Alaska
Take a trip to the Asian island that could play a role in Alaska's future • Alaska Beacon
Thirteen hours after boarding a jet in Seattle recently, I stepped off onto Asian soil, breezing through customs and into an air-conditioned subway.
I was bound for a city of skyscrapers, art, soup dumplings and glorious urban hiking: Taipei.
Maybe you already know a little bit about Taiwan, the nation of some 23 million people.
Some outdoorsy Alaskans have ridden the Huandao, a network of bike paths and roads that circumnavigate the mountainous island.
Or you’ve read about Taiwan on the news — how it’s under constant threat from China, its saber-rattling neighbor across an 80-mile strait.
Allow me to take you on a quick diversion to Asia from your regular life, to explain why Taiwan, which I visited in late October, matters to Alaska — and the rest of the world.
Martial law to progressive democracy
Two years ago, I took a trip to Japan, and while I was there, I made a side visit to Taiwan.
At the time, I was contemplating the idea of working as a foreign correspondent, perhaps in Hong Kong. But a friend who’d worked in journalism in Asia suggested I check out Taiwan instead, because Hong Kong’s future appeared increasingly depressing: The Chinese government had crushed the region’s pro-democracy protests, leaving little drama or nuance to report on.
The friend was right: Last week, dozens of demonstrators were sentenced to up to a decade in prison.
Taiwan’s future, by contrast, was setting up to be a compelling drama — one that’s still playing out today.
A quick history lesson. For centuries, Taiwan’s Indigenous population has shared the island with people of mainland Chinese heritage, who migrated there in waves. One of the largest waves came in the late 1940s.
That’s when more than 1 million Chinese nationalists, led by Chiang Kai-Shek, fled to the island after losing their country’s civil war to the communists, led by Mao Zedong.
Chiang became the leader of Taiwan, but once there, his government, in hopes of retaking the mainland, continued referring to itself as the Republic of China — a name that Taiwan still uses today.
Chiang’s rule over Taiwan was authoritarian and repressive: His forces killed tens of thousands of people during an 
But in the 1980s and 1990s, something surprising happened: Taiwan evolved into a thriving, progressive democracy.
Earlier this year, the Taiwanese people elected a new president, Lai Ching-te, in free and fair elections. Taiwan was the first Asian country to legalize same-sex marriage, in 2019. It holds an enormous annual Pride celebration in Taipei — this year’s included a speech from the vice president. There are regular protests and the country’s parliament hosts robust debate — including periodic fistfights.
The presence of that kind of open, democratic society — so close to China, and with a military supported by arms from the U.S. — risks serving as an inspiration to people living under Communist Party rule on the mainland. And it’s not the type of inspiration that the Communist Party likes.
Taiwan needs allies
On my previous trip to the island, I made some new friends and picked up on some of these political themes between bike rides, pork buns, monkey viewing and a Taiwan Series baseball game.
When I got home, I stayed up on Taiwan related news and kept talking about the country with an Anchorage friend of Taiwanese heritage.
He, in turn, connected me with the Taiwanese government’s office in Seattle. Which, as it turns out, is always looking for interested journalists to invite to the island.
After a brief correspondence, I was told, in February, to block off a week in October for an official visit.
I arrived back in Taipei on a Friday afternoon — just in time for dinner with a couple of Alaska friends who had also traveled to Taiwan for a bike trip. We sat outside next to a fish market, eating skewers of grilled beef, veggies and scallops, before I rode the mile back to my hotel room on one of Taipei’s ubiquitous shared bicycles — rentable for about a dollar an hour with a smartphone.
The next day I watched the Pride parade, a raucous festival of queer culture with floats sponsored by Uber and Google.
Another bike ride took me to a train to a bus, for an overnight stay in Taiwan’s northeast corner. I spent it in Jiufen, a mountainside getaway of tea rooms and guesthouses, then hiked and explored markets and museums the next day before returning to Taipei for the start of my official visit.
