Most American school children learn that Japan attacked Pearl Harbor on December 7, 1941, leading us to join World War II. This week marks the 75th anniversary of Japanese-Americans being subsequently rounded up and interned as suspected enemies of the state. But there's another tragic and untold story of American citizens who were also interned during the war. I'm a member of the Ahtna tribe of Alaska and I've spent the better part of 30 years uncovering and putting together fragments of a story that deserves to be told.

In June 1942, Japan invaded and occupied Kiska and Attu, the westernmost islands of Alaska's Aleutian Chain, an archipelago of 69 islands stretching some 1,200 miles across the North Pacific Ocean toward Russia's Kamchatka Peninsula. From a strategic perspective, Japan wanted to close what they perceived as America's back door to the Far East. For thousands of years, the islands have been inhabited by a resourceful indigenous people called Aleuts. During the Russian-American Period (1733 to 1867), when Alaska was a colonial possession of Russia, Russian fur-seekers decimated Aleut populations through warfare, disease, and slavery.

Shortly after Japan's invasion, American naval personnel arrived with orders to round up and evacuate Aleuts from the Aleutian Chain and the Pribilof Islands to internment camps almost 2,000 miles away near Juneau. Stewardship of the internment camps would fall under the jurisdiction of the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Services (USF&WS). Furthermore, orders included the burning of the villages to the ground, including their beloved churches, as part of a "scorched earth" policy. The Army's stated purpose was to protect the Aleuts, who were American citizens, from the dangers of war. But one officer told astonished Aleuts that it was, as he put it, "Because ya'll look like Japs and we wouldn't want to shoot you." That exchange is part of a documentary video called Aleut Evacuation.

With only the clothes on their backs, 881 Aleuts from nine different island villages were forced aboard the USS Delarof and transported to dilapidated abandoned salmon canneries where the roofs and walls had holes, the windows and doors were broken, and the floors were so rotten that people fell through them. There was no electricity, sanitation, or running water.

The Aleuts were interned against their will for the duration of the war, long after the Japanese were routed out of Alaska, and were largely neglected by the very government that said it was protecting them. Ironically, less than 30 miles away, over 700 Nazis who had been captured in North Africa were imprisoned at a POW camp at Excursion Bay. The Nazis, sworn enemies of America and our allies, were treated far better than the Aleuts, so much so that military historian Stan Cohen later wrote in The Forgotten War, "All in all, the German imprisonment in Alaska was quite pleasant."

In May 1943, the United States government even enslaved many of the men from the Pribilof Islands. The government threatened that none of the Aleuts would ever be allowed to go home (even after the war) if the men didn't "volunteer" to harvest fur seals for the war effort. By international treaty, only Native Pribilovians could harvest fur seals. They were told the furs would be made into liners for aviation jackets and helmets for American pilots and bomber crews, which was a lie. The men spent the summer sealing season on the tiny Pribilof Islands clubbing over 125,000 seals. The government sold the furs to the Fouke Fur Company of St. Louis, Mo., for $1.5 million in profits, all of which went straight into the government's coffers.

The Japanese invasion of Alaska never made it very far beyond the westernmost Aleutian Islands of Kiska and Attu. Over a period of 15 months, American soldiers eventually recaptured the mountainous islands in a series of battles which came to be known as the Forgotten War. In all, half a million soldiers — American, Canadian, Russian, and Japanese — were involved in the conflict, one of the least known yet toughest-fought battles in WWII, as explained by Brian Garfield in The Thousand Mile War. Some of the most horrific accounts of hand-to-hand combat in World War II happened at the end, when over 500 Japanese soldiers, unwilling to surrender or to be taken alive after a desperate banzai (suicide) attack, blew themselves up en masse with hand grenades at the foot of Engineer Hill.

The war in the Aleutians gave America its first theater-wide victory over Japan and the first experience at amphibious assaults in the war. Some 118 Aleuts perished from lack of warmth, food, and medical care. Smaller Aleut villages lost as much as a quarter of their pre-internment population. The Aleut deaths were avoidable. Medical supplies that had been allocated for the internment camps were instead taken by the military. The 700 German prisoners all returned home after the war without a single one dying during their imprisonment.

