“I remember that first summer that we couldn’t fish, watching the cotton flying and being like …what it felt like, I was drifting. I’m like, ‘What am I doing?’” - Tirzah Bryant, environmental and education coordinator for the Louden Tribe, the Galena-based tribal government, on the effects of salmon run collapses and fishing closures.
Migrating summer chum and chinook salmon swim on July 7, 2007, below the U.S. Bureau of Land Managment’s fish weir on the Tozitna River, Alaska. The Tozitna is a tributory of the Yukon River. (Photo by Jason Post/U.S. Bureau of Land Management)
By Yereth Rosen
When 26-year-old Tirzah Bryant was a kid, she knew how to watch the cottonwood trees along the Yukon River for the sign that it was time to fish for salmon.
“We know that the fish are coming when the cotton’s flying from the cottonwood,” she said.
But run collapses and successive fishing closures along the river have rendered the cottonwood signal meaningless.
Michelle Sparck (center) poses for a photo with Bering Straits Native Corporation summer interns in Nome on July 20, 2026 during a voter outreach trip. (Photo courtesy of Michelle Sparck)
By Corinne Smith
A Native-led voter mobilization group is working to boost Alaska Native voter education and turnout this election season.
Get Out the Native Vote is a non-partisan effort now underway to reach voters across the state’s vast and varied geography and get them to cast ballots in the primary elections on August 18 and the midterm elections on November 3.
The Alaska Native Medical Center is reflected in the campus pond on Sept. 9, 2022. The hospital is among several facilities on the Alaska Native Tribal Health Consortium campus in Anchorage. ANTHC is the nation's largest Native tribal organization. (Photo by Yereth Rosen/Alaska Beacon)
By Yereth Rosen
The federal government has agreed to pay the Alaska Native Tribal Health Consortium $400 million to settle claims of inadequate cost coverage over several years.
The settlement, announced on Tuesday by the U.S. Justice Department, stems from a lawsuit filed by the nonprofit tribal health group in 2021 against the Department of Health and Human Services, which operates the Indian Health Service.
Deputy Matanuska-Susitna Borough School District Deputy Superintendent Katie Gardner and Superintendent Randy Trani discuss a concealed-carry weapons proposal during a regular school board meeting at the Matanuska-Susitna Borough School District in Palmer on May 5, 2026. (Photo by Amy Bushatz/Mat-Su Sentinel)
COMMENTARY
By R. Brett Sterling
The Mat-Su school board recently passed a policy to arm classroom teachers. I’ve been struggling to find the right word to describe it.
The district claims the policy is about “maintaining a safe and secure learning environment.” In a profession obsessed with research-based decision making, nothing supports the claim that armed teachers make schools safer, especially when there hasn’t been a gun-related death in an Alaskan school in over twenty-five years. The board claims the policy will not “change the educational environment.” When you hide guns in classrooms, the environment changes immediately.
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IN CASE YOU MISSED IT
On a nearly deserted Alaska island, you pay to keep hundreds of empty buildings wired for internet | ProPublica, Anchorage Daily News
Lawmakers approve state audit of the Alaska Board of Fisheries | Corinne Smith
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