More about the official part: To preserve their relations with China, all but roughly a dozen of the world’s countries decline to give Taiwan formal diplomatic recognition — meaning that its government has to get creative to forge ties with sympathetic populations.
A few times a year, the Ministry of Foreign Affairs, or MOFA, pays for an entire delegation of journalists to spend a week in the country — mostly for meetings with government officials, but also for gorging themselves on Taiwan’s delectable cuisine and viewing tourist attractions like a remarkably lifelike miniature cabbage carved from jade.
For me, this entailed criss-crossing Taipei in a curtain-festooned tour bus with a very solicitous MOFA staff member and a dozen other reporters — from Haiti, Slovakia, the Netherlands, Canada, Italy, Australia, Finland, Nigeria and South Korea.
The initiative is hosting around 100 reporters this year at a total cost of some $500,000, which largely pays for journalists’ flights and hotels, according to MOFA officials. To maintain my independence and credibility in reporting on Taiwan, I combined my trip with a vacation, paid for my own plane ticket to Taipei and found a cheap AirBnB; I did not pay for the group meals hosted by MOFA.
“We try to make friends with the rest of the world,” Catherine Hsu, a top MOFA official, told us over the fanciest lunch I’d ever eaten — seven courses dished out at a hotel restaurant inside Taipei’s main railway station.
Taiwan needs friends because without them, it stands little chance against its large, powerful neighbor across the strait.
Taiwan is an economic powerhouse: Its biggest company, Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Co., is the global leader in high performance semiconductors and has been valued at more than $1 trillion; the island also is home to other semiconductor businesses and high-tech industries.
But even a country whose per-person gross domestic product is in line with Israel’s and Spain’s can’t compete with the blunt force threatened by China, which calls Taiwan a “sacred and inseparable part” of its territory and vows to reunify it.
Taiwan currently spends some $20 billion a year on national defense, and military infrastructure and bomb shelters dot the island. But China’s defense budget is roughly 10 times that, and it regularly conducts menacing military drills — in one recent case, simulating a blockade of Taiwan and in another, launching missiles that flew over the island.
As Lai, the Taiwanese president, visited Hawaii this week just after a newly approved U.S. arms sale, China’s military issued a statement saying it would “resolutely crush any ‘Taiwan independence’ separatists.”
‘We will play an important role’
Over our week in Taiwan, my group was ushered from ministry to ministry, with briefings on subjects like the nation’s network of high-tech industrial parks and its efforts to transition toward more climate-friendly energy sources.
But many of our meetings were dominated by a force that wasn’t in the room: China. We heard from criminal investigators about how Taiwan’s decades-long exclusion from the United Nations, at China’s behest, means it can’t participate in Interpol, the international policing organization. It has also been blocked from formal membership in the World Health Organization and the U.N.’s official climate talks.
Think tank officials reeled off polling data about Taiwanese citizens’ willingness to take up arms against China. And media fact-checkers told us about disinformation campaigns suspected to be seeded by China-aligned operatives.
Anchorage Democratic Sen. Bill Wielechowski also visited the country earlier this year and came away with similar impressions. 
“The whole country, their whole identity is wrapped up in this notion that, at any time, China could come in and take over,” Wielechowski told me.
Wielechowski, who traveled with another Alaska state senator, Anchorage Democrat Elvi Gray-Jackson, is the latest in a long line of Alaska politicians to establish ties with Taiwan. Republican former Gov. Frank Murkowski is also a longtime ally, having taken more than two dozen trips to the country and served as an observer at Taiwan’s presidential elections.
Wielechowski’s and Gray-Jackson’s primary interest in Taiwan was foreign trade and reviving once-robust sales of Alaska products to the country. The state formerly had a trade office in Taipei, supporting substantial exports of Alaska timber and oil, and the two are interested in reviving it.
But Taiwan’s future is also directly relevant to Alaskans because of how Chinese military action could prompt an American response.
Alaska military bases host dozens of U.S. fighter jets, and experts say that if there’s any kind of conflict over Taiwan, their pilots and support crews are very likely to be dispatched to the Pacific.
