause great strain.  It also takes up the fact that work requirements for public benefits are an ill fit for rural Americans.

Alaska cannot afford to lose health care funding. Our state is near the top of the list for the highest rates of suicide, tuberculosis and sexually transmitted infections in the nation. It is also severely lacking in adequate behavioral health services. The cuts will only make these problems worse.

Work requirements instituted in Medicaid are untenable for rural Alaska, with many communities facing limited broadband access and job opportunities.

Here's a piece in The Atlantic, by Russell Berman, suggesting that Kentucky Republicans are not afraid to stand up to Trump. 

Building blocks: how a lack of childcare infrastructure is hurting children and their parents

In mid-March, The Daily Yonder published a piece detailing social worker and filmmaker Laura Norton-Cruz’s efforts to bring awareness to the lack of childcare infrastructure in rural Alaska. Norton-Cruz is intimately familiar with the shortage of childcare, and the problems this shortage creates for rural Alaskan families. The Daily Yonder writes:

Norton-Cruz remembers finding out that she was pregnant and feeling like she’d just been “thrown to the wolves.”  “What am I going to do about child care?” she asked. “What am I going to do about breastfeeding and pumping at work? What am I going to do about paid leave?"

Over a decade after becoming a single mother, Norton-Cruz enlisted the help of filmmaker Joshua Branstetter and created At Home/In Home: Rural Alaska Childcare in Crisis, a documentary that would provoke Alaska’s state legislature.

Norton-Cruz’s documentary focuses on Kotzebue, Alaska, a rural town of 3000 residents, primarily Alaskan Native people. More than 500 children under the age of five reside in Kotzebue, yet the town does not have a single licensed childcare facility. 

Unfortunately, Kotzebue is not unique. According to a December 2024 report from the Alaska Governor’s Task Force on Child Care, 61% of Alaskans have limited or no access to licensed childcare facilities, even though over half of young children live in households where all parents are employed and need childcare.

The documentary portrays parents who are forced to leave jobs in childcare deserts, employers who cannot find employees, public officials who track the economic damage of the childcare crisis, and residents who battle the state childcare licensing system as they try to establish a home-based childcare facility.

Childcare deserts are not just present in rural Alaska. In fact, nearly two-thirds of American rural families live in a childcare desert. Childcare deserts are defined as areas where there are more than three young children for every licensed childcare slot available. 

Additionally, rural Americans spend more money and travel farther for childcare arrangements. On average, a rural family spends 12.2 percent of their income and travels 7.5 miles for childcare while urban families spend 10.8 percent of their income and travel 3.5 miles for childcare. (Read more about rural childcare here and here).

The lack of infrastructure to support women and children is a recurrent problem in rural areas, and expands beyond a lack of childcare. A 2023 CDC report found that only 31% of rural municipalities had some type of paid maternity leave in 2021 compared to 41.2% of urban areas, and 42.3% of rural municipalities provided break time and space to pump breast milk versus 55.4% of urban municipalities.

It is well documented that rural areas are also lacking in maternal care. As of 2024, 59% of rural counties qualify as maternity care deserts. As a result, rural women have consistently higher predicted probability of maternal mortalities, with 37.9 pregnancy-related deaths per 100,000 occurring in rural areas in 2020 and 31.2 deaths per 100,000 in micropolitan areas, compared to 29.9 per 100,000 in large metropolitan areas. (Read more about rural maternal health care here and here).

Alaska is a particularly challenging place to deliver health and human services due to its vast size, sparse population, extreme climate, and the unique needs of its diverse communities, including Native populations. As such, rural Alaskan populations often face even more extreme disparities in healthcare access and outcomes.

Thankfully, Norton-Cruz’s film has prompted the Alaskan governor to set up the Alaska Child Care Task Force, which has allowed Kotzebue residents to erect a home-based non-profit early learning program. Although residents admire the program’s progress, the early learning program only serves eight of the 500 children under the age of five in Kotzebue. Clearly, there is still much work to be done. 

