Alaska
Mary Peltola Has Carved Out Her Own Space in Washington
I
n late July, Mary Peltola scrambled to change her travel plans. The first-term Democratic representative from Alaska had just returned to DC after a trip home to help her family put up salmon for the winter: smoking, salting, drying, canning, and freezing fish for the long, cold months ahead.
She’d missed several votes, drawing criticism from conservative groups, and now—after just five days back in the capital—she was packing again.
Leaders in the House of Representatives had canceled the following week’s agenda, starting summer recess early. For Peltola, that meant another exhausting journey, about 4,000 miles from start to finish. There would be a flight to Seattle, another to Anchorage, then one more, on a cramped, narrow-body jet to Bethel, a town of 6,276 on the banks of the Kuskokwim River in western Alaska.
Peltola’s trip is more than 1,500 miles longer than the distance the representative from the next-farthest-flung district travels. She jets through five time zones, often facing delays, which means that by the time she reaches her bed, it can be the middle of the night on the Yukon Delta. Back in Washington, the sun has already risen.
During her stop in Anchorage in July, Peltola made a Costco run, stocking up on essentials, which tend to be cheaper and more abundant in the state’s most populous city. She picked up Thai food, which is impossible to find in Bethel, and then tucked her bounty into four large suitcases, building an extra link in the state’s tenuous supply chain.
Peltola had arrived in Washington in September 2022 after winning an unusual ranked-choice election, defeating opponents with longer political résumés—including former governor and vice-presidential candidate Sarah Palin. Holding her state’s lone House seat, Peltola represents an electorate whose party lines are more like elaborate squiggles, and from the outset she understood one of her job’s most defining challenges: In a fractured and often hamstrung Congress, she must straddle the partisan divide. Fighting for Alaska’s interests means battling climate change while sometimes supporting drilling for oil and natural gas. It means standing up for abortion rights as well as the Second Amendment. Acclimating to Washington is a tough task for any newcomer. For Peltola, it was uniquely difficult.
But that day at the Anchorage airport, as DC buzzed in the aftermath of President Joe Biden’s suspension of his reelection campaign, she was as off-duty as a congresswoman can be. Wheeling luggage toward a check-in counter, toting noodles, she was nearly a year removed from the most difficult moment of her time in office, a tragedy that had upended her life. Her husband’s sudden death was the one challenge she could never have predicted, and back in Alaska for recess this summer, she would continue to set her family’s new course. She would unpack the goodies in her suitcases, check in on her house, be a mom to her two youngest children, Nora and Job Nelson—a brief window of normalcy before jetting off to shake hands and make promises and campaign, once again, to retain her seat.
I
n March 2022, Don Young, who had held Alaska’s House seat since 1973, died suddenly aboard a flight from Los Angeles to Seattle. In the ensuing days, Alaskans mourned the 88-year-old Republican who had been called the state’s third senator—and then rushed to enter the race to replace him. As the filing deadline approached, the list of candidates swelled past 40 and included a monk who’d legally changed his name to Santa Claus.
At the time, Peltola was 13 years removed from having served in the Alaska state legislature. A mother of four, stepmother of three, and grandmother of two, she worked as executive director of the Kuskokwim River Inter-Tribal Fish Commission, which represents subsistence-fishing interests. The number of salmon on the Kuskokwim had been at or near record-low numbers for years, leaving Alaska Native fishermen with empty freezers. “The river is [Alaska’s] refrigerator,” Beth Kerttula, former minority leader of the Alaska House of Representatives, says. “I mean, we don’t go to a store, we go fish.”
To Peltola, the special election was an opportunity: She could run and use her campaign to raise awareness of fish issues. She floated the idea to confidants, including Ana Hoffman, one of her closest friends. But as the deadline to file approached, Hoffman—who, like Peltola, is an Alaska Native—felt Peltola’s interest had waned. “Who wants to go to Washington, DC?” Hoffman says. “I thought the feeling would pass.”
The day of the deadline, Peltola texted Hoffman: She had filed to run. But even as Peltola submitted her paperwork, she was pessimistic about her chances. “There was a very deep understanding that my path to victory was zero,” Peltola says. “A lot of us, from the big rivers and from parts of Alaska that depended on wild food, we really felt like we’d been beating the bushes and trying to get help and nobody would notice.”
“I think what I liked about Mary almost immediately is that she felt like a regular person. I think a third of Alaska has Mary’s cellphone number.”
Peltola’s campaign was built on a slogan of “fish, family and freedom,” and her positions cut across partisan lines. Nearly 60 percent of Alaskans are unaffiliated—just 12 percent are registered Democrats—and Peltola knew she’d have to win support from a staggering number of voters who at best don’t affiliate with her party and at worst actively disagree with it. To do so, she says, she stuck to specific issues instead of spouting partisan rhetoric. In TV ads, she wore a gray hooded sweatshirt and gutted a salmon.
“People use the word ‘authentic,’ ” says Anton McParland, who managed Peltola’s campaign and is now her chief of staff. “I think what I liked about Mary almost immediately is that she felt like a regular person. Sometimes it drives me crazy how well she remembers people’s names. And if you’re an Alaskan, often it’s your parents’ and your grandparents’ names.”
“I think a third of Alaska has Mary’s cellphone number,” he adds, laughing.
Peltola also benefited from Alaska’s open primary and ranked-choice voting system. Implemented for the first time in the race to replace Young, it frees the state’s many independent voters from having to pick a party primary to participate in, and they can split their tickets as they see fit. Under its rules, voters cast ballots for one candidate in an open primary, and the top four finishers advance to a general election. In the general election, voters rank the candidates from their first choice to fourth, and if no one receives more than 50 percent of the first-place votes, the fourth-place candidate is dropped. That candidate’s first-place votes are reallocated to the second-choice candidates on their ballots, and if a winner fails to emerge, the same process repeats with the third-place candidate.
Among the 48 competitors in the special-election primary, Peltola finished fourth behind Independent Al Gross, Republican Nick Begich, and Palin. Gross subsequently dropped out and endorsed Peltola. Both Republicans remained in the race. “What the system did was put a Democrat on the ballot . . . who would never have won a closed Democratic primary,” says Scott Kendall, an attorney who authored the ballot measure that led to Alaska’s open primary and ranked-choice voting. Coming from a rural district, Peltola didn’t always hew to liberal orthodoxy in her positions. “She squeaked into the top four,” Kendall says. “And then people got to see her on the main stage. And obviously, she was very appealing.”
“Who wants to go to Washington, DC?” Says Peltola’s Close Friend. “I thought the feeling would pass.”
