Two Tlingít villages in Southeast Alaska will receive apologies for wrongful military action from the U.S. Navy this fall.

The first of those apologies will take place in Kake this weekend, where U.S. Navy Rear Admiral Mark B. Sucato will acknowledge the harms of a bombardment in 1869. An apology in Angoon is scheduled for Oct. 26, the 142nd anniversary of the 1882 bombardment.

Navy ​​Environmental Public Affairs Specialist Julianne Leinenveber said it was determined that the military actions were wrongful because they resulted in loss of life, loss of resources, and inflicted multigenerational trauma on the affected communities.

“The pain and suffering inflicted upon the Tlingit people warrants this long overdue apology,” she wrote in an email.

Tlingit people have asked the U.S. government to apologize for decades. Leinenveber said the U.S. responded in the last few years with planning discussions at the highest levels of military leadership and the federal government about how to issue a substantive, meaningful apologies in a culturally appropriate manner. Lately, she wrote, military relationships with Alaska Native clans brought the matter to the attention of Navy leadership, who coordinated with the Office of the Secretary of Defense to formally apologize for the bombardments.

“The Navy will be issuing this apology because it is the right thing to do, regardless of how much time has passed since these tragic events transpired,” she wrote.

Joel Jackson, the president of the Organized Village of Kake, said the apologies are meaningful to the community even after a century.

“It’s a long time coming,” he said. “Hopefully, through this apology, we can start healing from the wrongs that were committed against us.”

Jackson said he is particularly concerned with the effects of intergenerational trauma, which he said he sees in his community today. The Navy apology will specifically acknowledge the U.S. government’s responsibility for that trauma.

Jackson said the military history of the event is not an accurate accounting of what happened. Many accounts refer to the bombardments as the Kake Wars.

“We never did go to war with them,” he said. “They attacked our communities.”

Military action in Kake

There are different accounts of the military events in Kake in 1862. Some refer to the events as a bombardment, while others refer to them as the Kake Wars.

What goes without much dispute is that a U.S. Navy vessel, the USS Saginaw, totally destroyed three village sites and two forts in the area of Kake in the winter. Soldiers then burned the villages and destroyed food and canoes. By all accounts, the destruction led to “many deaths.”

Descriptions of the events that precipitated the bombardment differ. An account from William S Dodge, one of two mayors of Sitka under the provisional government, printed in the Annual Report of the Department of the Interior, recounts that two Alaska Native men were killed by a sentry in Sitka when they were unaware there was an order not to leave the village there. Afterward, men from Kake killed two colonizers in retaliation, which caused the war, Dodge wrote.

A forthcoming book from Zachary R. Jones, Ph.D., is similar to this account, with the detail that a Kake clan leader asked for trade blankets and goods as compensation for the deaths in accordance with Tlingit law, but the general refused, which is why a “party of Kake Tlingits” killed two trappers on Admiralty Island in retribution. The information was released in advance of the book’s publication in a news release from the Sealaska Heritage Institute.

New relationships

Angoon School Principal Emma Demmert was invited by the U.S. Navy to take part in planning meetings early this summer for its October apology. She said she is hopeful for the future after working with Navy officials and seeing their openness and willingness to embrace Angoon’s cultural traditions.

“This is a really good step to healing for our community, and it’s really been enlightening to be a part of the team and meeting with the Navy on this whole topic,” she said.

Demmert said the apology is a shift in relations with the U.S. government and she credits the Biden administration, in part, for that change. She also pointed to the work Angoon students did to build a dugout canoe and shine light on the history of the bombardment as a reason for renewed attention to the issue.

In Kake, Joel Jackson said he was also looking to the future and to right relations with the U.S. military.

“Giving an apology is by no means the end of it. Definitely we’ll be looking for them helping us even more,” he said. Jackson pointed to Kake’s high unemployment rate.

“Helping to set up infrastructure, you know, to get in some totem poles, stuff like that. Hopefully a museum to commemorate what happened.”

Two Republican candidates with legislative experience present contrasting visions for representing a South Anchorage district.

Rep. Craig Johnson, a businessman who was first elected to the House in 2006 and currently chairs the powerful House Rules Committee, is being challenged by Chuck Kopp, who served in the House from 2017 to 2020 after retiring from a law enforcement career.