Norton-Cruz continues to document the Task Force’s progress. She states:

We have to keep paying attention to this issue and keep the pressure on…because that’s what leads to changes in funding and changes in policy. We need to help employers, legislators, and leaders see that this is the most important part of child development and the most abandoned policy issue of our time.

Tribal co-management of U.S. National Parks (Part II): Glacier Bay National Park and Preserve

 N.B. The Hoonah Indian Association are an Alaska Native Village in Hoonah, Alaska. They are a majority Tlingit Alaska Native People. Glacier Bay has been the home of the Huna Tlingit since time immemorial. I will use the spelling "Hoonah" when referring to the political entity and the city of Hoonah, but the spelling "Huna" when referring to the people, since that is how they prefer it. 

Glacier Bay (Photo: Christopher Michael, Wikimedia Commons)

Glacier Bay National Park and Preserve is located in southern Alaska, west of Juneau and not far from the Canadian border. It is the homeland of the Huna Tlingit people, and can only be accessed by plane or by boat. The National Park Service (NPS) operates a lodge and park ranger service in Bartlett Cove, 10 miles from the small town of Gustavus, the closest town to the park. Most visitors to Glacier Bay come via cruise ship, where they can take in the views from the safety of a floating hotel. Hiking trails are only available near Bartlett Cove, but sea kayaking, boating, and rafting are popular ways to access the park.

Glacier Bay is currently co-managed with the Hoonah Indian Association, a federally-recognized Alaska Native Village whose community has been the steward of the land within Glacier Bay National Park for centuries. The Hoonah Indian Association are a largely Tlignit community in Hoonah, across the sound from Gustavus. Tlingit people lived on and cultivated the land in Glacier Bay National Park until the "little ice age," a period of global cooling lasting from approximately 1300 to 1850. During the little ice age, the glaciers stretched south, covering the land and filling the bay. The Tlingit communities moved south as well, taking up residence in their current villages. As the glaciers began to retreat in the late 19th century, archeologists and geologists began to petition for the protection of the bay because of what could be learned from the melting permafrost. 

John Muir visited Glacier Bay many times, and he frequently wrote about it. He was fascinated by the insight that the retreating glaciers could provide into the development of the Sierra Nevadas, particularly Yosemite Valley. Muir's visit and writings on the area generated popular and scientific interest. Glacier Bay became particularly important to glacial geologists. In response to gold prospecting and increased tourism, these scientists, with the support of Muir, campaigned to make Glacier Bay a National Monument. 

Glacier Bay National Monument was created by presidential declaration in 1925, not long before Canyon de Chelly (see Part I, here). As compared to the Najavo Nation, the Tlingit were in a much poorer negotiating position during the campaign for federal protection. The Navajo Nation was able to negotiate with the Bureau of Indian Affairs and the National Park Service to preserve their rights to Canyon de Chelly because they had a treaty agreement with the United States that gave them ownership over land, including Canyon de Chelly. 

The Tlingit were in a different situation. Russia ceded Alaska to the United States in 1897. The treaty between Russia and the U.S. for the transfer of Alaska and the Organic Act of 1884 recognized Native claims to the land. By 1897 the United States was no longer making treaties. The Dawes Act of 1887 made treaty-protected reservation land alienable by assigning private title to individual Tribal members. The Huna Tlingit were allotted land in Hoonah and organized into the Alaska Native Brotherhood (ANB) in 1912, alongside other nearby peoples.

When Glacier Bay was designated a National Monument in 1925, the Tlingit were barely consulted. There was already fairly limited communication between the NPS and the Tlingit villages. Most of the land surrounding Hoonah was already under the jurisdiction of the Forest Service, which had done little to disrupt daily life at that point. The majority of Tlingit and ANB activism in that period was focused on labor organizing, since most Tlingit men worked for fisheries and canneries. For the first few years, the NPS did little to interfere with Tlingit hunting and trapping in the park.