Although the Japanese invasion was defeated by the fall of 1943, the Aleuts remained interned until the end of the war in mid-1945. In 1980, President Reagan signed the Commission on Wartime Relocation and Internment of Civilians Act, which authorized the establishment of a commission to review the facts and circumstances surrounding the relocation and internment of tens of thousands of American civilians during World War II.

Forty-two years after the Aleuts returned to their burned and ransacked villages, the U.S. government finally recognized that their constitutional rights had been violated.

In 1988, Congress passed the Aleutian and Pribilof Islands Restitution Act, which paid $12,000 to Aleut surviving victims of the internment camps. By then, about half of the survivors had long since passed away.

John Smelcer's forthcoming historical novel, Kiska, is about the Aleut Internment experience.

Copyright 2017 NPR. To see more, visit http://www.npr.org/.

Mitch Seavey has been the first to cross the finish line under the famed burled arch before — he previously won the famed Alaska Iditarod Trail Sled Dog Race in 2013 and 2004.

This year he became the fastest and the oldest musher to win the race.

He also beat his son, defending champion Dallas Seavey, who had wins in 2012 and 2014.

In fact, Mitch Seavey shaved several hours off the record that his son set last year.

Seavey won the race, arriving in Nome in 8 days, 3 hours, 40 minutes and 13 seconds, race stats show.

"Fifty-seven used to be old, and it's not anymore," Seavey said during a post-race news conference.

The Seavey family's history goes back to the first Iditarod in 1973 when Mitch Seavey's dad raced in it.

Dan Seavey raced in five Iditarods.

On March 6, more than 70 teams started the 1,000-mile course in Fairbanks.

The Alaska Dispatch News interviewed the winner after the race:

"'They love speed,' Seavey said of his sled dogs. 'I think it frustrated them to go too slow, so I just let 'em roll. It was scary because I've never gone that far that fast ever, but that's what they wanted to do and maybe it's a new chapter.'

"Seavey's team recorded 10 and 11 mph runs and the separation he built over other racers gave him the flexibility to bank generous rest for his dogs, and himself, as they moved up the Norton Sound coast in the race's final days.

"'They only know one thing and that's 9.5 to 10 mph and they hit their feet, and they hit their speed and that's what they do. And they trusted me to stop them when they needed to be stopped, and feed them, and I did that, and they gave me all they could. But I guarantee they're tired now,' said the new champion."

With the victory, Seavey gets a $75,000 check and a new truck.

Copyright 2017 NPR. To see more, visit http://www.npr.org/.

By a largely party-line vote Tuesday, the Senate approved a bill that repeals Obama-era hunting restrictions on national wildlife refuges in Alaska. The House already voted last month to abolish those restrictions — which were instituted by the Fish and Wildlife Service in 2016 to protect predator species from hunters — and so the bill now heads to the desk of President Trump, who is widely expected to sign it.

The FWS rule facing repeal explicitly prohibited many kinds of "predator control" on the 16 federally owned refuges in Alaska. That prohibition included a ban on the aerial hunting, live trapping or baiting of predators such as bears and wolves — as well as on killing those predators while near their dens or their cubs.

Alaska Rep. Don Young, the Republican sponsor of the bill passed Tuesday, says these restrictions represented federal overreach.

"Not only does this action undermine Alaska's ability to manage fish and wildlife upon refuge lands," Young said, "it fundamentally destroys a cooperative relationship between Alaska and the federal government."

Republican Sen. Dan Sullivan, also representing Alaska, echoed those concerns Tuesday, saying the restrictions changed the state's relationship with FWS "from one of cooperation to subservience,"The Associated Press reports.

"This rule is about Alaska," he said.

Others, like Democratic Sen. Maria Cantwell of Washington, were not convinced.

"This isn't about states' rights," she said, according to the wire service. "It's not about prohibiting hunting. ... It's about how we can manage these wildlife refuges to the degree that agencies believe are necessary for the preservation of these wildlife heritage areas."

