Mary Sherbick found out she was pregnant at the height of the pandemic in 2020. Although she and her partner had planned it, the pandemic was anxiety-inducing and isolating. While scrolling on social media, she came across online talking circles for Alaska Native women, organized by Alaska Native Birthworkers Community (ANBC), who were pregnant or postpartum. Sherbick, who is Yupik, immediately signed up.

“A lot of us were also just concerned about the way that we would be treated, and some of our concerns of pain or our birth plans within a hospital setting,” Sherbick said. “I think a lot of the women that I talked to just were aware of the history of how Indigenous women, Indigenous people in general, have been treated, and the sterilization programs that have been done unknowingly to Indigenous people.”

Growing up in foster care and losing her mother at 17, Sherbick did not have the family connection to support her in her pregnancy. And while her relatives introduced her to Yupik foods such as dry fish and agudak, she also felt removed from her culture. Her mother did not encourage Sherbick to speak the Yupik language, due to safety concerns. “There was an attitude on being Alaska Native within an urban setting, specifically within Anchorage, of animosity,” Sherbick said. Because of this, being able to have an Alaskan Native birth worker who could provide an Indigenous perspective was deeply meaningful and centered in sovereignty, she added.

Before giving birth in May 2021 at the Alaska Native Medical Center, which is where the ANBC team works primarily to support mothers, Sherbick attended one of the group’s birth preparation workshops focused on prenatal plant medicine. Participants received ingredients rooted in Indigenous knowledge, including yellow dock root, nettle leaf and red raspberry, to make herbal teas and infusions. “I can control even the potency of it,” Sherbick said. “I used the herbal iron syrup quite a bit because I was already anemic. That really helped with my blood flow and circulation.”

Sherbick’s experience of having anemia during her pregnancy is one that many Alaska Native women can relate to. According to a research study, Alaska Native pregnant or postpartum women had higher anemia prevalence than non-Native women. Anemia is far from the only pregnancy-related issue that Native Alaskans face.

In 2024, Native American and Alaska Native people had the highest pregnancy-related mortality ratio among major demographic groups, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. Alaska Native mothers also have the highest preterm birthrates in the state, with rates rising over the past decade. Native American and Alaska Native women have a higher risk of gestational diabetes mellitus and subsequent diagnosis of diabetes, compared with non-Hispanic white women.

Sherbick, who also dealt with gestational diabetes, knew that she needed a strong birth plan and support from Native birth workers. “I had specific breathing techniques. I had a whole playlist. I had a plan of walking around, and I was really doing OK until my water broke,” Sherbick explained. A partial water break increased her risk of infection and pain, so she ultimately chose an epidural, despite not wanting one at first.

The birth workers “really did a good job at breaking down the medical verbiage and making sure I truly understood what was going on and what were the next courses of action, and if that was something that I agreed to or felt that I was ready to do,” Sherbick said. “I felt really supported and honored because of that. Someone who comes from the same heritage and values as me, it just made me feel that much better.” With her birth worker’s help, she ensured skin-to-skin contact immediately, she said: “There was no wiping. I think there was no bathing for the first 24 or 48 hours. We really wanted to make sure that she felt my presence.”

Abra Patkotak, her ANBC birth worker, said she “started Alaska Native birth workers community because we saw that these families were really isolated and they needed support. It was hard for them and to be alone during the most vulnerable time in your life, that of childbirth.” Founded in 2017, ANBC has provided free birth-related services to Alaska Native women, including prenatal care, labor support, postpartum care and support during miscarriage, abortion, loss, adoption and for LGBTQ2S+ people.

Mariana Dosal, who is Mexican and a member of the Agdaagux Tribe of King Cove, Alaska, also faced birth complications while in Anchorage. Her first birth was traumatic – she hemorrhaged and nearly bled out. Fearing a similar experience, she sought help from the birth workers at ANBC. “The next time I went in, I had more experience with how to prevent that, from the native birth worker community,” Dosal said. Patkotak “being in there to advocate for what I need allowed me to not lose as much blood the second time. I didn’t go into shock, and I didn’t need blood transfusions.”

Both Sherbick and Dosal worked with Patkotak, an ANBC co-founder who is Iñupiaq from Utqiagvik. She trained to be a doula in 2010 before moving to Utqiagvik, 750 miles north of Anchorage, where she ran a pre-maternal home. There, she saw the challenges that rural Native Alaskan women faced, including having to spend large parts of their pregnancy away from home, to give birth.

Patkotak believes community support was once central to Alaska Native births. “My Amau, my great-grandfather, helped deliver babies. And this role was a role that every single community had,” she said. However, when the Community Health Aid Program started, there was a move towards more westernized healthcare, and midwives and birth workers were absorbed into that healthcare system, “and the time honored, respected role of midwifery was no longer the same”, she added.

After a generation of Native midwives passed away, the knowledge died with them. “Now, there’s this resurgence,” Patkotak said. “I think about them all the time. I call them in to support me.”