“Look, I’m not going into war plan stuff, because that’s all classified and everything,” GOP U.S. Sen. Dan Sullivan told me last week. But, he added, two hours before our conversation, he’d had a discussion with Admiral Samuel Paparo, the commander of some 380,000 U.S. Indo-Pacific forces and civilians.
“We will play an important role,” Sullivan said. “We have a lot of forces, who are very close to the theater — closer than Hawaii. A major conflict in the Taiwan Strait would significantly impact the active duty forces in Alaska.”
Uncertainty with a new U.S. president
Sullivan, a former U.S. Marine, was once deployed to the Taiwan Strait and has since visited the country several times as a senator.
He’s been a key Republican ally of Taiwan in the U.S. Congress, amid an increasing penchant for isolationism among members of his party.
His staff sent me a 24-page booklet — “A Test of Wills: Why Taiwan Matters” — that it had made out of a series of Sullivan’s policy speeches.
But it’s too early to say if his views will win out in the new presidential administration. A Wall Street Journal correspondent shadowed Sullivan in Asia earlier this year, with the 
“In Taipei and Singapore, Sen. Dan Sullivan looks to quell foreign leaders’ fears that the U.S. won’t stand by allies if Trump wins,” the subhed reads. The piece describes Sullivan telling Taiwan’s vice president that “you can count on the United States of America,” but added that that promise “wasn’t wholly within (Sullivan’s) power to keep.”
My visit to Taiwan was just before Donald Trump won his second term. The U.S. election came up at nearly every meeting, with my fellow journalists repeatedly pressing Taiwanese officials on how they’d deal with Trump if he took office again.
Previously, Trump has said that Taiwan should pay the U.S. for its defense and complained that the island’s semiconductor industry is stealing American jobs; a former top aide said Taiwan could be “toast” if Trump was re-elected.
Taiwanese officials largely brushed off those comments and said they could work with Trump; one jokingly told us that, as a businessman, perhaps Trump could broker a deal to sell Taiwan some state-of-the-art F-35 fighter jets.
(The very solicitous Ministry of Foreign Affairs staffer followed up the next day with a group text requesting that the comment be considered off-the-record; I politely refused, given that the relatively high-ranking official declined to walk it back himself when given the opportunity immediately after he spoke.)
In our interview, Sullivan pointed out that Republican U.S. Sen. J.D. Vance, the vice president-elect, has spoken “publicly and very strongly” of the geopolitical importance of Taiwan — even as Vance has been much more skeptical of U.S. support for Ukraine.
But there’s little doubt that the election results are injecting new uncertainty into what’s long been an important alliance between the U.S. and Taiwan — at a time when the island is under increasing pressure not just militarily but economically.
Earlier this month, Reuters reported that SpaceX — run by Trump booster Elon Musk — asked some of its Taiwanese suppliers to transfer manufacturing to other countries because of China’s military threat. The news agency also reported last year that offshore wind power developers are increasingly thinking about how to insure their projects in the Taiwan Strait against events like war.
How, exactly, the U.S. should respond to these developments isn’t a question for me — it’s a question for the American public and its elected officials. And the public just gave those officials some strong signals by electing Trump.
There are compelling reasons for America to avoid another foreign military entanglement, which, in Taiwan, would almost certainly put Alaska service members in harm’s way.
But I’ve also seen Taiwan twice now, with my own eyes, and I can attest to what’s at stake. Its mist-flanked mountains, modern skyscrapers and high-tech semiconductor foundries. Its nightclubs and queer culture. And, most importantly, a democratic society where political and cultural freedoms have flowered in the ashes of an authoritarian past.
“They say, ‘Today, Ukraine,’” one of the Taiwanese officials told us on our visit. “‘Tomorrow might be Taiwan.’”
Nathaniel Herz welcomes tips at [email protected] or (907) 793-0312. This article was originally published in Northern Journal, a newsletter from Herz. Subscribe at this link.