On the day the general-election results were due to be released—15 days after ballots were cast—all three remaining candidates were scheduled to speak at an oil-and-gas conference in Anchorage. A few minutes before the announcement, they left the stage. Begich took the stairs to a room his campaign had set up. Palin and Peltola shared the freight elevator, snapping a selfie together before the doors opened. (The two women did not attack each other while campaigning and had been friendly when they served together in state government—so much so, Peltola has said, that Palin’s family gave her family its backyard trampoline when Palin resigned from the governor’s office.)
Secluded with her staff in a room that Peltola says gave “the very strong sense that we did not expect to be winning,” she squinted at the screen projecting the grainy results, wondering if her glasses were dirty. But it was just a bad internet connection, and soon the pixels sharpened. Begich, who had the fewest first-place votes, was eliminated first. More important: Nearly 30 percent of voters who had ranked him number one cast their second-place votes for Peltola, not Palin.
That was enough to make Peltola, a member of the Yup’ik people, the first Alaska Native to serve in Congress. She’s also the first woman to occupy the state’s House seat and the first Democrat to do so since 1972. “Democrats in Alaska don’t win,” Peltola says of a state Donald Trump won handily in 2016 and 2020. “We don’t have many candidates from the bush, because it’s so cumbersome trying to do anything from the bush. Not a lot of Natives have run for a congressional seat. I don’t think there are a lot of Alaska Natives who want to live in Washington, DC. There was no kind of example of this ever happening.”
T
he night of the special-election victory, Peltola told her husband, Gene “Buzzy” Peltola, that she felt she owed him and her kids an apology. She’d barely considered this outcome, which would force her to relocate, split her attention, and alter their family dynamic.
Before heading to Washington, Peltola flew back to Bethel, where she comforted the families of four missing moose hunters. Then she was off to her inauguration, setting up shop afterward in Young’s empty office. There was no point in redecorating—the general election was in less than two months and Peltola knew she could be back in Bethel by midwinter. “When I would do Zooms with people, it kind of looked like I was calling from jail,” Peltola recalls, so she had an art teacher in Kodiak send something colorful: a stack of pictures of dandelions, drawn by fifth-graders.
Lodging also involved a creative—and supremely Alaskan—solution. Short-term rentals were too expensive, but an old friend offered a guest room. It was Lisa Murkowski, Alaska’s senior Republican senator, who had stood with Peltola during her swearing-in. Fellow Democrats were incredulous, but Peltola stayed with Murkowski until December—through campaigning and again defeating Palin and Begich.
Murkowski, Peltola, and Kerttula, the former Alaska House minority leader, all had begun their terms in the state legislature on the same day in January 1999. Peltola was 25, nearly two decades younger than the other two freshmen, but they bonded and set a precedent for what they believed politics should look like. Kerttula and Peltola flipped a coin when they both wanted a spot on a coveted committee. And Kerttula, who lived in Juneau, let Peltola stay in her unfinished basement when the House was in session. Peltola’s eldest child, Conrad Kapsner, played on a baby mat with Kerttula’s new puppy.
Murkowski went to Washington in 2002. Kerttula followed 12 years later, when she was named director of the National Oceans Council during the Obama administration. Only Peltola remained in Alaska, and Kerttula said she called her friend often as she struggled to acclimate to Washington. “It’s rough on all Alaskans in DC,” Kerttula says. “You’re kind of shocked. Not to mention that it’s hot and it’s crowded and it’s, you know, icky.”
“In Alaska, you go back 50 years and we’re a true wilderness,” she adds. “We’ve all learned: If it’s freezing out and the car stops, you’ve got to stop and help people, because they will die. So it’s just a completely different mindset.”
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y the time Peltola signed a lease on a place of her own on Capitol Hill, she’d found some community in DC—largely through the Alaska State Society, a nonprofit that hosts happy hours, cornhole tournaments, and holiday parties and whose members are mostly Alaskan transplants. Each night before bed, she’d call home to speak with her husband, a naturalist who’d worked in the Bureau of Indian Affairs and as manager of the Yukon Delta National Wildlife Refuge. A career public servant, Buzzy would offer advice, analysis, and perspective.
That routine shattered on September 13, 2023, the one-year anniversary of Peltola’s swearing-in. Early that morning in DC, she learned the plane Buzzy was flying had crashed in remote western Alaska. He died before rescuers arrived, and Peltola rushed home.
The following days were a blur. McParland remembers phone calls directing people to the one florist that could get blooms to rural Alaska. There were flowers—vases and vases of them, hauled to Buzzy’s house in Anchorage after the funeral. “[Everyone] just circled the wagons,” McParland says.
Before Mary and Buzzy were married, they served together on the city council in Bethel, where Buzzy was born and spent much of his life. The couple shared a passion for Alaska, and Buzzy was one of his wife’s most trusted advisers. “He was always very calm,” McParland recalls. “He was mathematically inclined. And he always had a perspective of being able to kind of uncharge a situation and look at it analytically.”
In the hours after Buzzy’s death, as Peltola made funeral arrangements and looked after her kids, staffers couldn’t help but wonder if the tragedy might change the course of her political career. They understood, McParland says, that “she might well choose not to run” in 2024.
But a phone call upended that perception. When President Biden called to offer sympathy, he asked a question some might have interpreted as rhetorical: What can I do to help? “Buzzy dedicated his life to the state,” McParland says. “And [she told Biden], ‘I need help with these issues that we both cared about.’ And I think, for her, it was like the first realization that she would keep doing it.”
Peltola remained in Alaska until October, then flew back to Washington as Republicans struggled to select a new speaker. She stayed for only a few days before taking off again to address the Alaska Federation of Natives convention in Anchorage. It was her first major public appearance since Buzzy’s death, and organizers played a slideshow of the Peltolas, set to the tune of “Amazing Grace,” which had played at Buzzy’s funeral. Afterward, many Alaskans joined to sing an Iñupiaq hymn. In her remarks, Peltola encouraged her constituents to keep up “respectful demands for change” as they faced a food-security crisis due to the lack of fish in their rivers, and she shared her take on the House leadership crisis: “With a collaborative approach, we can help people find common ground and get off high-center.”
The crowd applauded. Everyone knew what she meant. In Washington, Peltola sometimes described situations as being “on high-center,” a uniquely Alaskan term for a situation when a snowmobile gets stuck, immobile, with all of its wheels off the ground. It was a perfect metaphor for congressional gridlock. No one on Capitol Hill ever seemed to grasp it.
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ome House members seek the spotlight, courting controversy in the twin Thunderdomes of cable news and social media. Peltola is different. Wearing glasses and cardigans, she comes across as calm, clear, and thorough, like a favorite high-school teacher. She’s focused on nitty-gritty governance: aviation safety, critical infrastructure, domestic seafood production. Peltola counts among her proudest legislative accomplishments securing a $206.5 million grant to strengthen Alaska’s energy grid and an executive order that bans imports of Russian seafood. In June, she introduced a bill that would over-haul federal management of fisheries, helping ease the crisis in Alaska by addressing overfishing and making fisheries more sustainable.