As the Alaska Dispatch News points out, this debate gets to the core of a long-running dispute:

"At the heart of the disagreement between state and federal wildlife managers is what each group thinks should guide its purpose. The federal government has argued that the goal on refuges and in parks should be biodiversity. The state Board of Game has an interest in ensuring maximum sustained populations for hunting."

Ensuring the "maximum sustained populations" of commonly hunted prey species like elk, moose and caribou often means reining in the populations of their predators — namely, bears and wolves. In the 2016 restrictions, federal regulators argued that the Alaskan Board of Game had gone too far in prioritizing the populations of prey species over predators.

It was an argument pursued by several Democratic senators, including New Jersey's Cory Booker, and environmental groups who were opposed to the rollback.

"This isn't hunting — it's slaughter," Brett Hartl, government affairs director at the Center for Biological Diversity, said in a statement. "Killing wolves and bears in this cruel, unsportsmanlike fashion is outrageous, especially in national wildlife refuges that belong to all Americans."

He added: "Repealing these protections also undermines the critical role predators play in healthy ecosystems."

Still, Republican Sen. Lisa Murkowski of Alaska says these objections come from activists unfamiliar with Alaska, where "state management of fish and wildlife is practically sacrosanct."

"Opponents will allege that the repeal of this rule will legalize brutal predator control practices," Murkowski said, according to the Dispatch News. "The Senate should know that it is already illegal for hunters to use certain practices — gas against wolves, traps to bears. You can't do this in national wildlife refuges in Alaska."

In working to repeal the FWS rule, Republican lawmakers turned again to the Congressional Review Act, a measure they also used to great effect last month in rolling back another Obama-era regulation.

As we explained then, the CRA is a means to review and cancel regulations issued in the final days of an outgoing administration: "The move allows the Senate to proceed with a simple majority, thus enabling GOP senators to avoid a filibuster by Democrats."

Copyright 2017 NPR. To see more, visit http://www.npr.org/.

In February of last year, Alaskan Gov. Bill Walker signed an administrative order to help jumpstart mariculture, or sea farming, in the state. One Juneau couple is whipping up a recipe to make local kelp an enticing business and snack. They're part of a growing number of startups that see Alaska seaweed as a marketable food.

Kelp has become a big part of Matt Kern and Lia Heifetz's relationship.

"It's basically all we talk about it," Heifetz says with a laugh. "Every day of the week. Every night of the week. Every weekend."

Kern and Heifetz are dedicating so much of their time to seaweed because they've been laying the groundwork for a new business.

"Kelp salsa," Kern says. "It's made predominantly from bull kelp that we harvest from around Juneau."

The Alaska Department of Fish and Game doesn't have a formalized process for collecting wild kelp for commercial use — at least not yet. So, the couple forages under an experimental permit.

A lot of work and late nights go into making a batch of salsa. Kern pops the lid off a small mason jar and opens a bag of corn chips.

"Today we have a green salsa verde," he says. "And another flavor called campfire that has roasted garlic and onions."

Both jars of salsa contain lots of minced bull kelp. The campfire flavor is tart from the seaweed and mildly spiced.

The couple recently received a $40,000 Path to Prosperity grant, which helps Southeast Alaskan entrepreneurs grow their business. Last year, they made about 2,000 jars of salsa, mostly cooked up in their home kitchen and sold at the local public market. But they want to eventually expand distribution beyond Juneau.

Having access to enough foraged seaweed for that expansion could be difficult, but a California-based startup might be able to help. Blue Evolution is looking at the prospect of seaweed farming in Alaska. Right now, the company grows the plant in Mexico, dries it and turns it into pasta.

"They were really interested in doing domestic production," says marine biologist Tamsen Peeples, who is employed by Blue Evolution and works on the science of seaweed farming at the University of Alaska Southeast.

She says coastal states like Maine are already kelp farming, but developing it in Alaska has its advantages.