But, in the 1930s the Alaskan Brown Bear became a fixture of the national imagination. Conservationists wanted to create a bear sanctuary in Alaska where they could increase bear populations so that tourists could see them from their boats. They proposed expanding the size of the Glacier Bay National Monument to include land that could be used for a bear sanctuary. Over renewed protest from the mining industry, President Roosevelt expanded the National Monument in 1939, again without consultation with the Bureau of Indian Affairs (BIA) or the ANB.  In reaction to the expansion, the BIA, the ANB, and the NPS reached an agreement giving the Tlingit the privilege to hunt and trap in the park for subsistence. The agreement was informal, and not recorded. Non-Huna Tlingit did not have permission to hunt in the park.

Throughout this period, the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service was paying a bounty for seals. Though the Tlingit were ostensibly only allowed to hunt for subsistence, data suggests that they also redeemed seals for money, some of which were likely hunted in the park. Huna Tlingit people began complaining because they were being excluded from the Park by white residents under the guise of NPS policy. In 1946, the NPS, BIA, and ANB reached a new agreement. It recognized three rights: that the Huna Tlingit would be allowed to carry firearms while in the park, that they would be permitted to hunt hair seals within 100 ft of the waterline, and that the agreement would be re-negotiated in 1950.

Huna Tlingit park usage was renegotiated every few years until 1966. By then, park officials were becoming more and more concerned with the health of the seal populations and the aesthetic violence of seal hunting. Visitors to the parks didn't like to see any vestige of hunting, particularly carcasses. For tourists and park officials, the hunting disrupted the purpose of the park. They had no problem with "traditional" hunting, which they believed left no trace and did not involve firearms. 

Park Service officials argued that the Tlingit were hunting beyond the health of the seal population, estimating that 1,200 seals were taken from the park of a total population of only approximately 4,000 in any given year. However, when more accurate data estimated that the seal population in the park was more likely between 7,000 and 8,000 seals, the conservation argument lost ground. 

The NPS then argued that since the Tlingit community no longer needed the seals for survival, so they shouldn't have unrestricted rights to hunt seals in the park. A park biologist went so far as to say that "These alleged hide hunters, entering the bay in large boats, sometimes killing 200 seals on a single trip, were trying to 'outdo the whites in their resource-rape.'"

This argument was based on the takes of two Tlingit hunters, George Dalton and James Austin. Huna Tlingit hunters consider neither the use of firearms or hunting for money to be non-traditional. Sealing had always been part of their life, and tools had always changed with technology. Ironically (and revealingly), the NPS later cited the same two men as the last true subsistence hunters in those waters.

NPS action on sealing was prompted by a series of legal issues. In 1947, the Tlingit and Haida Tribes filed suit against the United States, alleging an illegal take of more than 17 million acres in six designated areas in southeastern Alaska, including Glacier Bay. In 1959, the U.S. Court of Claims found for the Tribes, but remanded the case for further hearings on relief (177 F.Supp. 452). In 1968, the same court approved $7.5 million dollars in damages to the Tribes (389 F.2d 778). The rulings acknowledged the Tlingit and Haida's native title to the land comprising Glacier Bay but resolved their claims by compensating them for the land. 

For the NPS, the resolution of the Tlingit and Haida native claim to Glacier Bay potentially affirmed the NPS's right to modify the hunting privilege and exclude Tlingit hunters from the park. Additionally, the Alaska Native Claims Settlement Act (1971) terminated Native title to the rest of Alaska, vesting land rights to most of that land in the State of Alaska.

Then, the Marine Mammals Protection Act (MMPA) was passed in 1972. The MMPA provided an exception for Alaska Native hunting that allowed them to hunt in National Parks for subsistence and cultural activities. Advocates for the sealing ban in Glacier Bay realized they had to act before an exception under the MMPA was granted to the Huna Tlingit. 