So far, Peltola has kept her campaign promise not to adhere blindly to her party’s positions. Since the start of 2023, ProPublica reports, she has voted in opposition to fellow Democrats nearly 15 percent of the time. She condemned the Biden administration for not doing more to stop the flow of illegal drugs from Mexico, for example, and she was one of only two Democrats voting to repeal a set of regulations for pistol braces. She also was instrumental in pushing Biden to approve the Willow Project, a plan to drill oil on Alaska’s North Slope that is widely supported in the state and expected to generate billions of dollars.
In November 2023, Peltola was the sole Democratic cosponsor of the Alaska’s Right to Produce Act, which would remove some restrictions on drilling in the Arctic. During debate on the House floor earlier this year, however, she critiqued a minor clause in the bill that ended a designation giving Native tribes sway over policy decisions that affect the ecosystem in the northern Bering Sea. Peltola had worked to strike that language from the legislation, but she couldn’t get support from Republicans who weren’t inclined to reach across the aisle in an election year.
Ultimately, the law passed with support from just five Democrats. Peltola, who voted “present,” was not among them. To non-Alaskans, the clause might have seemed insignificant—but for her, it was kryptonite, pitting two key constituencies, fishing and energy interests, against each other. Her inability to get it removed was a lesson in frustration, a reminder that in polarized Washington, lawmakers don’t stop to help each other when it’s freezing and the car won’t start.
“You want to eliminate red tape or make things, government, work better for people, and there’s just this inordinate amount of headwind, unnecessary headwind, unnecessary roadblocks,” Peltola says. “And that’s the name of the game. If you want to get something done in a system that thrives on dysfunction and gridlock, it’s just hard.”
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laskan winters are hard, too. In December in Bethel, the sun rises around 11 am and sets before 5 pm. The too-short days drag on, and people avoid the weather by staying inside, keeping to themselves. Newly widowed and still grieving, Peltola took fewer trips home last winter, spending more of her time in Washington. “Without my husband, and it’s so dark and cold, it just seemed like adding fuel to a fire,” she says.
When she wasn’t working, Peltola spent time with her Alaska Society friends and her youngest daughter, Nora, who in the fall of 2023 moved to DC and enrolled in high school. “She’s my girl, and we need each other,” Peltola says. “We’ve had a lot of family changes. And, you know, being the youngest of seven, and everybody is now out of the house, it’s tough being the caboose.”
Despite the difficulties of her first term, Peltola is eyeing reelection. In late August, she won 50.9 percent of the vote in the state’s primary. Begich, who polled well all summer, won 26.6 percent. Another Republican, Alaska lieutenant governor Nancy Dahlstrom, placed third, with 19.9 percent, and subsequently dropped out of the race to help consolidate GOP support behind Begich in November.
In mid-September, the Cook Political Report labeled the race a “toss-up” in a state Trump is expected to win with ease. But Peltola “has the highest net positives of any public official in the state, even though she’s a Democrat and even though it’s a presidential [election] year,” says Kendall, the lawyer behind ranked-choice voting in Alaska. “She’s delivered some atypical things for a Democrat. . . . She’s a sportswoman. She owns many guns. She fishes. So it’s really kind of a total package.”
Back home during Congress’s summer break, Peltola was scheduled to campaign, with visits to towns up and down the Alaska coast. But before all that, there were pressing tasks in Bethel. Taking advantage of the nearly 18 hours of daylight shining on western Alaska, she taught Nora to drive and accompanied her to the doctor to get the vaccines she’d need before starting her junior year of high school. She helped her father-in-law with a boat in the shop. She towed her kids’ skiff out of the harbor. She cleaned a broken freezer full of “fermented food,” she says, and another that contained “a glacier.”
“It’s hard labor,” Peltola jokes. “It makes Congress seem fun.”
I
n late July, Mary Peltola scrambled to change her travel plans. The first-term Democratic representative from Alaska had just returned to DC after a trip home to help her family put up salmon for the winter: smoking, salting, drying, canning, and freezing fish for the long, cold months ahead.
She’d missed several votes, drawing criticism from conservative groups, and now—after just five days back in the capital—she was packing again.
Leaders in the House of Representatives had canceled the following week’s agenda, starting summer recess early. For Peltola, that meant another exhausting journey, about 4,000 miles from start to finish. There would be a flight to Seattle, another to Anchorage, then one more, on a cramped, narrow-body jet to Bethel, a town of 6,276 on the banks of the Kuskokwim River in western Alaska.
Peltola’s trip is more than 1,500 miles longer than the distance the representative from the next-farthest-flung district travels. She jets through five time zones, often facing delays, which means that by the time she reaches her bed, it can be the middle of the night on the Yukon Delta. Back in Washington, the sun has already risen.
During her stop in Anchorage in July, Peltola made a Costco run, stocking up on essentials, which tend to be cheaper and more abundant in the state’s most populous city. She picked up Thai food, which is impossible to find in Bethel, and then tucked her bounty into four large suitcases, building an extra link in the state’s tenuous supply chain.
Peltola had arrived in Washington in September 2022 after winning an unusual ranked-choice election, defeating opponents with longer political résumés—including former governor and vice-presidential candidate Sarah Palin. Holding her state’s lone House seat, Peltola represents an electorate whose party lines are more like elaborate squiggles, and from the outset she understood one of her job’s most defining challenges: In a fractured and often hamstrung Congress, she must straddle the partisan divide. Fighting for Alaska’s interests means battling climate change while sometimes supporting drilling for oil and natural gas. It means standing up for abortion rights as well as the Second Amendment. Acclimating to Washington is a tough task for any newcomer. For Peltola, it was uniquely difficult.
But that day at the Anchorage airport, as DC buzzed in the aftermath of President Joe Biden’s suspension of his reelection campaign, she was as off-duty as a congresswoman can be. Wheeling luggage toward a check-in counter, toting noodles, she was nearly a year removed from the most difficult moment of her time in office, a tragedy that had upended her life. Her husband’s sudden death was the one challenge she could never have predicted, and back in Alaska for recess this summer, she would continue to set her family’s new course. She would unpack the goodies in her suitcases, check in on her house, be a mom to her two youngest children, Nora and Job Nelson—a brief window of normalcy before jetting off to shake hands and make promises and campaign, once again, to retain her seat.
I
n March 2022, Don Young, who had held Alaska’s House seat since 1973, died suddenly aboard a flight from Los Angeles to Seattle. In the ensuing days, Alaskans mourned the 88-year-old Republican who had been called the state’s third senator—and then rushed to enter the race to replace him. As the filing deadline approached, the list of candidates swelled past 40 and included a monk who’d legally changed his name to Santa Claus.