“A lot of us in my generation have been separated from that traditional knowledge just through colonization, [and] the medicalization of birth,” added Margaret David, ANBC co-founder. David is Koyukon Dene, and a mom of four, three of whom she birthed at home with support from midwives.

On a day-to-day basis, ANBC’s work ranges from birth preparation groups to on-call support. Some parents seek help during the prenatal phase, while others need labor support. ANBC also runs a 24/7 call line for referrals from the Alaska Native Medical Center for mothers in active labor. Most of the ANBC team is based in Anchorage, with a smaller team in the valley, because many rural Alaskan mothers have to travel there to give birth. A 2025 study found 43.3% of American Indian and Alaska Native births occurred in areas with low access to birthing facilities, compared with just 3.1% for white, non-Hispanic mothers.

For many mothers, traveling hundreds of miles from home is a financial, logistical and emotional nightmare.

Dosal, who lives in Dillingham, south-western Alaska, spent her last month of pregnancy in Anchorage, nearly 400 miles from home and separated from her partner. The local clinic in Dillingham lacks a birthing center, so women are sent to Anchorage about three weeks before their due date to give birth at a hospital equipped to help with labor and delivery. “That’s a really big hardship for us, because it takes a lot of money to live in Anchorage away from home,” she said. Some people have to stay even longer, depending on the complexity of their pregnancy.

While some financial support exists for mothers in this situation, it often falls short. Dosal spent $500 on groceries her first time in Anchorage just to set up a kitchen. “So it’s not really ideal for expecting mother … and then spiritually it wreaks havoc on your spirit to be in the city when you’re used to rural Alaska,” she said. But while in Anchorage, Dosal prepared for labor with ANBC’s help. “They gave me a medicinal foot bath, and gave me a pregnancy massage, and they have all these nice things for pregnant women,” she said, explaining that it provided her friendship and community that she was missing.

For the birth workers at ANBC, though, support goes beyond labor and delivery. They use a “three sisters” model, where each sister focuses on a specific layer of support to ensure a holistic approach to sovereignty from first breath. One provides free services to Native families, another grows the cohort of Indigenous birth workers and the third focuses on systemic change for better maternal health.

David explained that for years, ANBC brought other Native trainers from across the country to come and help train birth workers in Alaska. “Last year we had somebody come do a really beautiful lactation training,” she said, but, as of last year, they created their own curriculum and now train those interested in birth work.

They conduct trainings in remote regions too, including a training in Nome, Patkotak said. “We have hopes to expand … we have a lot of hopes to just increase what we’re doing, because it’s so positive, and there’s definitely a good impact.”

By expanding, and bringing birth work to other parts of Alaska, too, they hope to continue connecting birthing families with their Native roots, improving birth outcomes and expanding postpartum support.

For Sherbick, who lives in Anchorage, ANBC’s birthing circles were invaluable postpartum, for advice on colic, teething and more. “I had no idea how great … Muktuk is, which is whale blubber. It’s really good for teething babies,” said Sherbick, who had some in her freezer at the time. “And my daughter loved it.” Sherbick’s husband is Iñupiaq and Muktuk is an Iñupiaq delicacy, one which she said her husband didn’t even know of when he was her age. She thinks that being introduced to this traditional food not only helped her in the early days of being a mother, but also contributed to her daughter’s love for the food.

“And it all comes from these Indigenous women or these Indigenous people who are willing to come together to help support each other in this very sacred time in your life,” Sherbick said.

RUBY — Beneath a bulbous waxing moon, we roll along on a ribbon of packed snow. The clear river ice beneath our tires is four feet thick.

That ice we can’t see is the crystal memory of so many cold days of the winter of 2025-26. The remaining spruce pile of our Tanana friends Charlie Campbell and Ruth Althoff was small enough to be covered by a single tarp.

To get to Tanana, Forest Wagner and I pedaled to Alaska’s largest river via a newish road from Manley Hot Springs.

When I first saw Forest backdropped by that massive expanse of chunky white, my jaw dropped to my chest in a real-life cliché. You forget how big this river is when you haven’t seen it for a while.

Forest and I are pedaling the White Lonely for the next week and a half, two ants crawling over a cold moon. We never get very close to shore.

In our attempt to ride from home to Nome, the section from the village of Tanana to Ruby is the one that kept me up at night in January. People just don’t travel it much. We are dependent on a packed trail, which Hudson Stuck noted was the greatest gift one northern traveler can give another.

While we float at the speed of a canoe, we shove our bikes off the trail to allow passage of a few snowmachiners each day. Between Tanana and Ruby, they all fit the same profile: one man wearing a praying mantis helmet driving a modern black machine with a plastic red jug of gas strapped behind his seat. Only one stopped to chat. Most waved or gave a thumbs-up in passing while surfing the deep snow around us.

“Travelers,” Forest said.

The 120-mile stretch between Tanana and Ruby features a few log cabins separated by many miles of frozen river and a few more structures that were once there when I skied this stretch with Andy Sterns 25 years ago. That’s long enough for floods to wash some away or for leaky roofs to collapse.