On April 4, 1974, the Chief Park Ranger informed the Mayor of Hoonah that the NPS would be enforcing a general ban on the killing of wildlife in National Parks in Glacier Bay. The NPS did not provide any written notice or allow for comment. Between 1974 and 1992, no permits were granted to Tlingit hunters. Glacier Bay National Monument became a National Park and Preserve in 1980.

In 1992, the Tlingit staged a protest and entered into negotiations with the NPS. By 1997, the NPS agreed to build a Tribal House in Glacier Bay, a space in the park where Tlingit people could establish cultural practices. The project was stalled for lack of funding until 2013. The Tribal House, Xunaa Shuká Hít, was dedicated in 2016. 

In July, 2014 President Barack Obama signed the Huna Tlingit Traditional Gull Egg Use Act, which allows Tlingit people to resume harvesting gull eggs in Glacier Bay once the NPS established harvesting regulations. The NPS now has an agreement with the Hoonah Indian Association to harvest eggs in the park, and works with cruise lines to have the Hoonah Indian Association provide guide and cultural interpretation services. 

Sealing in the park is still banned. 

The majority of the history in this post is based on information found in Land Reborn: A History of Administration and Visitor Use in Glacier Bay National Park and Preserve, available online here. Chapters 1-6 and 10 are especially relevant.

Latina Deputy USDA Secretary sworn in

NPR reported yesterday here on Xochitl Torres Small's swearing in as the first Latina Deputy Secretary of the U.S. Department of Agriculture.  Torres Small is from New Mexico, where she served one term as a congresswoman from the sparsely populated district that includes Las Cruces and vast portions of the southern part of the Land of Enchantment.  Here's an excerpt from the NPR story about Torres Small, with Ximena Bustillo reporting: 

The former New Mexico congresswoman was tapped in by President Biden in 2021 to serve as undersecretary for rural development at USDA, the branch of the department that oversees infrastructure, utilities and healthcare across rural communities. Now in a higher ranking position, she takes on the role as the administration and Democrats are looking to strengthen their footprints in rural areas.

* * *  

Torres Small has been promoted at a time when the department is undergoing changes to address historical discrimination across its lending and other programs. Late last year the department began making payments on loan cancellations for some farmers and providing $2.2 billion for farmers who experienced discrimination prior to Jan. 2021.

As for new challenges facing Torres Small, they include "looming department staffing shortages. Torres Small has previously raised concerns that nearly half of the employees she oversaw in rural development were eligible to retire, even as demands for the agency have increased."   

The story includes several long quotes from Torres Small: 

To get to be deputy secretary and in charge of the backend of the shop is really exciting because we impact people's lives in so many ways.  I'm the granddaughter of farm workers, and of course, that's a way that it has impacted my life. But my parents were educators. And when it comes to thinking about the kids that they're teaching, making sure that those kids have healthy, nutritious food to help them learn is crucial.

And here's an excerpt where Torres Small highlights the racial and ethnic diversity of rural America, a reality often overlooked (but highlighted in my recent article here and recently on several occasions on this blog):   

One of my favorite things about serving as undersecretary at rural development was that rural America is a lot of different things and a lot of different places, and it's incredibly diverse. Yes, it's a farmer on a tractor, and it's also a rural [fishing village] in Alaska and it's also Indian country.

While cast in a negative light here, an aging USDA staff can also be seen as a positive--opening opportunities for younger rural sociologists and economists in government service. 

WSJ reports on paralegals as a solution for (rural) lawyer shortage

Here's an excerpt from Erin Mulvaney's Wall Street Journal story about how several states are considering allowing nonlawyers to provide legal advice: 

From evictions to family law, some of the most common legal issues are the ones in which it can be most difficult to find a lawyer. So states are considering potentially expanding the definition of those who can help people with their legal problems. Minnesota has a pilot program, in place since 2020, that allows paralegals to represent clients in housing and family law with attorney supervision. Minnesota’s Supreme Court recently agreed to extend it to next year. New Hampshire is also testing a similar initiative that took effect in January.