At the time, Peltola was 13 years removed from having served in the Alaska state legislature. A mother of four, stepmother of three, and grandmother of two, she worked as executive director of the Kuskokwim River Inter-Tribal Fish Commission, which represents subsistence-fishing interests. The number of salmon on the Kuskokwim had been at or near record-low numbers for years, leaving Alaska Native fishermen with empty freezers. “The river is [Alaska’s] refrigerator,” Beth Kerttula, former minority leader of the Alaska House of Representatives, says. “I mean, we don’t go to a store, we go fish.”
To Peltola, the special election was an opportunity: She could run and use her campaign to raise awareness of fish issues. She floated the idea to confidants, including Ana Hoffman, one of her closest friends. But as the deadline to file approached, Hoffman—who, like Peltola, is an Alaska Native—felt Peltola’s interest had waned. “Who wants to go to Washington, DC?” Hoffman says. “I thought the feeling would pass.”
The day of the deadline, Peltola texted Hoffman: She had filed to run. But even as Peltola submitted her paperwork, she was pessimistic about her chances. “There was a very deep understanding that my path to victory was zero,” Peltola says. “A lot of us, from the big rivers and from parts of Alaska that depended on wild food, we really felt like we’d been beating the bushes and trying to get help and nobody would notice.”
“I think what I liked about Mary almost immediately is that she felt like a regular person. I think a third of Alaska has Mary’s cellphone number.”
Peltola’s campaign was built on a slogan of “fish, family and freedom,” and her positions cut across partisan lines. Nearly 60 percent of Alaskans are unaffiliated—just 12 percent are registered Democrats—and Peltola knew she’d have to win support from a staggering number of voters who at best don’t affiliate with her party and at worst actively disagree with it. To do so, she says, she stuck to specific issues instead of spouting partisan rhetoric. In TV ads, she wore a gray hooded sweatshirt and gutted a salmon.
“People use the word ‘authentic,’ ” says Anton McParland, who managed Peltola’s campaign and is now her chief of staff. “I think what I liked about Mary almost immediately is that she felt like a regular person. Sometimes it drives me crazy how well she remembers people’s names. And if you’re an Alaskan, often it’s your parents’ and your grandparents’ names.”
“I think a third of Alaska has Mary’s cellphone number,” he adds, laughing.
Peltola also benefited from Alaska’s open primary and ranked-choice voting system. Implemented for the first time in the race to replace Young, it frees the state’s many independent voters from having to pick a party primary to participate in, and they can split their tickets as they see fit. Under its rules, voters cast ballots for one candidate in an open primary, and the top four finishers advance to a general election. In the general election, voters rank the candidates from their first choice to fourth, and if no one receives more than 50 percent of the first-place votes, the fourth-place candidate is dropped. That candidate’s first-place votes are reallocated to the second-choice candidates on their ballots, and if a winner fails to emerge, the same process repeats with the third-place candidate.
Among the 48 competitors in the special-election primary, Peltola finished fourth behind Independent Al Gross, Republican Nick Begich, and Palin. Gross subsequently dropped out and endorsed Peltola. Both Republicans remained in the race. “What the system did was put a Democrat on the ballot . . . who would never have won a closed Democratic primary,” says Scott Kendall, an attorney who authored the ballot measure that led to Alaska’s open primary and ranked-choice voting. Coming from a rural district, Peltola didn’t always hew to liberal orthodoxy in her positions. “She squeaked into the top four,” Kendall says. “And then people got to see her on the main stage. And obviously, she was very appealing.”
“Who wants to go to Washington, DC?” Says Peltola’s Close Friend. “I thought the feeling would pass.”
On the day the general-election results were due to be released—15 days after ballots were cast—all three remaining candidates were scheduled to speak at an oil-and-gas conference in Anchorage. A few minutes before the announcement, they left the stage. Begich took the stairs to a room his campaign had set up. Palin and Peltola shared the freight elevator, snapping a selfie together before the doors opened. (The two women did not attack each other while campaigning and had been friendly when they served together in state government—so much so, Peltola has said, that Palin’s family gave her family its backyard trampoline when Palin resigned from the governor’s office.)
Secluded with her staff in a room that Peltola says gave “the very strong sense that we did not expect to be winning,” she squinted at the screen projecting the grainy results, wondering if her glasses were dirty. But it was just a bad internet connection, and soon the pixels sharpened. Begich, who had the fewest first-place votes, was eliminated first. More important: Nearly 30 percent of voters who had ranked him number one cast their second-place votes for Peltola, not Palin.
That was enough to make Peltola, a member of the Yup’ik people, the first Alaska Native to serve in Congress. She’s also the first woman to occupy the state’s House seat and the first Democrat to do so since 1972. “Democrats in Alaska don’t win,” Peltola says of a state Donald Trump won handily in 2016 and 2020. “We don’t have many candidates from the bush, because it’s so cumbersome trying to do anything from the bush. Not a lot of Natives have run for a congressional seat. I don’t think there are a lot of Alaska Natives who want to live in Washington, DC. There was no kind of example of this ever happening.”
T
he night of the special-election victory, Peltola told her husband, Gene “Buzzy” Peltola, that she felt she owed him and her kids an apology. She’d barely considered this outcome, which would force her to relocate, split her attention, and alter their family dynamic.
Before heading to Washington, Peltola flew back to Bethel, where she comforted the families of four missing moose hunters. Then she was off to her inauguration, setting up shop afterward in Young’s empty office. There was no point in redecorating—the general election was in less than two months and Peltola knew she could be back in Bethel by midwinter. “When I would do Zooms with people, it kind of looked like I was calling from jail,” Peltola recalls, so she had an art teacher in Kodiak send something colorful: a stack of pictures of dandelions, drawn by fifth-graders.
Lodging also involved a creative—and supremely Alaskan—solution. Short-term rentals were too expensive, but an old friend offered a guest room. It was Lisa Murkowski, Alaska’s senior Republican senator, who had stood with Peltola during her swearing-in. Fellow Democrats were incredulous, but Peltola stayed with Murkowski until December—through campaigning and again defeating Palin and Begich.
Murkowski, Peltola, and Kerttula, the former Alaska House minority leader, all had begun their terms in the state legislature on the same day in January 1999. Peltola was 25, nearly two decades younger than the other two freshmen, but they bonded and set a precedent for what they believed politics should look like. Kerttula and Peltola flipped a coin when they both wanted a spot on a coveted committee. And Kerttula, who lived in Juneau, let Peltola stay in her unfinished basement when the House was in session. Peltola’s eldest child, Conrad Kapsner, played on a baby mat with Kerttula’s new puppy.