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Yukon king salmon on their Canadian spawning grounds more than 1,400 miles from the Bering Sea/Pacific Salmon Foundation photo
Yukon king salmon rebound beginning?
After a couple of years with cooler waters in the Bering Sea, the Alaska Department of Fish and Game is reporting a Yukon River return of Chinook salmon that has, as of the start of the month, “passed the historical third quarter point and exceeded preseason projections.”
The report comes at a time when National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) researchers have linked the extremely weak returns of the past several years to the start of “an acute marine heatwave period in the Bering Sea” that began late in 2016 and extended into 2020.
Yukon Chinook, the oversized salmon that most Alaskans simply call kings, were the big losers in this warming event while Bristol Bay sockeye salmon were the big winners. This is what happens when environmental conditions change, though you might not know it if all you read is highly subjective, mainstream media reporting on “global warming.”
The planet’s warming climate is an environmental disruptor that can cause all kinds of problems for plants and animals, and even humans, but it is a two-edged sword because that is the way environmental shifts work. There are losers, but there are also winners.
And there is no doubt the planet is warming. The big debate is about how much the future increase and how fast it comes. Scientists this year ruled out the sky-is-falling warning of a temperature increase of more than six to almost 10 degrees by 2021.
But as the Climate Directorate for the European Commission notes, the latest, ” most optimistic path – the new ‘best case scenario’ – would still lead to global warming of 1.7° C, (3.06° F) temporarily exceeding the 1.5° C (2.7° F) target in the Paris Agreement” on climate change.
What exactly this means for Yukon Chinook is hard to say, given that Arctic Ocean warming of late has focused more in the Barents Sea off the north coast of Europe than in the Chukchi and Bering seas off Alaska. The odds, however, would seem to favor a continued bounty of Bay sockeye while Chinook to the north continue to struggle.
The Alaska Department of Fish and Game is this year forecasting a Bay harvest of 33.5 million sockeye from a total return of 45.3 million of the fish. This is a historically very strong run, but it pales when compared to what happened during those heat wave years when Yukon Chinook were fading.
A sockeye explosion
In 2022, the Bay witnessed an unprecedented return of 79 million sockeye, according to state data, and the harvest topped 60 million. Meanwhile, there was over-escapement in almost every river system in the region because the harvesting and processing resources in the Bay couldn’t handle a return so big.
Escapement is the number of fish getting past fishermen to make it back to their spawning grounds. It is a scientifically calculated number intended to produce the greatest return of salmon per spawner in future years.
The goal in the Bay is to put about 11.8 million salmon on the spawning grounds. The escapement in 2022 was about 7.2 million over the goal even though the harvest that year dwarfed the previous record harvest of 44.3 million set in 1995.
The 16.2 million difference between the two, record harvests was bigger than the total harvests for all but two seasons in the Bay from 1938 to 1979 when the North Pacific Ocean was filled with colder water.
A so-called “regime change” at sea in the 1980s altered marine survival and sockeye harvests in the Bay – home to the largest wild sockeye fishery in the world and one of only a handful of Alaska fisheries that can claim to catch truly ‘wild’ salmon – began to explode.
By the end of the 2021 fishing season, the five-year average harvest had reached 41.1 million sockeye; the 10-year average stood at 33.4 million; and the 20-year average stood at 29.4 million, nearly double the historic, long-term average of 16.2 million.
The good, old days for Bay fishermen have come in the here and now, despite a catastrophic drop in prices paid for Bay salmon since farmed, Atlantic salmon took over global markets at the start of the new millennium.
Alaska sockeye salmon, and especially those increasingly rare Alaska king salmon, have hung onto a niche in the premium market dominated by farmed salmon, but the bulk of the Alaska harvest is now made up of so-called ‘wild caught’ salmon that compete globally with ‘wild-caught’ Russian salmon in markets for canned and pouched salmon and smallish pink salmon filets.