The matchup in House District 10, which encompasses the leafy Oceanview and Klatt neighborhoods, the Dimond Center – Alaska’s largest shopping mall — and other spaces, would not have been possible without the ballot initiative that ushered in ranked choice voting in Alaska. That initiative, in addition to authorizing a ranking system, mandated open primaries. Even though Kopp and Johnson were the only candidates on the primary election ballot, both advanced to the general election.

That contrasts with Kopp’s experience in 2020, when he was defeated in the primary by current Rep. Tom McKay, R-Anchorage. In the general election that followed that primary, voters narrowly approved the ranked-choice initiative.

Four years later, Kopp stands by his decision to be part of what was then a caucus of Democrats, Republicans and independents.

“The best solutions are never the gift of one party. And I say that as a proud Republican,” he said.

“As a legislator elected by the citizens of District 10, I will always be on a team to best serve and represent the district,” he added. “I will not hesitate to put people first over the party.”

Whatever coalition he joins should be consistent with his “Republican values” of low taxes, infrastructure investment, resource development and responsible budgets. “And I want an organization that is not going to go into the ditch over a social agenda,” he said. “I don’t like it when I see the legislative process hijacked.”

To Johnson, Kopp’s party-line crossing approach is a negative.

“You look at who supports him and who supports me — you can see a stark difference. Who influences him, versus the kind of people that want to see me get reelected,” Johnson said. There is a “very clear difference,” he said. “It’s just very difficult to differentiate when you’re sitting with an R by your name.”

Those ties are evident in the primary election results, in which Kopp won 60.5% of the vote, Johnson said, noting the low turnout of 17.8%. “We’ve got a Republican who’s got mostly Democratic support in Chuck, and the Democrats turned out quite heavily and the Republicans didn’t,” he said.

Johnson pointed out that the current Republican-dominated House majority does include rural Democrats. But he does not favor more evenly balanced bipartisan coalitions, such as the nine-Democratic, eight-Republican majority caucus in the state Senate.

“I would not be interested in joining a caucus that put committee chairs in positions to pass or hold up things that I feel I am philosophically opposed to,” he said. “I will not compromise my ideals and morals for power.”

For Kopp, the overarching issue in the election – and for Alaska – is the state’s continued outmigration and shrinking working-age population. That loss is the result of the state’s failure to invest in itself, he said.

“You also have to look at the cost of doing nothing, and the cost of doing nothing has been catastrophic for our state,” he said.

There are, for example, about 70 Alaska state trooper positions currently unfilled, along with about 50 Anchorage police positions. Also affected are basic services like road maintenance, with departments short-staffed, and education, he said. “We have school districts that are starting late because they can’t fill the teacher positions,” said.

The event that crystallized this concern — and his decision to run against Johnson — was the House majority’s refusal to consider the Senate-approved measure, Senate Bill 88, that would have resurrected a defined-benefit pension system for public employees.

Legislation passed in 2005 established a new 401(k)-style defined contribution system for what were then new public employees, but in recent years there have been calls to return to the defined-benefit pension systems like those used in the past.

Kopp favored the Senate’s bill, which he said crafted a reasonable approach that would have been both less costly than past public employee defined-benefits plans and less costly than doing nothing.

“Absolutely, I’m in favor of that defined-benefit plan,” he said. The plan that the Senate bill crafted would have been less expensive than past public-employees’ defined-benefit plans, and a worthwhile investment in the workforce, he said.

Kopp is particularly attuned to the issue because of his law-enforcement experience, which included a stint as police chief in Kenai. As of now, Alaska police officers are working in a very difficult profession without the promise of “anything meaningful waiting for them” at retirement, he said. He also noted that state employees are generally not eligible for Social Security benefits.

Johnson, as Rules chair, blocked the Senate’s defined-benefit bill from reaching the House floor. He is proud of that action and highlights it on his campaign website as one of his key legislative accomplishments.

The Senate’s plan was too expensive, Johnson said.