Murkowski went to Washington in 2002. Kerttula followed 12 years later, when she was named director of the National Oceans Council during the Obama administration. Only Peltola remained in Alaska, and Kerttula said she called her friend often as she struggled to acclimate to Washington. “It’s rough on all Alaskans in DC,” Kerttula says. “You’re kind of shocked. Not to mention that it’s hot and it’s crowded and it’s, you know, icky.”
“In Alaska, you go back 50 years and we’re a true wilderness,” she adds. “We’ve all learned: If it’s freezing out and the car stops, you’ve got to stop and help people, because they will die. So it’s just a completely different mindset.”
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y the time Peltola signed a lease on a place of her own on Capitol Hill, she’d found some community in DC—largely through the Alaska State Society, a nonprofit that hosts happy hours, cornhole tournaments, and holiday parties and whose members are mostly Alaskan transplants. Each night before bed, she’d call home to speak with her husband, a naturalist who’d worked in the Bureau of Indian Affairs and as manager of the Yukon Delta National Wildlife Refuge. A career public servant, Buzzy would offer advice, analysis, and perspective.
That routine shattered on September 13, 2023, the one-year anniversary of Peltola’s swearing-in. Early that morning in DC, she learned the plane Buzzy was flying had crashed in remote western Alaska. He died before rescuers arrived, and Peltola rushed home.
The following days were a blur. McParland remembers phone calls directing people to the one florist that could get blooms to rural Alaska. There were flowers—vases and vases of them, hauled to Buzzy’s house in Anchorage after the funeral. “[Everyone] just circled the wagons,” McParland says.
Before Mary and Buzzy were married, they served together on the city council in Bethel, where Buzzy was born and spent much of his life. The couple shared a passion for Alaska, and Buzzy was one of his wife’s most trusted advisers. “He was always very calm,” McParland recalls. “He was mathematically inclined. And he always had a perspective of being able to kind of uncharge a situation and look at it analytically.”
In the hours after Buzzy’s death, as Peltola made funeral arrangements and looked after her kids, staffers couldn’t help but wonder if the tragedy might change the course of her political career. They understood, McParland says, that “she might well choose not to run” in 2024.
But a phone call upended that perception. When President Biden called to offer sympathy, he asked a question some might have interpreted as rhetorical: What can I do to help? “Buzzy dedicated his life to the state,” McParland says. “And [she told Biden], ‘I need help with these issues that we both cared about.’ And I think, for her, it was like the first realization that she would keep doing it.”
Peltola remained in Alaska until October, then flew back to Washington as Republicans struggled to select a new speaker. She stayed for only a few days before taking off again to address the Alaska Federation of Natives convention in Anchorage. It was her first major public appearance since Buzzy’s death, and organizers played a slideshow of the Peltolas, set to the tune of “Amazing Grace,” which had played at Buzzy’s funeral. Afterward, many Alaskans joined to sing an Iñupiaq hymn. In her remarks, Peltola encouraged her constituents to keep up “respectful demands for change” as they faced a food-security crisis due to the lack of fish in their rivers, and she shared her take on the House leadership crisis: “With a collaborative approach, we can help people find common ground and get off high-center.”
The crowd applauded. Everyone knew what she meant. In Washington, Peltola sometimes described situations as being “on high-center,” a uniquely Alaskan term for a situation when a snowmobile gets stuck, immobile, with all of its wheels off the ground. It was a perfect metaphor for congressional gridlock. No one on Capitol Hill ever seemed to grasp it.
S
ome House members seek the spotlight, courting controversy in the twin Thunderdomes of cable news and social media. Peltola is different. Wearing glasses and cardigans, she comes across as calm, clear, and thorough, like a favorite high-school teacher. She’s focused on nitty-gritty governance: aviation safety, critical infrastructure, domestic seafood production. Peltola counts among her proudest legislative accomplishments securing a $206.5 million grant to strengthen Alaska’s energy grid and an executive order that bans imports of Russian seafood. In June, she introduced a bill that would over-haul federal management of fisheries, helping ease the crisis in Alaska by addressing overfishing and making fisheries more sustainable.
So far, Peltola has kept her campaign promise not to adhere blindly to her party’s positions. Since the start of 2023, ProPublica reports, she has voted in opposition to fellow Democrats nearly 15 percent of the time. She condemned the Biden administration for not doing more to stop the flow of illegal drugs from Mexico, for example, and she was one of only two Democrats voting to repeal a set of regulations for pistol braces. She also was instrumental in pushing Biden to approve the Willow Project, a plan to drill oil on Alaska’s North Slope that is widely supported in the state and expected to generate billions of dollars.
In November 2023, Peltola was the sole Democratic cosponsor of the Alaska’s Right to Produce Act, which would remove some restrictions on drilling in the Arctic. During debate on the House floor earlier this year, however, she critiqued a minor clause in the bill that ended a designation giving Native tribes sway over policy decisions that affect the ecosystem in the northern Bering Sea. Peltola had worked to strike that language from the legislation, but she couldn’t get support from Republicans who weren’t inclined to reach across the aisle in an election year.
Ultimately, the law passed with support from just five Democrats. Peltola, who voted “present,” was not among them. To non-Alaskans, the clause might have seemed insignificant—but for her, it was kryptonite, pitting two key constituencies, fishing and energy interests, against each other. Her inability to get it removed was a lesson in frustration, a reminder that in polarized Washington, lawmakers don’t stop to help each other when it’s freezing and the car won’t start.
“You want to eliminate red tape or make things, government, work better for people, and there’s just this inordinate amount of headwind, unnecessary headwind, unnecessary roadblocks,” Peltola says. “And that’s the name of the game. If you want to get something done in a system that thrives on dysfunction and gridlock, it’s just hard.”
A
laskan winters are hard, too. In December in Bethel, the sun rises around 11 am and sets before 5 pm. The too-short days drag on, and people avoid the weather by staying inside, keeping to themselves. Newly widowed and still grieving, Peltola took fewer trips home last winter, spending more of her time in Washington. “Without my husband, and it’s so dark and cold, it just seemed like adding fuel to a fire,” she says.
When she wasn’t working, Peltola spent time with her Alaska Society friends and her youngest daughter, Nora, who in the fall of 2023 moved to DC and enrolled in high school. “She’s my girl, and we need each other,” Peltola says. “We’ve had a lot of family changes. And, you know, being the youngest of seven, and everybody is now out of the house, it’s tough being the caboose.”
Despite the difficulties of her first term, Peltola is eyeing reelection. In late August, she won 50.9 percent of the vote in the state’s primary. Begich, who polled well all summer, won 26.6 percent. Another Republican, Alaska lieutenant governor Nancy Dahlstrom, placed third, with 19.9 percent, and subsequently dropped out of the race to help consolidate GOP support behind Begich in November.