The ‘wild-caught’ label is used to disguise the fact that many of these fish are products of hatchery operations in Alaska and Russia. They are as wild, or not, as cattle put out to pasture to fatten. And the same applies to some non-Bay sockeye, such as those coming from hatcheries in Alaska’s Prince William Sound.
Bay salmon are a different story. These are truly wild salmon, and there is no doubt that they have benefited from warming.
Not all good
The same warning, however, has proven disastrous for Yukon Chinook and the people who once depended on them for cash and food. The commercial fisheries that produced cash have been closed for years, and subsistence harvests for food have been sharply limited.
Alaska catches fell to less than 20,000 kings per year on average in this decade, and with a serious downward trend underway, the U.S. and Canada in 2024 signed an agreement to suspend “directed Chinook commercial, sport, domestic, and personal use fisheries in the mainstem Yukon River and Canadian tributaries for one full life cycle (of) seven years.”
Alaskans fishing the Yukon for chum salmon, which are comparatively far more abundant, do still harvest some kings as bycatch, but the number is small. And harvests, whether in-river or at sea, do not, according to the NOAA researchers, seem to be the key problem facing the Yukon fish.
The scientists reported finding that “elevated natural mortality in later, post-juvenile life history stages has increasingly limited population productivity and recovery potential in recent years following a protracted marine heatwave period. Collectively, our results emphasize how shifting conditions can induce, novel stage-specific survival bottlenecks in species with complex life cycles.”
Their peer-reviewed study published in Ecological Applications, the journal of the Ecological Society of America, has, however, come under fire from Alaskans who don’t want to believe the data and prefer to blame the decline on the bycatch of Yukon Chinook offshore trawl fisheries targeting pollock and bottomfish.
Former Rep. Mary Peltola, D-Alaska, from Bethel near the mouth of the Yukon in rural Western Alaska, has repeatedly dissed the science. She is now running for the U.S. Senate seat held by Sen. Dan Sullivan, R-Alaska, and continuing to do so.
“I’ve seen the decline of our fisheries firsthand. I’ve seen our families suffer. And I’ve seen our fishermen have their livelihoods threatened. I’m running for Senate because it doesn’t have to be this way. We can take on the rigged system in D.C. and begin to restore abundance to Alaska,” she has said.
She contends that “the truth is that out-of-state factory trawlers and excessive bycatch are hurting Alaska. They are sweeping up more than 140 million pounds of bycatch….But instead of reining in the trawling industry, Alaska subsistence and sport fishing are hit with crushing restrictions, punishing Alaskans while protecting the corporations doing the damage.
“Instead of holding their corporate trawler donors accountable, D.C. politicians kick the can down the road with more studies. But we don’t need more studies to tell us what’s happening in front of our eyes.”
Whatever Peltola might see in front of her eyes, the scientists say there is no evidence that it is a bycatch problem. After modeling a huge pile of historical data, they concluded that ending all bycatch would put some more Chinook in the Yukon River, but not many more.
A few hundred fish
Simulations using various sizes of salmon returns to the Yukon showed that “the greatest difference occurred in 2007, in which the median run size from the zero-bycatch simulations was 433 fish greater than that of the fitted model,” they said. “In other years, median differences in run size between the fitted model and zero-bycatch simulations ranged from 32 to 398 fish.”
Basically, the models concluded what has long been observable. Bycatch numbers go up when Chinook are abundant and go down when Chinook are scarce. The Bering Sea pollock fishery, the biggest target of the anti-trawling campaign, posted a record bycatch of 122,195 Chinook in 2007, according to the North Pacific Management Council.
That now oft-cited number was an anomaly. It reflected a year when Chinook were unusually abundant in the region. The bycatch dropped to 20,000 the next year.
For the past decade, according to NPFMC data, the average stands at just shy of 19,000 fish per year. Genetic studies have shown these fish come from rivers all over North America, but the greatest proportion comes from Western Alaska rivers.