Other states have adopted programs to create a new tier of legal-service providers who aren’t attorneys but are licensed to assist people with basic everyday legal issues, including on family law, debt collections and housing. In Utah and Arizona, dozens of these professionals are already providing legal services. And this year, Colorado and Oregon are implementing similar initiatives, approved by their respective high courts.

In Alaska, the state’s Supreme Court last November approved a program that allows community justice workers to offer some legal services. Hundreds of people have volunteered to be trained.

“We have a legal system built by lawyers, for lawyers, but doesn’t provide help for everyone who needs it,” said Nikole Nelson, executive director of the Alaska Legal Services Corporation. “The tide is turning.”

* * * 

While the initiatives vary, they all share a central goal: expanding the number of professionals who can offer legal services to the people who find themselves alone in the court process. The states are still in an early period of experimentation, including on the areas in which nonlawyers should be allowed to practice and what kind of supervision is necessary for their work, said Michael Houlberg, director of special projects at the Institute for the Advancement of the American Legal System, which researches innovations in the legal industry.

Interestingly, while these attorney shortages to which use of paraprofessionals would respond are largely associated with rural places, the story uses the word "rural" only once, in the opening vignette about Judge Robert Friday, who sits in a state court in a rural area about an hour north of Duluth.   A somewhat related story about use of laypersons to alleviate justice system deficits--especially in rural places--is here.  New Mexico has also looked at this possible solution, as has Washington state, though they are not mentioned in the WSJ piece. 

Covering the distance to mentor teachers in rural Alaska

Cory Turner reported for NPR a few days ago from rural western Alaska where a septuagenarian teacher is mentoring a young colleague, though it requires him to take three flights to reach Chevak, population 938.

Outside Chevak School, in western Alaska, the lake is ice, and the snowy tundra unfurls to the Bering Sea. But that doesn't stop new, first-grade teacher Amelia Tulim from trying to lighten the mood with an outdoor egg hunt. Inside the colorful plastic eggs: small, animal-shaped erasers.

Tulim grew up in Chevak, an Alaska Native community and home to the Cup'ik people. It's here, in the same school where she now works, that her third-grade teacher first inspired her to become an educator.

"She made learning fun," Tulim says, smiling. "I remember sitting in my desk and looking right at her and telling myself, 'One day, that's going to be you. You're going to make learning fun.' "

And she is. But being a new teacher is also hard, she admits.

The long hours of grading and lesson-prep can be exhausting. Poverty is also a challenge in Chevak, as it is in so many districts across the U.S., and often requires that teachers do far more than teach. There's also the long, snowy winters, though Tulim's used to those.

"We only have three cars here," she says, "the rest are ATVs and snowmobiles."

For many Alaska teachers, this math adds up to burnout. The state's rural communities are hit hard by teacher shortages, losing roughly one in four teachers every year. 

* * * 

Research shows teachers who were trained in Alaska, as Tulim was, are less likely to leave the classroom than outsiders, a trend that's also been seen in other communities, and that's fueled an explosion in grow-your-own teacher training programs across the U.S.

She also has Ed Sotelo.

The 70-year-old veteran teacher pops into her classroom, greeting the children as they return from their egg hunt – as if he'd simply walked across the hall.   

* * * 

Sotelo is one of fifteen retired teachers who now work as mentors for the Alaska Statewide Mentor Project (ASMP). The program began 20 years ago, through the University of Alaska, and later survived being gutted by statewide budget cuts; seeing the impact the mentors were having on their teachers, school districts themselves stepped in to keep the project funded.

On remote work for American Indians and Alaska natives

Marketplace, from American Public Media, did this story a week ago, "Telework could help tribes curb outmigration, but Native workers are being left behind."  Here's an excerpt:  

Maleah Nore has a job she’s passionate about, promoting mental health and working on suicide prevention in Native communities. But she’d like to do that work closer to the rural southeast Alaskan village where she grew up.

“Part of the reason that we’re experiencing such drain in our villages is that people are forced to move to these huge hubs,” she said, like the Portland metro area where she lives now.

