Alaska

Alaska Natives want the US military to clean up its toxic waste

Published

12 months ago

March 19, 2025

Alaska Natives want the US military to clean up its toxic waste

In June 1942, Japan’s invasion of the Aleutian islands in Alaska prompted the U.S. military to activate the Alaska territorial guard, an Army reserve made up of volunteers who wanted to help protect the U.S. So many of the volunteers were from Alaska’s Indigenous peoples — Aleut, Inupiak, Yupik, Tlingit, and many others — that the guard was nicknamed the “Eskimo Scouts.”

When World War II ended and the reserve force ceased operations in 1947, the U.S. approached the Indigenous Yupik people of Alaska with another ask: Could the Air Force set up “listening posts” on the island of Sivuqaq, also known as St. Lawrence Island, to help with the intelligence gathering needed to win the Cold War?

Viola Waghiyi, who is Yupik from Sivuqaq, said the answer was a resounding yes.

“Our grandfathers and fathers volunteered for the Alaska territorial guard,” she said. “We were very patriotic.”

But that trust was abused, Waghiyi said. The U.S. military eventually abandoned its Air Force and Army bases, leaving the land polluted with toxic chemicals such as fuel, mercury, and polychlorinated biphenyls, or PCBs, that are known as “forever chemicals” because they persist so long in the environment. The contamination was largely due to spilled and leaking fuel from storage tanks and pipes, both above ground and below ground. More chemical waste came from electrical transformers, abandoned metals and 55-gallon drums.

Now, Waghiyi is the environmental health and justice program director at the Alaska Community Action on Toxics, an organization dedicated to limiting the effects of toxic substances on Alaska’s residents and environment. Last week, the organization filed a complaint to the United Nations special rapporteur on toxics and human rights, in partnership with the U.C. Berkeley Environmental Law Clinic.

Their complaint calls for the United Nations to investigate how military waste on Sivuqaq continues to violate the rights of the people who live there, such as the right to a clean and healthy environment and Indigenous peoples’ right to free, prior, and informed consent to what happens on their land.

“By exposing the Yupik people of Sivuqaq to polluted drinking water sources, air, and soil, and by contaminating local native foods; by causing pervasive human exposure to hazardous chemicals through multiple routes; by toxifying the broader ecosystem; and by not cleaning up contamination sufficiently to protect human health and the environment, the U.S. Air Force and Army Corps of Engineers violated human rights long recognized in international law,” the complaint says.

This submission from Alaska is part of a larger, global effort to raise awareness of military toxic waste by the United Nations. The U.N. special rapporteur on toxics and human rights is collecting public input on military activities and toxic waste until April 1. The information collected will be used in a report presented to the U.N. General Assembly in October.

The two shuttered bases in Sivuqaq, Alaska, are now classified as “formerly used defense,” or FUD, sites, overseen by the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers, and more than $130 million has been spent to remove the contamination. John Budnick, a spokesman for the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers in Alaska, said the cleanup is considered complete but that the agency is reviewing the site every five years “to ensure the selected remedies continue to be protective of human health and the environment.”

“We have completed the work at Northeast Cape, but additional follow-up actions may result from the monitoring phase of the Formerly Used Defense Sites Program,” he said. The last site visit occurred last July and an updated review report is expected to be released this summer.

The federal Environmental Protection Agency, or EPA, similarly concluded in 2013 that an additional EPA cleanup wouldn’t significantly differ from what the Army Corps of Engineers is doing and declined to place the sites on the EPA’s list of hazardous waste cleanup priorities.

A 2022 study found that so far, federal cleanup efforts have been inadequate. “High levels of persistent organic pollutants and toxic metals continue to leach from the Northeast Cape FUD site despite large-scale remediation that occurred in the early 2000s,” the authors concluded.