While we were in Tanana, our hosts remembered summers past during which they harvested king and chum salmon. Those fish were once so numerous beneath our wheels in their pinky-size fry stage, waiting for the river to break up so they could torpedo to the ocean.

In the largest natural-history change in recent times in Alaska, salmon numbers have nosedived to the point that no one can fish for them anymore. The spruce fish wheels anchored now in deep snow will remain at the Tanana boat landing again this summer. Ruth called it a fish-wheel graveyard.

Being out here reminds this urban Alaskan of what we have all lost with the end of those runs of swimming protein and soil nutrients that seemed infinite. Tanana, once famous for its number of dog teams that ran on dried chum salmon from the river, is down to a limited number of aging veterans whose owners can afford to feed the expensive imported-from-America kibble that my wife and I feed our dogs.

The ghosted-out fish camps we pass on this section of the river tell a story of that huge change, when we pay attention to it. But sometimes we just daydream and stand on the pedals to get off the seat. Every hour, we stop rolling, plant our boots on the trail and eat. When we pause to stop chewing, the hum of utter silence wraps itself around us like a hug.

When my satellite tracker is on, you can see our arrow creeping across the landscape here: https//share.garmin.com/NedRozell.

ANCHORAGE, Alaska (ALASKA BEACON) – University of Alaska staff announced a vote to form a union on Wednesday. The union would represent 2,300 permanent staff across the three universities and a dozen community campuses, Corinne Smith with the Alaska Beacon reports.

Staff voted to form the union Coalition of Alaska University Staff for Equity, or CAUSE, which would be part of the national United Auto Workers union, in a 1,106 to 610 vote, with 64% voting yes.

UA staff that would be represented by the union include student services staff, researchers, fiscal and administrative staff, development staff, science communicators, information systems specialists, library workers, athletics coaches and many others, according to a statement announcing the vote.

“Amid growing uncertainty around state and federal funding for the University, staff cited several reasons for forming a union: consistency and competitiveness in pay and benefits; greater transparency in promotion, career development, and retention; fair workload; and more,” the statement said.

“This is an exciting day for staff at UA,” said Mike DeLue, a researcher with the International Arctic Research Center at the University of Alaska Fairbanks, in the emailed statement.

“We did our research, discussed and debated, and overwhelmingly chose to unionize. As soon as the result is certified, we’re ready to sit down with the University and work constructively on addressing the issues that motivated us to form a union in the first place. Improving our working conditions will help us serve more students, enhance UA’s research capacity, and support Alaska communities,” he said.

The results of the union vote are expected to be certified on April 8, barring any objections or challenges filed by either of the parties, said Jonathon Taylor, director of UA public affairs, by email on Wednesday.

Taylor also cited financial uncertainty as one of the reasons the university opposed the union effort, which he said was communicated to employees ahead of the vote.

“The university opposed unionization because we believed it would reduce flexibility, slow decision-making, and limit our ability to respond to financial uncertainty,” he said. “That position was operational, not ideological.”

“UA respects the outcome and the right of staff to organize,” he said by email. “We’ll be bargaining in good faith with CAUSE-UAW in accordance with Alaska labor law.”

Taylor noted that existing wages and working conditions will remain in place while the contract is negotiated. He said initial contracts take roughly 400 days to negotiate. He said a 3% salary increase the university requested of the Alaska State Legislature in next year’s budget for all unionized and non-union staff will not apply to the new union members since they are in the process of forming the union and have not yet negotiated a new contract.

“Under Alaska labor law and case law, a contract with a bargaining unit must be in place for negotiated raises to be requested and approved by the legislature,” he said. Taylor said the issue was communicated to staff ahead of the union vote.

“Non-represented staff remain eligible for that increase,” he said.

But Charlie Banks, an organizer for the union effort and an academic advisor with the University of Alaska Anchorage, said Thursday that it is the university’s choice, and the new union members should be eligible.

“We believe that the university has the ability to issue the pay increases to us,” she said in a phone interview.

She said support for salary increases is also a show of support for retaining staff, which she says is a common goal of both the union and the university.

“We agree with university admins concerns about difficulties with recruitment and retention. One of the main reasons for this is that Alaska is not keeping up with its peers in maintaining competitive packages for workers,” she said. “Not surprisingly, our peer institutions that have staff unions have much stronger recruitment tools because their contracts are responsive to their needs.”

The new staff union follows the 2024 unionization of UA graduate workers to form the Alaska Graduate Workers Association within the United Auto Workers Local 1907. The union represents graduate teaching assistants, researchers and fellows. They bargained their first three-year contract within 96 days, which secured higher pay, an updated grievance process and a change from at-will to just-cause employment, according to reporting from the student-run newspaper The Northern Light.

The new staff union joins the national UAW union, which includes approximately 120,000 higher education workers across the country, including staff at the University of Washington and University of California.

This story has been republished with permission from the Alaska Beacon.

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