A hybrid model allows Nore to sometimes work from her home office, but not from her Tlingit homelands.

“In order to do the work that we need to do to help our people and get further in this world, we have to leave our villages,” she said. “That is just counterproductive.”

Because distance makes it harder to be a good relative and community member, Nore said.

* * *

Research from the Brookings Institution and the Federal Reserve Bank of Minneapolis’ Center for Indian Country Development finds that the remote work revolution could have unique benefits for tribal communities and economies, but that Native workers are being left behind.

“No one is accessing the remote work environment as little as the American Indian/Alaska Native population,” said Matthew Gregg, a senior economist at the Minneapolis Fed and an author of the report.

At the height of the pandemic, Gregg said, data from the U.S. Census Bureau shows 23% of Native workers were teleworking because of COVID-19, compared to 31% of white workers.

“One of the key reasons is that there’s employment differences between whites and Native Americans,” Gregg said.

Native people are overrepresented in fields we’ve come to know as “essential,” such as health care, education and service work, and underrepresented in office jobs that are more likely to allow telework.

More than two years into the pandemic, Gregg said the telework gap has narrowed, but those occupational differences no longer explain the gap.

“In fact, within occupations, there’s a racial disparity,” he said.

Gregg and his co-author, Robert Maxim, a senior research associate at the Brookings Institution, have some ideas about what else might be going on.

“The first is access — or I should say lack of access — to broadband internet,” Maxim said.

Ranked-choice vote counting done, Mary Peltola (D) and Lisa Murkowski (R) win in Alaska

Photos from Mary Peltola's twitter feed on
November 24, 2022, day after she was declared winner of 2022 midterm
one side of her mug says "made of salmon" and the other is
"Mary Peltola for Congress"

Here's the story about Peltola, about whom I've previously written here.  Peltola is from rural Bethel, and she talks rural--as well as fish--a lot.  Here's her tweet from the morning after her victory was declared, from which I took the photos above.  Here's another fun Peltola tweet reflecting her pro-fish campaign; it features dancing crabs. 

And here's the NYTimes story about Lisa Murkowski, who defeated fellow Republican Kelly Tshibaka, who was backed by Trump.  Democrat Pat Chesbro garnered nearly 10% of the vote in the first round of the state's rank-choice voting, which takes into account voters' second choices if no candidate gets more than 50% of the vote in the first round. 

Murkowski now begins her fourth full term in the Senate.  Peltola has now earned her first full term in Congress.  As she did in this election, Peltola also defeated Sarah Palin and Nick Begich back in August to fill the seat Don Young (R) had held for nearly five decades.  Young died in March.  

Here is the Washington Post's coverage of these Alaska wins.  Of Peltola, Nathaniel Herz writes: 

Peltola ran a locally focused campaign with both traditional and unconventional Democratic platform planks — she touted her support for abortion rights and “pro-fish” views, along with her endorsement of a new Alaska oil project and the large gun collection that she and her family maintains.

This Washington Post story also has a good explanation of rank-choice voting, and its short history in Alaska.   

Postscript:  Here's an AP piece on the bipartisan coalition that will govern the Alaska legislature after the recent elections.  The lede follows: 

The Alaska state Senate will have a coalition of Democrats and Republicans serving as a majority caucus next January, officials announced. Friday.

The coalition will include nine Democrats and eight Republicans, leaving three members of the 20-seat chamber in the minority.

Gary Stevens, a Republican from Kodiak, will serve as Senate president. Among other leadership positions include Bill Wielechowski, an Anchorage Democrat, as Senate rules chair, and Cathy Giessel, a Republican who previously served as the body’s president and regained her Senate seat in this year’s election, as majority leader.