“For the first 10 years, it’s not a bad system because not many people have retired,” he said, referring to actuarial information that was presented to lawmakers. “But once you get past 10 years and 15, 20, 25, it turns into billions of dollars and we’re going to end up like we were before we got rid of it, where we had a $9 billion in indebtedness and our credit rating was affected. Our ability to bond was affected. So, it could have a huge impact on future generations,” he said.

Johnson opposes any return to a defined-benefit program and does not believe retirement benefits attract workers. In the case of police officers, he pointed to departments in other states that do offer defined-benefit pensions but have trouble attracting applicants, nonetheless.

“Retirement is not how you attract people. You attract people with work environments and the opportunities to advance and job satisfaction. And it’s very difficult to be a policeman right now,” he said.

Rather than return to a defined-benefit system, the state can increase pay and possibly increase the amount it contributes to employee retirement accounts, he said. And Anchorage’s municipal government has the option of creating its own benefit system without placing the burden on the state, he said.

Both Kopp and Johnson favor an increase in the Base Student Allocation, the per-student level of state education funding granted to school districts.

Johnson said he was instrumental in crafting a bill, which ultimately was passed by the Legislature, that would have increased the BSA. After Gov. Mike Dunleavy vetoed the bill, to the dismay of many educators and students, Johnson was among the legislators who voted against a veto override. Johnson said continuing efforts to increase the BSA over the long term would have simply been vetoed again; instead, lawmakers were at least able to secure a one-time increase of $680 per student.

Kopp said he would have voted to override the veto, which was sustained by one vote.

People in the district are extremely concerned about education funding and worried about state support that has atrophied, he said. “They were alarmed when one of our local elementary schools was on the chopping block,” he said.

Klatt Elementary School, which is in his House district, was one of six schools that the Anchorage School District in 2022 considered for closure for budget problems.

The problems facing education in the district and in Alaska more generally are tied in part to the loss of qualified workers – teachers in this case, Kopp said. “My district really cares about the recruitment and retention of that workforce,” he said.

Both candidates cite public safety as a top concern for their district. That category includes homelessness in Anchorage, which both candidates characterized as a complex problem that defies easy solutions.

Both candidates also cite a need to make energy supplies in Anchorage and the Cook Inlet region more dependable, an issue of growing concern as the flow of natural gas used for electricity and heat has become less secure.

While Kopp supports retention of the ranked choice voting system, Johnson will be supporting the ballot measure to overturn it.

Johnson believes the ranked-choice system encourages some candidates to hold back on campaigning prior to the primary election to save their money for the general election. “You know, I did some of that and it didn’t pan out particularly well,” he said.

The North American Aerospace Defense Command, or NORAD, said it detected Russian military aircraft off the coast of Alaska on Sunday, marking the fourth time since 9/11 amid heightened tensions between the U.S. and Russia.

Two Russian IL-38 military planes operating in the Alaska Air Defense Identification Zone, or ADIZ, were detected and tracked on Sunday, NORAD said in a news release.

The aircraft remained in international airspace and did not enter U.S. or Canadian sovereign airspace, NORAD said, adding that this Russian activity in the Alaska ADIZ happens regularly and is not believed to be a threat.

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The aircraft in the other three incidents in the past week — on Wednesday, Friday and Saturday — also remained in international airspace in Alaska’s ADIZ and were not viewed as a threat, according to NORAD.

The U.S. and Canada, which together make up NORAD, first intercepted a couple of Russian military aircraft on Wednesday.

A pair of TU-142s were detected by NORAD on Friday. And on Saturday, two Russian IL-38 planes were intercepted, the same type of aircraft intercepted in Sunday’s incident.

The aircraft in all four incidents remained in international airspace and did not enter U.S. or Canadian sovereign airspace. (Getty Images)

An ADIZ begins where sovereign airspace ends and is a defined stretch of international airspace requiring the ready identification of all aircraft in the interest of national security, NORAD said.

NORAD said it employs a layered defense network of satellites, ground-based and airborne radars and fighter aircraft to detect and track aircraft and inform appropriate actions. The company said it is prepared to employ a number of response options to defend North America.

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The aircraft in all four incidents were not seen as a threat, NORAD said. (Getty Images)

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Earlier this summer, NORAD intercepted two Russian and two Chinese bombers flying near Alaska for the first time that the two countries have been intercepted while operating together, U.S. officials said at the time.