"Alaska has bountiful amounts of coastline, obviously, and clean water," Peeples says. "As an Alaskan, I think it's a great opportunity for individuals who otherwise in the winter are laying low between commercial fishing and tourism."

But one thing Alaska doesn't have is easy access to kelp seed. The department of fish and game says you can only farm with plants native to the region. An oyster company in Homer, Alaska sells some wild seaweed that grows on its lines. But the farmed variety is only growing at a couple of test sites in the state.

That's where Peeples' research comes in. She's been working on propagating seed from local kelp spores.

"In order for this industry to grow, we're going to have to get a number of other hatcheries to come online," Peeples says.

A new House bill could make it easier for nonprofit hatcheries to receive state loans. Even though those wouldn't apply to a company like Blue Evolution, Peeples thinks it's a good thing.

So far, she has successfully incubated varieties like sugar and ribbon kelp. And those plants are growing in the waters of Kodiak and Ketchikan. Blue Evolution will buy the seaweed back in the spring.

As their kelp salsa business grows, Kern and Heifetz say they're also interested.

"We plan to be sourcing directly from farms in the future," Heifetz says.

For them, it's not about building a seaweed snack empire.

"This wasn't a huge day-to-day leap in our lives ... to go from doing it on our home scale," Kern says. "'Because this is what we'd be doing with our time anyway."

That means building their business sustainably, making thousands of jars of kelp salsa and sharing it with friends and customers.

This report comes fromAlaska's Energy Desk, a public media collaboration focused on energy and the environment. You can hear the audio here.

Copyright 2017 KTOO-FM. To see more, visit KTOO-FM.

On Friday, employees of BP Exploration Alaska discovered an uncontrolled gas leak in an oil and gas well on Alaska's North Slope, near the community of Deadhorse. Soon after, they determined that the well was also spraying a mist of crude oil.

BP reported the leak and formed a "unified command," which included responders from Alaska's Department of Environmental Conservation, the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency, and the North Slope Borough.

The well vented gas throughout the weekend. By Sunday, the crude was no longer spraying, and workers were able to activate a safety valve that reduced the pressure of the gas.

On Monday, nearly three days after the leak was found, ADEC announced the unified command had to managed to "kill" the well overnight and end the gas leak.

"The area impacted is limited to gravel," says Candice Bressler, spokesperson for ADEC. "There have been no reports of impacted wildlife." Oil droplets were found on about 1.5 acres of the well's drill pad, according to The Associated Press.

The community of Nuiqsut, 50 miles west of the site, had been notified of the incident, but was not evacuated.

"Responders determined that the well had 'jacked up,' or risen, approximately 3 – 4 feet; this vertical movement of the well caused the pressure gauge to break off and prevented operations from pumping into the well to kill it," ADEC reported.

BP began drilling at the massive Prudhoe Bay oil field in 1968. It has generated more than 12 billion barrels of oil, according to BP, and remains one of North America's largest oil fields.

The leak happened amid efforts to boost output from aging wells and reach new supplies in the North Slope's oil fields, reports Bloomberg:

"North Slope production rose to 565,000 barrels a day in March, its highest level since December 2013. That's still down by almost three-quarters from the peak of more than 2 million barrels in the late 1980s."

In a 2011 settlement with the Department of Justice, BP agreed to pay a $25 million civil penalty and carry out a "system-wide integrity management program" after it spilled more than 5,000 barrels of crude oil from its pipelines on Alaska's North Slope in 2006. Five years later, BP agreed to pay more than $20 billion in penalties for the 2010 Deepwater Horizon accident and oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico.

Copyright 2017 NPR. To see more, visit http://www.npr.org/.

Buy a ticket in the Nenana Ice Classic and you could win nearly $300,000. All you have to do is guess when the ice covering Tanana River at the city of Nenana, Alaska will break up.

Brothers Josh and Judah Ridgeway live in Nenana, a community of 375 people, about an hour southwest of Fairbanks. The brothers were hired by the Ice Classic to make regular ice measurements. They use a gas powered drill to bore through 3 to 4 feet of ice — though it's sometimes more. They do this at several locations on the Tanana, a few times a week, in April.