In mid-September, the Cook Political Report labeled the race a “toss-up” in a state Trump is expected to win with ease. But Peltola “has the highest net positives of any public official in the state, even though she’s a Democrat and even though it’s a presidential [election] year,” says Kendall, the lawyer behind ranked-choice voting in Alaska. “She’s delivered some atypical things for a Democrat. . . . She’s a sportswoman. She owns many guns. She fishes. So it’s really kind of a total package.”
Back home during Congress’s summer break, Peltola was scheduled to campaign, with visits to towns up and down the Alaska coast. But before all that, there were pressing tasks in Bethel. Taking advantage of the nearly 18 hours of daylight shining on western Alaska, she taught Nora to drive and accompanied her to the doctor to get the vaccines she’d need before starting her junior year of high school. She helped her father-in-law with a boat in the shop. She towed her kids’ skiff out of the harbor. She cleaned a broken freezer full of “fermented food,” she says, and another that contained “a glacier.”
“It’s hard labor,” Peltola jokes. “It makes Congress seem fun.”
This article appears in the November 2024 issue of Washingtonian.
Alaska
Tomorrow Alaska Burns $190 Million Of Taxpayer Money To Drag Oil Companies Into The Arctic Refuge
There’s a place in the far northeast corner of Alaska that almost no American has ever seen and almost every American would tell you to protect. In June the sun never sets. The light is low and golden for twenty hours and soft and golden for the other four. The tundra goes electric green with cottongrass and dwarf willow and Arctic poppy. The Porcupine River runs cold and clear off the Brooks Range. And 143,000 caribou fan out across the coastal plain to give birth to their calves. They’ve been doing this for thousands of years. The herd walks 1,500 miles from interior Alaska and the Canadian Yukon to the same patch of tundra, every spring, to deliver the next generation onto the same ground their grandmothers were born on.
Right now, this week, the herd is on the plain. The calves are being born. Polar bear mothers, the sea ice failing them, have moved their dens onshore. Snow geese feed in the wetlands. Musk oxen, brought back from extinction in the 1930s, move in slow shaggy ranks across the high ground. More than two hundred bird species nest here every summer. Some flew in from Argentina. Some flew in from New Zealand. Some flew in from the edge of Antarctica. The Gwich’in people, who’ve shared this country with the Porcupine herd for thousands of years, call this place Iizhik Gwats’an Gwandaii Goodlit. The Sacred Place Where Life Begins.
Tomorrow morning at 10 a.m. Alaska time, in an office building in downtown Anchorage, the Bureau of Land Management will open sealed bids on the right to drill it. The only confirmed bidder is the State of Alaska itself, putting up $190 million in taxpayer money to drag oil companies into a refuge they’ve already refused to drill twice.
The only entity that has confirmed it will bid tomorrow is the Alaska Industrial Development and Export Authority. AIDEA is a state-owned Alaska corporation. Its money is Alaska taxpayer money. Three weeks ago, AIDEA’s board voted 6-1 to authorize $190 million for tomorrow’s bidding and the seismic exploration that would follow if it wins anything. That’s on top of the roughly $12 million in Alaska public money AIDEA already spent in 2021 buying refuge leases that have, five years later, produced zero barrels of oil, zero dollars in revenue, and a pile of pending litigation. AIDEA’s existing leases were canceled by the Biden administration, reinstated by a federal judge, and tied up in court ever since.
Let me explain what’s happening here, because the official press releases will not.
AIDEA wants the drilling. The Alaska political establishment has wanted the drilling for fifty years. Two prior federal lease sales on this same land asked whether private industry actually wanted to drill it, and private industry said no. The 2021 sale drew almost no major oil company bids. The 2025 sale drew zero bids of any kind. None. Exxon sat out. So did Chevron. So did Shell and ConocoPhillips. Every one of the six largest American banks refuses to finance Arctic Refuge drilling. Every major oil company has, on the record, in repeated lease sales, walked away.
So the Alaska political class is using state public money to bring the drillers in. AIDEA director Randy Ruaro told the Anchorage Daily News in May, “We’re absolutely interested.” His board voted to spend $190 million the next week. The lone no vote came from Andrew Guy, president of the Indigenous-owned Calista Corp., who said the agency hadn’t explained what the $190 million was actually for. The board went ahead anyway.
AIDEA’s bid serves a single purpose. The state’s development bank locks up acreage tomorrow so that an oil major can take a sublease later, when political weather changes or new federal infrastructure makes the project feasible. Call it what it is. A $190 million Alaska taxpayer downpayment on the destruction of the most pristine wildlife refuge in the country. Alaska is paying nearly a quarter of a billion dollars to make sure the drilling pipeline stays alive when the actual market has rejected it twice.
The Trump administration will call the result a successful sale tomorrow afternoon. The Alaska delegation will call it industry vindication. Alaska taxpayers will eat the $190 million. The federal government will pocket the bid money. The polar bears and the caribou will be one auction closer to gone.
When Congress opened the refuge to drilling in the 2017 Tax Cuts and Jobs Act, the Congressional Budget Office estimated the two mandated lease sales would generate $1.82 billion over ten years. Pro-drilling members of Congress sold the program as a $1 billion offset against the bill’s $1.9 trillion price tag. The actual federal take from the 2021 sale was $8.2 million. The take from the 2025 sale was zero.
When Congress passed the One Big Beautiful Bill Act last summer and mandated four more sales, CBO revised the revenue estimate down to $452 million across the entire ten-year window. Taxpayers for Common Sense, the nonpartisan watchdog that’s tracked this program for a decade, calls even that estimate wildly inflated. Their projection based on twenty years of actual North Slope bidding data is $3 to $30 million in total federal revenue across all four sales combined.
To translate that, 2017 voters were told the program would pay for itself. The actual pace at which the program is paying for itself is roughly the cost of an elevator retrofit on a single Senate office building. We’ve written before about the lie behind ‘unused’ public land and the math that doesn’t add up on public lands logging. This is the same con, run on the same talking points, for the same beneficiaries. The pattern repeats. The federal government promises billions in extractive revenue. Actual revenue arrives in the low millions. The land is ruined regardless.
The reason the math doesn’t work is structural. There are no roads on the coastal plain. The Trans-Alaska Pipeline stops a hundred and twenty miles to the west at Prudhoe Bay. The airstrips, the housing, the processing capacity that any commercial operation would require, all of it would have to be built from scratch, in a place where winter lasts nine months and the working window for surface infrastructure is measured in weeks. A new field in the Refuge would take seven to ten years to develop before the first barrel reached a refinery. Whatever crisis the Trump administration cites tomorrow to justify the sale will be eight years in the rearview by the time any oil moves.
Goldman Sachs ran these numbers in 2017 and called Arctic exploration economically unjustifiable. The market agreed twice. Tomorrow, Alaska public money will try to override the market.