If bycatch could be wholly eliminated, the NPFMC estimates there would be an almost 2 percent improvement in the number of Chinook returning to those streams. As for the Yukon itself, the estimated improvement is 0.63 percent.
Such a change would be undetectable. The state sonar used to count salmon at Pilot Station on the Yukon has a “confidence level” of 90 percent. What this means is that the count is an estimate that comes from within a range that could be 10 percent higher or lower than the number judged to be the total return.
The numbers make the politics of the bycatch, at least as it applies to the pollock fishery in the Bering Sea, a classic red herring. There are no doubt some king salmon die when caught in trawls in the Eastern Bering Sea (EBS), but that fishery also happens to be the most intensely monitored fishery in the state.
The NOAA researchers noted that the trawl fleet has, since 2011, “been subject to 100 percent fishery observer coverage with full census counts of all salmon caught, and paired genetic and scale samples collected from one in 10 fish.”
Most Alaska fisheries operate without observers, and Alaska commercial salmon fishermen have opposed efforts to fit their boats with video cameras to provide remote monitoring because, according to the Southeast Alaska Seiners Association, “commercial permit holders are extremely sensitive to the confidential nature of
their fishing activities. Many see this program as opening their catch data to a number of unknown entities.”
The biggest of those “entities” would be the public. The state now hides data on how much money individual commerical salmon fishermen are making by mining the ocean for a common property resource and does not require they to report bycatch – such as starry flounder in Cook Inlet – that they discard.
Meanwhile, critics of the Bering Sea fishery claim that the federal monitoring now in place isn’t perfect, which is true, and argue that the Chinook bycatch could be significantly underreported. But even if observers were underreporting the catch by 100 percent, the improvement in the Yukon return would rise by only about 1.2 percent, according to the NOAA study, leaving it still well below the ability of the state sonar to detect a change.
Not that this is likely to alter the bycatch rant.
The Covid-19 pandemic days of “listen to the scientists” are now over, and Alaska has returned ot the days of people listening to what they want to believe, and some people – Peltola among them – deeply want to believe that the Yukon River would be full of salmon if the largest of U.S. fisheries – the pollock fishery – were shut down.
That weather and climate dictate how natural systems function is a hard thing to grasp in a now very urban America, where most people are out of touch with the natural world.
Categories: News, Outdoors
Arraignment of Amos Lane in District Court
Utqiagvik (formerly Barrow), Alaska
August 6, 1993
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When I pushed open the heavy gray doors of the courtroom, heads turned toward me as though it were a wedding, but nobody smiled. I wished I weren’t dragging a suitcase, but I’d come straight from the airport because my office said arraignment had already begun. I stashed the suitcase in a back corner and headed up the aisle.
The courtroom usually sat empty on a Friday morning, and usually was as quiet as a church, which it resembled with its pinstriped gray carpeting and blond wood spectator pews. Instead of an altar, we had a judge’s bench and jury box. Today the place was standing room only, and it buzzed with the murmurs of impatient spectators.
“Amos Lane is his name,” Liz, our office manager, had said when she phoned me in South Carolina in the middle of my first vacation in three years. “They’re holding him on misdemeanors now, but they think he killed the Ipalook sisters.”
“The Ipalook sisters!”
Fred Ipalook Elementary School in Utqiagvik was named for the family patriarch, the first Inupiaq (formerly called Eskimo) school principal.
“Both of them strangled, one raped,” Liz said.
I was standing in my parents’ kitchen, looking through the magnolia trees blooming on their lawn, trying to register what Liz was saying.
“Listen…I know you haven’t been out in a while,” she went on. “Do you want me to have Anchorage send somebody up temporary?”
It took me a while to answer.
“No, I’ll come. It’s my territory.”
My parents’ friends had asked me why I went so far away to defend people who might be dangerous. I had two explanations. The first involved money, the second was hard to explain, so I usually tried to change the subject.