"It's actually kind of a fun project, coming out here and drillin' the holes for 'em," says Josh. "Get out here in the morning when the sun's comin' up and — play."

Back in 1917, railroad engineers in Nenana wagered bets on when the ice would break up on the river. It evolved into an annual statewide guessing game in which hundreds of thousands of tickets are sold. On each ticket the buyer writes when they think the ice will go out, down to the minute.

The winning time is determined by a Rube Goldberg contraption, involving a tripod on the river ice, connected to a clock on shore.

It's all good fun, and possible good fortune for ticket holders, but the Ice Classic also provides a record of climate change.

Dating back 101 years, Ice Classic records are valuable data to National Weather Service climatologist Rick Thoman. According to Thoman, it's not just the breakup dates, but that they've been gathered in a consistent way for so long.

The ice has gone out on the Tanana River at Nenana as early as April 20, and as late as May 20, but Thoman points to a gradual trend toward earlier breakup dates. He says what's now an average breakup date, about April 30, would have been an unusually early date in the first part of the 20th century.

Dennis Argall has been involved in the Nenana Ice Classic for 50 years and is the president of the board. He sits at a 1980s vintage computer terminal inside the Ice Classic headquarters. In recent years, Argall has witnessed the second-latest breakup on record, as well as several of the earliest. But he says he doesn't believe in "that global warming stuff," or at least the human-caused aspect.

"I think humans would think a whole lot of themselves if they think they could affect the globe," Argall says. "You know, it's a big world."

That sentiment contradicts widespread scientific consensus, but it's a belief common among some Alaskans. Ice driller Josh Ridgeway says he thinks it's a cycle that human activity might be contributing to. The Ridgeway brothers made the final ice measurement of the season on April 24. It showed 29 inches of deteriorating ice, too risky to walk on. That means Alaskans will soon know who wins this year's Ice Classic jackpot, and that summer is on the way.

Copyright 2017 KUAC-FM. To see more, visit KUAC-FM.

In rural Alaska, providing health care means overcoming a lot of hurdles.

Fickle weather that can leave patients stranded, for one.

Also: complicated geography. Many Alaskan villages have no roads connecting them with hospitals or specialists, so people depend on local clinics and a cadre of devoted primary care doctors.

I followed one young family physician, Dr. Adam McMahan, on his regular weekly visit to the clinic in the village of Klukwan.

It's a speck of a town alongside the Chilkat River in Southeast Alaska, framed by snowy mountains that loom in the distance.

The clinic staff drives up to Klukwan twice a week from the bigger town of Haines, 22 miles to the south.

On our drive, McMahan points out the clouds of dust blowing off sandbars along the river: "Likely today we'll see somebody with a lung issue because of the sand coming off the river."

Klukwan is populated mostly by Alaska Natives of the Tlingit tribe, fewer than 100 people in all, with a few hundred more people in the surrounding area.

Over the three years that he's been practicing medicine in Klukwan, McMahan has come to know his patients well, and that becomes clear as he begins the day's consultations.

With patient Lani Hotch, along with reviewing her cholesterol and blood sugar levels, McMahan remembers that she has a new dog. "What type of puppy did you get?" he asks her. (A yellow Lab.)

With fisherman Henry Chatoney, he wonders, "Hey, did you find a deckhand?"

And knowing that Everett Simons grows great potatoes and has been put on a low-starch diet for his diabetes, the doctor joshes, "How often are you sneaking a potato?"

This is the kind of intimate, full-spectrum family medicine the 34-year-old doctor loves.

"I know that Everett, he's an amazing potato farmer," he says. "I know that Henry is full of adventures and has fished Bristol Bay for longer than I've been alive. You get to know your patients as human."

McMahan can trace his inspiration to become a physician back to a striking series of black-and-white photographs he saw in a magazine when he was a teenager. His grandfather was a pediatrician and had a 1948 issue of Life magazine on a shelf in his office. The photo essay by W. Eugene Smith, "Country Doctor," shows a dedicated general practitioner tending to his patients in rural Colorado: making house calls, taping up broken ribs, stitching wounds.