The man running tomorrow’s sale is Doug Burgum, the former North Dakota governor that Trump confirmed as Interior Secretary in January 2025 with a mandate to maximize fossil fuel extraction from federal lands. Burgum’s previous job was running the third-largest oil-producing state in the country. The Associated Press, citing state records, reported that his administration coordinated with oil industry lobbyists on regulatory strategy while his own family was leasing land to oil companies.
In October 2025, Burgum reopened the entire 1.56-million-acre coastal plain to leasing. In December 2025, Trump signed six Congressional Review Act resolutions overturning BLM management plans that had protected the coastal plain along with five other major federal land units. The CRA carries a permanent bar against the agency issuing comparable protections without new congressional action. The same Interior Department also opened the entire Gulf of Mexico oil and gas program by convening the God Squad for the first time in thirty years to exempt the program from the Endangered Species Act. Over the heads of fifty-one Rice’s whales. Tomorrow’s auction is one move in a campaign.
The Gwich’in Steering Committee was unequivocal. “Secretary Burgum’s intentions to pilfer sacred land in the Arctic Refuge to the highest bidder flies in the face of the rights of the Gwich’in as Indigenous people and, quite frankly, in the face of common sense.” On April 28, Steering Committee Executive Director Kristen Moreland sent letters to eight major oil company executives formally requesting they decline to bid tomorrow. The day after, 13 conservation organizations sent a parallel letter to 11 oil executives reminding them of the reputational risk of bidding. As of this writing, none of those companies has publicly confirmed they will. None has publicly confirmed they won’t.
Look at the numbers, then think about what they mean.
The Porcupine caribou herd has dropped from 218,000 animals in 2017 to 143,000 in the most recent 2026 survey. A thirty-five percent decline in nine years. The coastal plain is their calving ground. The geographic reason there’s still a Porcupine herd at all.
The Southern Beaufort Sea polar bear population, the bears that den on the coastal plain, has dropped to a draft 2025 estimate of 819 bears. The 1980s estimate was upwards of 1,500. They’ve been listed as threatened under the Endangered Species Act since 2008, the law Doug Burgum’s Interior Department is currently dismantling through regulation. Three-quarters of the coastal plain is now their primary denning habitat, because sea ice denning is no longer viable. The mothers dig their dens in snowdrifts behind the dunes. They give birth in those dens in winter. The cubs are smaller than a softball when they’re born and weigh roughly a pound. They cannot be moved.
Seismic exploration uses 90,000-pound thumper trucks that pound the tundra in winter to map subsurface geology. The forward-looking infrared technology the oil industry uses to locate polar bear dens before driving over them has been documented missing more than half of known dens in field-tested conditions. When the technology misses a den, the truck drives over it. When the mother bear flees her den early, the cubs die.
Read that again. The technology misses more than half the time. When it misses, the cubs die. Tomorrow morning, Alaska is committing $190 million of public money to bring that equipment into the highest-density polar bear denning habitat in the United States. The hunters and anglers who love the Refuge know this as well as the scientists do. The same audience who saw the 1.4 million acres of the Dalton Corridor transferred to Alaska last month, severing the wildlife corridor between Gates of the Arctic, the Arctic Refuge, and two adjacent refuges. The same audience who watched 58 million acres of national forest get opened to industrial logging in March. The pattern is the pattern. The country we hand to our kids will have less of this in it every year we tolerate this.
Two full ANWR lease sales under the original 2017 Tax Cuts and Jobs Act mandate happened. Both flopped. CBO cut its revenue forecast in half. The banks won’t finance. The majors won’t bid. The Indigenous nation whose existence depends on the caribou opposes it. The polar bears are at a fraction of their historical numbers. The hunters and anglers who rely on those public lands are watching the access disappear. And the State of Alaska is throwing a quarter of a billion dollars in public money at the problem tomorrow to keep the political show alive.
Ninety-nine percent of one million public comments on the original program opposed drilling. Two-thirds of registered voters consistently oppose drilling in polling. The United Nations Committee on the Elimination of Racial Discrimination has sounded alarms three times about the human rights violations entailed in opening the calving grounds without Gwich’in consent. Multiple federal lawsuits are pending against the 2025 Record of Decision under the APA, the Wilderness Act, ANILCA, the Refuge Act, NEPA, the ESA, and the underlying statutory authorities. The Center for Biological Diversity and Defenders of Wildlife have served notice of intent to sue under the Endangered Species Act over polar bear impacts. The administration is conducting the sale anyway.
It’s a familiar pattern from this Interior Department. Move fast. Transfer the asset. Generate facts on the ground. Let the courts try to unwind them later. Once a lease sells, it encumbers the land for years. Active leases generate environmental reviews and seismic permits and road petitions and infrastructure proposals and an institutional momentum the courts struggle to undo even after they rule the underlying decisions unlawful. That’s the point of holding the sale anyway.
We Will Never Forgive or Forget Those Who Sell Our Public Lands is the name of a piece we ran last summer. It feels more applicable every week. Tomorrow morning, the State of Alaska is adding a $190 million line item to that ledger.
The U.S. House and Senate hold the keys here. The OBBBA mandate that compels tomorrow’s sale was written by Congress and signed by the president, and only Congress can rescind it. Find out how your senators and representative voted on every public lands measure of 2025 and 2026 in the Congressional Public Lands Scorecard. Call them. Tell them you want HR 3067, the Arctic Refuge Protection Act, advanced. Tell them you want the OBBBA Arctic Refuge mandate repealed. Tell them you noticed.
Tell them you noticed that the only confirmed bidder is using public money to bring oil companies to a place those companies don’t want to be.
Tell them you noticed the math has never worked.
Tell them you noticed what they’re selling, and you know we don’t get this one back.
Raise some hell,
Will
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When Westin Nelson of Skagway became the first Alaska hunter on record to harvest a mule deer, he may have been doing the state a favor.
Mule deer, better known as inhabitants of the Rocky Mountain and Great Plains regions, have been expanding their range northward, including into Alaska. As they do so, they are expanding the risks of parasites and some contagious diseases.
The most concerning issue is the winter tick, or Dermacentor albipictus. It has yet to be documented in Alaska, but it has wiped out much of the moose population in New England and started causing problems for moose populations as far north as Canada’s Yukon and Northwest Territories.
In recent years, nearly half of the mule deer examined in the Whitehorse area were found to be tick-infested, said Dr. Kimberlee Beckmen, the Alaska Department of Fish and Game’s wildlife biologist. That is ominous for Alaska, she said.
“All it takes is one mule deer with one female tick on it to come into Alaska, and that would completely devastate our moose population,” Beckmen said.
Mule deer have been well-established in the Yukon Territory since at least the 1980s, and in Alaska, people have been spotting them on sometimes fleeting occasions for a little over a decade.