The persisting pollution has garnered the attention of Alaska’s state Dept. of Environmental Conservation which oversees the cleanup of contaminated sites. Stephanie Buss, contaminated sites program manager at the agency, said her office has asked the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers to do additional cleanup at Northeast Cape.

“These active contaminated sites have not met closure requirements,” she said. The second former base, Gambell, was classified as completed but still lacks land use controls, she noted.

“DEC takes community health concerns seriously and will continue to provide oversight of the conditions at its active sites in accordance with the state’s regulatory framework to ensure an appropriate response that protects human health and welfare,” Buss said.

That same 2022 study found that 89 percent of the fish around the Northeast Cape base contained mercury exceeding the levels the EPA deemed appropriate for people who rely on subsistence fishing. “All fish sampled near the FUD site exceeded the EPA’s PCB guidelines for cancer risk for unrestricted human consumption,” the researchers further found. Waghiyi said the contamination displaced 130 people, and has left her friends and family with a lasting legacy of illness.

“It’s not a matter of if we’ll get cancer, but when,” Waghiyi said. Her father died of cancer. Her mother had a stillborn child. Waghiyi herself is a cancer survivor and has had three miscarriages.

“We feel that they have turned their back on us,” Waghiyi said of the U.S. military. “We wanted our lands to be turned back in the same condition when they turned over.”

The U.S. military has a long history of contaminating lands and waters through military training and battles sites, including on Indigenous lands. Citizens of the Navajo Nation in Arizona and Yakama Nation in Washington continue to raise concerns about the ongoing effects of military nuclear testing on their lands and health. In the Marshall Islands, fishing around certain atolls is discouraged due to high rates of toxicity due to nuclear testing and other military training. On Guam, chemicals from an active Air Force base have contaminated parts of the islandʻs sole-source aquifer that serves 70% of the population. Last year, a federal report found that climate change threatens to unearth even more U.S. military nuclear waste in both the Marshall Islands and Greenland.

In 2021, the Navy in Hawaiʻi poisoned 90,000 people when jet fuel leached from aging, massive underground storage tanks into the drinking water supply after the Navy ignored years of warning to upgrade the tanks or remove the fuel. The federal government spent hundreds of millions of dollars to remove unexploded ordnance from the island of Kahoʻolawe, a former bombing range in Hawaiʻi, but the island is still considered dangerous to walk on because of the risk of more ordnance unearthing due to extensive erosion.

The complaint filed last week by the Alaska Community Action on Toxics calls for the United Nations to write to U.S. federal and state agencies and call upon them to honor a 1951 agreement between the U.S. government and the Sivuqaq Yupik people that prohibited polluting the land.

The agreement said that the Sivuqaq Tribes would allow the Air Force to construct surveillance sites to spy on the Soviet Union, but they had four conditions, including allowing Indigenous peoples to continue to hunt, fish and trap where desired and preventing outsiders from killing their game. Finally, the agreement said that “any refuse or garbage will not be dumped in streams or near the beach within the proposed area.”

“The import of the agreement was clear: The military must not despoil the island; must protect the resources critical to Indigenous Yupik inhabitants’ sustenance; and must leave the island in the condition they found it, which ensured their health and well-being,” the Alaska Community Action on Toxics wrote in their complaint.

“This is a burden we didn’t create,” Waghiyi said.

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Alaska

Alaska lawmakers push Trump administration to waive $100k visa fee for international teachers

Published

11 hours ago

March 3, 2026

Press Room

Alaska lawmakers push Trump administration to waive 0k visa fee for international teachers

Some Alaska school districts say they can’t afford to hire and retain international teachers after the Trump administration hiked fees for highly skilled worker visas. Alaska school districts have increasingly hired international teachers through the H-1B program amid an ongoing teacher shortage. Until last September, the annual fee for such visas was $5,000 per person. […]

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Alaska

Alaska’s voter roll transfer: Republicans bash hearing questioning if lieutenant governor broke the law

Published

23 hours ago

March 3, 2026

Press Room

Alaska’s voter roll transfer: Republicans bash hearing questioning if lieutenant governor broke the law

JUNEAU, Alaska (KTUU) – A legislative hearing into the legality of Alaska’s voter roll transfer to the federal government ended in partisan accusations Monday, with one Republican calling it a “set-up” and others saying it was unnecessary, while Democrats defended it as needed oversight.