"Those stills were really captivating," McMahan says. "I was looking at those the other day and they're not that different than what we do now here in Alaska."

The Klukwan clinic is open on Tuesdays and Thursdays. It's part of the Southeast Alaska Regional Health Consortium, or SEARHC.

The clinic has two exam rooms, a dental suite and a small lab for basic diagnostics.

"A lot of it is doing the best we can in the moment with limited resources," McMahan says. "I can't send you down the street to go see a cardiologist. I can't get a CT [scan] done in 10 minutes."

On the day we visit, McMahan is seeing mostly elderly patients, including one, a Tlingit elder named Evelyn Hotch, who is confined to her bed after a stroke.

So with stethoscope looped around his neck, McMahan walks down the road to pay her a house call.

Once we're inside her home, the first thing Evelyn Hotch does is offer all of us a snack: dried red seaweed. "You came to an Indian house," she says, "and this is what Indians like to eat!"

It's only after McMahan has shared her seaweed and inquired about the grandchildren whose photos cover just about every inch of her walls that he turns to her medical issues, asking about pain and what supplies she needs. "We'll see you next week, OK?" he says as he heads out.

The goal with regular primary care like this is to keep people out of the emergency room. But in such a small, remote town, what happens in an emergency? There's a volunteer ambulance squad that will drive up from Haines, about a half hour away.

Haines doesn't have a hospital, though, so critically ill or injured patients might need to be medevacked by Coast Guard helicopter from Haines to Juneau.

"The vibratory effect of that, when your heart rate's beating fast and you've got a really sick patient, hearing the helicopter, hearing the blades, is such a relief," McMahan says.

Once a patient makes it to Juneau, he or she might still need to be flown by air ambulance to bigger hospitals in Anchorage or Seattle, hundreds of miles away.

"The Rubik's Cube of resource coordination and transport is probably one of our biggest challenges," McMahan says.

In part because of these complicated logistics, Alaska has some of the highest health care costs in the country.

For people who don't have health insurance, "it's often cause for catastrophe, financially," McMahan says.

But, he adds, since Alaska expanded its Medicaid program in September 2015 under the Affordable Care Act, he is able to treat patients now who had gone for years without access to primary care.

More than 32,000 Alaskans have gained health coverage through Medicaid expansion.

McMahan worries about what might happen to his patients if the ACA is repealed and replaced by Congress: "I think if the Medicaid expansion is undercut, people will go without care," he tells me. "They're not going to be able to afford it."

Even though the current health care debate is taking place thousands of miles away from his clinic, it hits home.

"It's amazing how politics impact my day-to-day life when it comes to just getting somebody basic, basic care," he says.

For now, though, Dr. McMahan turns to his immediate concerns: He has more patients to see, and more stories to hear.

The "Our Land" series is produced by Elissa Nadworny.

Copyright 2017 NPR. To see more, visit http://www.npr.org/.

The tiny village of Newtok near Alaska's western coast has been sliding into the Ninglick River for years. As temperatures increase — faster there than in the rest of the U.S. — the frozen permafrost underneath Newtok is thawing. About 70 feet of land a year erode away, putting the village's colorful buildings, some on stilts, ever closer to the water's edge.

Now, in an unprecedented test case, Newtok wants the federal government to declare these mounting impacts of climate change an official disaster. Villagers say it's their last shot at unlocking the tens of millions of dollars needed to relocate the entire community.

"We just need to get out of there," says Romy Cadiente, the village relocation coordinator. "For the safety of the 450 people there."

Cadiente spoke while in Anchorage recently, where he met with state officials about moving the village, which includes a school built in 1958 by the Bureau of Indian Affairs that drew nearby subsistence hunters and fishers to settle.

Coming to terms with climate's impact on the Alaska Native village has been gut-wrenching for many. But a new village has been chosen 9 miles away, and several houses are already built.

Cadiente says the problem is money: The Army Corps of Engineers has estimated it will cost $80 million to $130 million to relocate key infrastructure.