The first was that my daughter was in law school and my son had just started college. Financial aid departments were generous to a widow like me, with meager resources, but the schools were still expensive. I learned that oil-rich Alaska provided good salaries for public defenders, especially if you were willing to go to a bush office, so I sold the old farmhouse near Olympia, Washington, that had been our family home for eleven years; managed to get through the Alaska bar exam; and moved to Arctic Alaska.
The second answer was that the midnight sun and the polar night and the white owls and white bears and white foxes of the Arctic fascinated me. Especially the white owls.
Public Safety officers filled the back pews. Their presence tended to put pressure on the magistrate to set a high bail. I knew it would be part of my job today to remind the court and the prosecutor that we were only here on misdemeanors. My new client might be a suspect in these shocking murders but had not been charged with them. No one had.
I spotted Ed Ellingsworth, local lead detective, his cadaverous frame drooping over a corner of a pew. A young female reporter sat beside him, plump and giggly. I rather liked the way she never spelled the district attorney’s name right. The name was Slusser, but she always wrote Slusher. She also garbled some Inupiat words, and used k, q, and g interchangeably, but so did a lot of people. The language is not yet entirely standardized, but then, neither is English. At least she had learned that Inupiat was a noun and Inupiaq an adjective.
Words that still confused me were the names of the area. When I first arrived, I was told that historic areas in the middle of town were referred to as “Ukpeagvik,” with a “p,” and that the name meant “place where the snowy owls gather.” How lovely, I thought—both the name and the glorious creatures themselves. At the time, the town was called Barrow, a proper British name, but then the townspeople voted to return to the ancient name of Utqiagvik, or “place where roots are dug.” No doubt both names are accurate, and the difference between them perhaps neither the reporter nor I will ever fully understand, but I preferred the owls.
Two entire middle pews were occupied by members of the Ipalook family, looking stricken and exhausted. There were also many spectators who came to court out of boredom. Utqiagvik didn’t have a movie theater. In the front row, there was a group of young women in summer parkas, some with babies folded inside their front zippers.
A faint, comforting scent of seal cooking oil pervaded the room.
My new client, Amos Lane—it would have to be him—sat alone in handcuffs at the defense table, bearing the angry stares at his back. All I could see was that he was a Native man with long black hair and muscular shoulders wearing an orange jumpsuit, and that he needed some company. I passed through the pony gate in the bar and took my place beside him.
His eyes flicked sideways over me, and I saw in his glance that he lumped public defenders together with bailiffs, clerks, police, DAs, judges, and everyone else who put him and kept him in jail.
“You’re Amos Lane? My name’s Rebecca Wright. I’m the public defender for the North Slope Borough. Let’s see what we’ve got.”
Alaska is divided into boroughs rather than counties. The North Slope Borough, an area the size of Wyoming, occupies the northern tier of the state. The Inupiat control the North Slope Borough financially and politically. While many teachers, doctors, and lawyers are taniks, non-Natives, they serve at the pleasure of Native authorities—and may be, and have been, asked to leave if they don’t serve well.
Without a word, Amos passed me the mess of papers in front of him. There were two misdemeanor complaints filed yesterday, and a petition for misdemeanor probation revocation filed instanter. Now.
The first complaint declared Lane was the subject of a citizen’s arrest by one Harold Killbear, whom he had assaulted.
He whispered, “That’s bullshit. The guy was beating up his girlfriend and I stopped him, is all. I got witnesses.”
I shrugged.
What struck me about the complaint was the “citizen’s arrest” part. It signified that no law enforcement officer had witnessed Lane committing any crime. To arrest on a misdemeanor, according to Alaska law, an officer actually had to see the offense happening. Otherwise, the defendant could only be summoned to come into court at a later time. But Killbear could file his own complaint and ask for assistance in taking anyone into custody right away.
I recalled that Killbear himself had appeared in court some weeks previously on a charge of DUI. I wondered, if I ever made it so far as my office this morning, whether I would find that the case against Killbear had been opportunely dismissed.