"No community is too small or too remote to care about"

That's a quote form Mary Peltola, Alaska's congresswoman, speaking about her predecessor Don Young. Young served as the state's only congressperson for some five decades, until he died this spring on his way home from DC to Alaska.  Peltola says, in this latest ad, that the lesson of showing up in rural places is one she learned from watching Young in the 1980s, when he traveled to Tuntuliak to give a high school graduation speech.  It's a powerful message for rural folks and one she's been rolling out a lot since she won the special election a few months ago.  (See related posts here) 

Name checking Don Young is an interesting strategy given that Peltola is a Democrat and Young was a Republican.  But Peltola, the surprise winner of the special election to replace Young, is now campaigning for a full 2-year term, and she's not shying away from Young's legacy--well, at least some parts of it.  Here's a screenshot from her ad (for which I can't find a link on her web page, sorry): 

 

Here's a link to the 30-second ad on Twitter.  

The place she mentions where Don Young traveled to give a graduation speech, Tuntutuliak, has a population of 408. It's in what she often refers to as western Alaska.  

Yesterday, Peltola was campaigning in the state's 10th largest city, Kodiak, population 5500.  

More from a Mary Peltola fan girl (yep, that's me)

I continue to follow Mary Peltola's Twitter feed with rapt attention and appreciated this Tweet today, as well as the responses it engendered: 

And here are just the first three responses: 

These evince a perspective beyond the, shall we say, generic rural and move into something much more distinctive--even unique--that is the great 49th state.  

These also remind me of the rural bashing on display a dozen years ago when infrastructure investment to connect Ketchikan, Alaska and its airport were at stake. The operative phrase then was a "bridge to nowhere." I wrote about it here.  

Earlier Tweets about Peltola and her unexpected rise to this congressional seat are here.  

On what makes Mary Peltola and her campaign distinctive

This is from Katrina van den Heuvel's column in the Washington Post, after she notes how rural Alaska is by saying that Democrats' flipping Alaska's at large congressional seat "doubled the amount of land the [party] represent in the lower chamber of Congress":

First, Peltola’s success demonstrates the value of putting a genuine effort into regions where Democrats have historically not invested enough. Although Alaska hadn’t elected a Democrat to the U.S. House since 1972 — and it’s one of the most rural states in the country — Peltola emerged victorious. To be sure, it can be difficult to predict which seemingly long-shot races are worth pursuing — but if Democrats put up a real fight in as many races as possible, they can sometimes find themselves electing a Mary Peltola in Alaska, a Jon Tester in Montana, a Laura Kelly in Kansas. (See also: former Democratic National Committee chair Howard Dean’s 50-state strategy.) That isn’t possible when Democrats allow Republicans to run unopposed, or when they nominate candidates who serve as little more than decoration on the ballot.

* * *

 With little out-of-state money, Peltola focused on connecting with voters about in-state issues — including, most significantly, fish. An Alaska Yup’ik Native, Peltola can point to a lifetime of fishing on the Kuskokwim River and boasts such professional titles as “Salmon Fellow,” so she offered practical expertise about a resource that provides subsistence, sport and sales for her constituents.

Peltola's campaign theme was "Freedom, Family and Fish."  Other posts about Peltola are here.  

Postscript:  Here's part of Peltola's interview with Joy Reid, which was excerpted in some of Liz Ruskin's reporting for Alaska Public Media:

LIZ RUSKIN, BYLINE: Peltola joins a freshman House class that includes brash partisans. She's a different sort. She lowers her voice for media interviews.

MARY PELTOLA: My hope is to take the values of collaboration and peacemaking and those kind of qualities. I hope that I can reflect those.

RUSKIN: As a Yup'ik from rural western Alaska, Peltola says she's been taught to consider community harmony and being part of something larger. She says she's proud of her ethnicities, all of them. She often points out that her dad is a white guy from Nebraska. On the eve of her swearing in, Peltola went on MSNBC and pushed back at a question from host Joy Reid that invoked identity politics.

PELTOLA: You talk about one group having suffered more than another group, and I think that it's important in America that we're not trying to one-up each other on our level of suffering.

RUSKIN: Peltola likes to say that no American is her enemy. Her radical moderation hasn't dampened enthusiasm for her among Alaskans.