Most sightings have been in the northern part of the Southeast Panhandle, but some were as far north as Interior Alaska. Three mule deer were reported in 2013 near Delta Junction, one was photographed near the Fort Knox mine outside of Fairbanks in 2016 and one was struck by a vehicle and killed in North Pole in 2017, according to the Department of Fish and Game.
Though they are related to the Sitka black-tailed deer that live in territory stretching from the British Columbia rainforest to the Kodiak Archipelago, mule deer are different from their Alaska cousins.
The contrast is striking, said Nelson, the Skagway hunter.
“These deer are big, maybe twice the size of Sitka black-tailed deer,” he said. “Mule deer have enormous ears. They have ears like a mule.”
Adult Sitka black-tailed deer generally weigh 80 to 120 pounds, according to the Department of Fish and Game, while adult mule deer often weigh more than 200 pounds.
Nelson said he has seen mule deer occasionally in the Skagway area over the past few years. He had a light-hearted competition with a friend about who would be the first to hunt one. It was not until April when circumstances came together to result in a successful hunt — right in that friend’s yard.
“I just happened to kind of get lucky,” Nelson said.
The rules for hunting mule deer in Alaska, where the species is non-native and considered “deleterious,” are liberal. There are no seasonal restrictions and no bag limits. Even though it took until this year for Nelson to become the first hunter on record to harvest a mule deer in Alaska, state officials first authorized mule deer hunting in 2019.
The caveat for mule deer hunters is that the Department of Fish and Game wants them to submit tissue samples for testing. That is to screen for signs of tick infestations and for numerous problems like brain worm, also known as “moose sickness,” chronic wasting disease, different types of hemorrhagic diseases, bluetongue, worm infestation and other diseases or parasites.
Nelson provided abundant samples to the department: the hide, head and neck, liver, heart, lungs, spleen, lower colon and two lower legs with the hooves attached, according to officials with the Department of Fish and Game.
Importantly, Beckmen with the department said, there were no signs of hair loss or breakage in the hide, indicating that any tick infestation during the past winter was unlikely.
Nelson said he has been reading up on mule deer and the state’s concerns about ticks and other dangers. But he downplayed any contributions he might have made to state wildlife safety. “I wouldn’t say I’m super-noble or anything. I just wanted to get one,” he said.
Climate change, along with factors like road-building and agricultural development, have allowed mule deer to thrive in new territory even as some habitat is lost to development, according to the Department of Fish and Game.
Climate change is also helping spread the winter tick northward and westward.
The ticks do not travel on their own. Rather, they grow from eggs that are laid on the ground in the spring that grow into larvae that climb up plants in packs to latch onto passing hosts in the fall, a process known as “questing.” If they stay attached all winter, they develop into adults that repeat the cycle by dropping from their hosts in spring to lay eggs. Shorter winters and later snowfalls are increasing opportunities for successful questing by the ticks, scientists say.
In New England, moose have been found with tens of thousands of winter ticks embedded in their skin. The blood loss they cause can be fatal, especially to young moose. In Maine, for example, biologists in 2022 found that 86% of the moose calves they had collared died from tick infestations. In New Hampshire, the moose population now is only about half of what it was in the 1990s, according to state biologists there.
While mule deer can become infested with winter ticks, they also are able to get rid of them fairly effectively through self-grooming.
Moose lack those grooming skills. That results in moose rubbing and scratching off so much of their hair that they are called “ghost moose” because their bald spots make them look white.
Mule deer are not the only species expanding their range to Alaska.
Another such species is the mountain lion, also known as cougar. The Alaska Board of Game early this year approved a first hunting and trapping season for mountain lions. It is set to start on Aug. 1 in parts of Southeast Alaska.
Originally published by the Alaska Beacon, an independent, nonpartisan news organization that covers Alaska state government.
Officials with the University of Alaska have tapped the commander of the U.S. Army 11th Airborne Division’s Arctic Aviation Command as the new permanent chancellor of the University of Alaska Fairbanks.
Col. Russell “Russ” Vander Lugt was selected from four finalists after an eight-month search process. He will be the top executive of Alaska’s leading research institution, which describes itself as “America’s Arctic university.” He will replace interim chancellor, and former U.S. Ambassador to the Arctic, Mike Sfraga, who succeeded former chancellor Dan White who announced his retirement in May of last year.
Vander Lugt is a senior U.S. Army officer, an Arctic scholar and UAF alumni, with over two decades of executive leadership experience, according to a university announcement on May 27. He has served as commander of the 11th Airborne Division’s Arctic Aviation Command at Fort Wainwright in Fairbanks since Aug. 2024.
“I’m humbled to be selected to lead the University of Alaska Fairbanks during this pivotal time,” Vander Lugt said in a statement with the announcement.
“I look forward to leading through trust, transparency, and teamwork as we see Alaska and the Arctic transformed through education, research, and public service. I’m committed to building on the strong foundation Chancellors Sfraga and White have established, and working closely with university leadership and governance to support and advance UAF’s mission,” he said.
Vander Lugt will step into the permanent chancellor role on Sept. 8. Sfraga’s last day was Friday, and university officials have selected Larry Hinzman, director of the UA Arctic Leadership Initiative, to serve as interim chancellor through the summer.
Vander Lugt has had a long career with the U.S. Army in various roles in Alaska, where he is stationed in Fairbanks, and across the U.S. His resume lists deployments to Europe and the Middle East.
He served in executive leadership roles that include the Alaskan Command, a division of the U.S. Northern Command, the 601st Aviation Support Battalion, and the 1st Stryker Brigade Combat team. He also taught history and military leadership as an assistant professor at the U.S. Military Academy at West Point and was a professor of military science and department chair at Embry-Riddle Aeronautical University in Prescott, Arizona.
He holds a master’s degree and doctoral degree in Arctic and Northern Studies, which he completed in 2022 at the University of Alaska Fairbanks.
Vander Lugt’s hire is the latest in major leadership changes in the University of Alaska system — former UA President Pat Pitney retired last month and former university attorney Matt Cooper was named as her successor. Cooper will begin as university president in early August, and Michelle Rizk, vice president of university relations and chief strategy, planning and budget officer, is serving as interim president. Cheryl Siemers was appointed permanent chancellor of the University of Alaska Anchorage in March, after serving as interim chancellor since the retirement of former chancellor Sean Parnell last year.
Vander Lugt’s base salary will be $309,000, according to the university’s announcement.
The University of Alaska Fairbanks serves roughly 7,500 students. It employs more than 800 faculty and nearly 2,000 staff across urban and rural campuses in Fairbanks, Kotzebue, Nome, Bethel and Dillingham.
Originally published by the Alaska Beacon, an independent, nonpartisan news organization that covers Alaska state government.
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