I felt my hackles rising. It was bad enough for Lane to sit alone in a courtroom of people who wanted somebody, anybody, to be jailed for a serious crime, without Public Safety piling on fake charges. I wished I’d had a chance to read over the file or even just talk to him before the hearing. The initial stages of a case of this magnitude had to be done right.
And I would have liked to tell Mr. Lane my initial reaction to the Killbear complaint, but we couldn’t afford to appear to furtively conspire in front of the crowd. Utqiagvik was so small that each and every person in the courtroom was a potential juror.
“I’ve heard of you,” Lane muttered.
He didn’t say whether what he’d heard was good or bad.
I gave him a polite smile. “I’ve heard of you, too,” I said, “all the way to South Carolina.” Lane started to inquire what I had heard, but I held up a hand and focused on the next charge.
In this complaint, Johnny Aveoganna accused Lane of stealing some ivory from his home. Uh-huh. I knew Aveoganna. He was a talented and prolific carver of ivory, a friendly and generous man, and a heavy drinker. He sold a lot of ivory. I had bought from him myself, a classic polar bear carved from part of a walrus tusk, and a smaller gull and a seal of fossilized ivory. He also gave away a lot of his work, especially to friends who dropped by for a drink.
If Public Safety had found some ivory signed by Aveoganna in Lane’s possession, he could be accused of stealing it. At trial Aveoganna could explain the ivory was a gift. Even if Amos had, in fact, stolen the ivory, the easygoing Johnny might call it a gift, just for old times’ sake.
On the other hand, Aveoganna’s ivory was not the tourist-trinket kind that sold cheaply in Anchorage. Its real value could kick the charge up from misdemeanor into felony if Public Safety decided they really wanted Lane and couldn’t find anything else with which to hold him, at least until the grand jury met to indict someone in the murder case. Hopefully, as an ultimate last resort, an Utqiagvik trial jury of people who knew Aveoganna as Lane and I did, and Fairbanks didn’t, would make short work of the charge.
“Mr. Lane, are you on any kind of parole or probation status?”
“No. I maxed out.”
Only the hardcore went the route of serving every day of their suspended time, the time that would be held over their heads when they were released to parole. That Lane had served every day told me that he didn’t want anybody, anywhere, having a leash on him.
I picked up the remaining papers, a misdemeanor probation revocation petition, with two fingers and looked at him inquisitively.
“That was just this stupid fight write-up I caught right before I got out. The guy lied. They were going to charge it as a felony, but then we copped this deal and I pled to it as a misdemeanor. They did it mostly so they could release me into alcohol treatment instead of the street.”
My head had begun to ache. What he was saying could be true. A lot of inmate squabbles, or misunderstandings by guards, led to empty charges. On the other hand, his previous record might show that he was a dangerous drunk who tended to get violent, and that whatever parole or probation officer had tried to guide him into treatment was doing the right thing.
Beyond those considerations, I grew puzzled that nowhere in this stack of paper was there any reference to the deaths of the two sisters. I had missed a birthday celebration and flown 3,800 miles to represent Amos Lane. If Liz was right and this guy was a suspect in the case, so far no one had come up with any evidence against him. Liz was Inupiaq herself, and she and her extended family members always knew what had happened, who was accused, and who was probably guilty.
Unlike Public Safety, I might add.
I studied his face. “Mr. Lane, I don’t recall seeing you in court before. You’re not from Utqiagvik, are you.”
It was not a question.
“No way,” he said. “I’m from Point Hope.”
Utqiagvik was on the northern edge of Alaska and was in fact the northernmost community in the United States. Point Hope was home to a few hundred people on the western rim, so remote it made Utqiagvik seem like a world hub. The people of Point Hope had once successfully resisted the federal government’s plan of detonating a thermonuclear device to create a harbor on their coast.
Good for them.
Point Hope is also one of the oldest continually inhabited communities on the North American continent. Inupiat have lived there 2,500 years.
***
Excerpted from Sisters of the Midnight Sun: A Murder in Arctic Alaska. By Rebecca Wright Stevens. Copyright 2026. Reprinted with permission. All rights reserved.
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