“Andrew (Gray) and the committee has a bias. I mean, that much is obvious from watching it,” Rep. Kevin McCabe, R-Big Lake, told Alaska’s News Source walking out of the hearing before it gaveled out. “Most of the testimony was slanted against the state and against the federal government.”

The House State Affairs and Judiciary committees met jointly Monday to hear testimony about whether Dahlstrom violated the law when she transferred the entirety of Alaska’s voter rolls to the federal government.

Rep. Steve St. Clair, R-Wasilla, agreed with his Big Lake counterpart that the hearing was unnecessary.

“I think we’re speculating on what the intent of the DOJ is and I believe we need to wait and see,” he said.

Rep. Andrew Gray, D-Anchorage and chair of the House Judiciary Committee, pushed back when told of his Republican colleagues’ reaction.

“I think that I went above and beyond to try to include everybody,” Gray said as he left the meeting. “If people are saying that if the Obama administration had asked for the unredacted voter rolls from Alaska, that all these Republicans around here would have just been like, ‘oh, take it all. Take all of our information.’

“That is not true. That is absolutely not true,” Gray added.

Rep. Ted Eischeid, D-Anchorage, backed his House majority colleague, questioning whether Republicans would have preferred if the topic not be addressed at all.

“The minority folks on the committee had a chance to ask questions,” he said. “I think this is a meeting we needed to have. Alaskans have asked for it. I think there’s still a lot of unanswered questions. So shedding light on the state’s actions, that’s bias?”

Dahlstrom did not attend the hearing. Gray said she was invited multiple times but cited scheduling conflicts. The lieutenant governor oversees the Alaska Division of Elections under state law.

In her most recent public statement — published Feb. 25 on her gubernatorial campaign website, not through her official office — Dahlstrom defended the voter roll transfer, saying the agreement with the DOJ was “lawful, limited” and that Alaska retains full authority over its voter rolls.

“The DOJ cannot remove a single voter from our rolls,” she wrote. “Its role is limited to identifying potential issues, such as duplicate registrations or individuals who may have moved or passed away.”

Representatives from the state’s Department of Law and Division of Elections both testified in defense of Dahlstrom’s decision. Rachel Witty, the Department of Law’s director of legal services, told the committee the state viewed the DOJ’s purview.

“The DOJ’s enforcement authority is quite broad,” Witty said. “And so, we interpreted their request as being used to evaluate and enforce HAVA compliance.”

HAVA — the Help America Vote Act — is a federal law that sets election administration standards for states.

Lawmakers also heard from an assortment of outside witnesses who largely questioned the legality of Dahlstrom’s actions, including former Lt. Gov. Loren Leman, who served under Republican Gov. Frank Murkowski, and former Attorney General Bruce Botelho, who served under Democratic Gov. Tony Knowles.

The Documents: A Months-Long Timeline

As part of the hearing, the committee released months’ worth of documents between the Department of Justice — led by Attorney General Pam Bondi — and Dahlstrom’s office, detailing the effort to transfer Alaska’s voter rolls over to Washington.

The DOJ first asked Dahlstrom to release the voter rolls in July of last year, citing the 1993 National Voter Registration Act, which requires states to allow federal inspection of “official lists of eligible voters.”

Dahlstrom agreed to release the records in August, providing a list of voters designated as “inactive” and “non-citizens,” along with their voting records and the statewide voter registration list — but it did not include what the DOJ wanted.

“As the Attorney General requested, the electronic copy of the statewide [voter registration list] must contain all fields,” reads an email sent 10 days after Dahlstrom agreed to release the data, “including the registrant’s full name, date of birth, residential address, his or her state driver’s license number or the last four digits of the registrant’s social security number.”

Dahlstrom agreed to provide the full details months later, in December, citing a state statute that permits sharing confidential information with a federal agency if it uses “the information only for governmental purposes authorized under law.” Those purposes, she wrote in the email, are to “test, analyze and assess the State’s compliance with federal laws.”

“I attach some significance to the fact that it took the State … nearly four months to respond to the Department of Justice’s demand,” former AG Botelho told the committee.

That same day, Dahlstrom, Alaska Division of Elections Director Carol Beecher and DOJ Assistant Attorney General Harmeet Dhillon signed a memorandum of understanding governing how the data could be accessed, used, and protected.

Dahlstrom’s office publicly announced the transfer nine days after the MOU was signed — nearly six months after the DOJ first made its request.

“Alaska is committed to the integrity of our elections and to complying with applicable law,” Dahlstrom said in the December statement. “Upon receiving the DOJ’s request, the Division of Elections, in consultation with the Department of Law, provided the voter registration list in accordance with federal requirements and state authority, while ensuring appropriate safeguards for sensitive information.”

A 10-page legal analysis from legislative counsel Andrew Dunmire, requested by House Majority Whip Rep. Zack Fields, D-Anchorage, concluded that the DOJ’s demand defied legal bounds.

“The DOJ’s request for state voter data is unprecedented,” Dunmire’s analysis states, adding that the legal justification the DOJ used to demand access to the data has never been applied this way before.

“Multiple states refused DOJ’s request, which has resulted in litigation that is now working its way through federal courts across the country,” he adds.

The Senate holds an identical hearing Wednesday, when its State Affairs and Judiciary committees take up the same questions.

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Alaska

Alaska Air National Guard rescues injured snowmachiner near Cooper Landing

Published

1 day ago

March 2, 2026

Press Room

Alaska Air National Guard rescues injured snowmachiner near Cooper Landing

An Alaska Air National Guard HH-60W Jolly Green II helicopter, assigned to the 210th Rescue Squadron, 176th Wing, returns to Joint Base Elmendorf-Richardson, Alaska, after conducting a rescue mission for an injured snowmachiner, Feb. 21, 2026. The mission marked the first time the AKANG used the HH-60W for a rescue. (U.S. Air National Guard photo by Staff Sgt. Joseph Moon)

JOINT BASE ELMENDORF-RICHARDSON, Alaska – Alaska Air National Guard personnel conducted a rescue mission Saturday, Feb. 21, after receiving a request for assistance from the Alaska State Troopers through the Alaska Rescue Coordination Center.

The mission was initiated to recover an injured snowmachiner in the Cooper Landing area, approximately 60 air miles south of Joint Base Elmendorf-Richardson. The Alaska Air National Guard accepted the mission, located the individual, and transported them to Providence Alaska Medical Center in Anchorage for further medical care.

The mission marked the first search and rescue operation conducted by the 210th Rescue Squadron using the HH-60W Jolly Green II, the Air Force’s newest combat rescue helicopter, which is replacing the older HH-60G Pave Hawk. Guardian Angels assigned to the 212th Rescue Squadron were also aboard the aircraft and assisted in the recovery of the injured individual.

Good Samaritans, who were on the ground at the accident site, deployed a signal flare, that helped the helicopter crew visually locate the injured individual in the heavily wooded area.
Due to the mountainous terrain, dense tree cover, and deep snow in the area, the helicopter was unable to land near the patient. The aircrew conducted a hoist insertion and extraction of the Guardian Angels and the injured snowmachiner. The patient was extracted using a rescue strop and hoisted into the aircraft.

The Alaska Air National Guard routinely conducts search and rescue operations across the state in support of civil authorities, providing life-saving assistance in some of the most remote and challenging environments in the world.