"The price tag on this village move is astronomical, and what we have right now is nowhere near," he says.

Many of Alaska's villages are dealing with erosion and thawing permafrost. But Newtok's needs may be the most immediate. It has already lost its barge landing, sewage lagoon and landfill. As river water seeps in and land sinks, it expects to lose its source of drinking water this year, and its school and airport by 2020.

After years trying to piece together state and federal funding to relocate, Cadiente says Newtok has run out of other options.

Usually, the president, with input from the Federal Emergency Management Agency, declares a disaster after a specific catastrophic event. But Newtok is asking for the declaration based on mounting damage from erosion and thawing permafrost over the past decade.

"My first reaction is, it's exciting," says Rob Verchick, who teaches disaster law and climate adaptation at Loyola University in New Orleans.

He says Newtok's request is likely a long shot. But he thinks it needs to be done. "And I think that it is going to lead to a very important conversation that we need to be having," he says.

Verchick says FEMA has pushed communities to plan for climate change, but the federal government doesn't have policies to deal with issues like relocation. As more places face the problem, Verchick says they — like Newtok — may need to get creative in seeking a legal solution.

A recent change gave federally recognized tribes like Newtok the right to request a disaster declaration from the White House directly. Mike Walleri, Newtok's attorney, argues that nothing in the law prevents the president from declaring a disaster for a multiyear event.

"You know, disasters are not planned," Walleri says. "They don't come in one size fits all."

If there's no money to relocate the whole village together, Newtok residents could be forced to scatter, with some even moving 500 miles away to Anchorage.

George Carl, the 66-year-old village council vice president, says it's not just houses that are at stake, but his community, culture, Yup'ik language and identity.

"Being born an Eskimo from that village, you know, that's my life," he says. "Place me to another village or city, it's not for me."

The ultimate decision on whether to declare a disaster lies with the president. Newtok's leaders hope to get an answer before President Obama leaves office next week.

This report comes fromAlaska's Energy Desk, a public media collaboration focused on energy and the environment.

Copyright 2017 Alaska Public Telecommunications Inc.. To see more, visit Alaska Public Telecommunications Inc..

The Environmental Protection Agency's presence at an environmental conference in Alaska this week was cut in half, after the Trump administration's transition officials ordered the change. The agency had helped to plan the Alaska Forum on the Environment— but days before it was to start, word came that half of the EPA's 34 planned attendees wouldn't be making the trip.

"We were informed that EPA was directed by the White House transition team to minimize their participation in the Alaska Forum on the Environment to the extent possible," forum director Kurt Eilo says.

The change has created awkward scenes at the conference, particularly at events meant to highlight the EPA's role in Alaska, a state known for both its pristine ecosystems and its oil production.

More than a thousand people attend the multiday event in downtown Anchorage each year, and the EPA is normally a major partner. This year, agency officials were scheduled to take part in about 30 sessions on everything from drinking water and sanitation in rural Alaska to climate change adaptation.

In an emailed statement, EPA transition official Doug Ericksen says the decision to cut back is an effort to limit excessive travel costs. He says a review last week found that EPA spent $44 million on travel last year, including sending employees to 25 outside conferences. When officials learned that 34 employees were slated to attend the Alaska event, they slashed the number to 17.

"This is one small example of how EPA will be working cooperatively with our staff and our outside partners to be better stewards of the American people's money," Ericksen said.

Some EPA staff whose plans to attend the conference were revoked would have come from Seattle or Washington, D.C. — but Eilo said others are basedjust blocks away from the downtown Anchorage site.

Eilo himself was an EPA enforcement officer when he founded the Alaska conference two decades ago. He says this is the first time he can recall this happening. While he understands the impulse to review travel spending, he says the cutbacks also raise a red flag.

"There's a lot of uncertainty among folks here at the forum," Eilo said. "There's concern about the tribal programs, there's concern about how we're going to address things like climate change in the next upcoming administration."

As the Alaska Dispatch News reports, one panel discussion that was to feature six EPA staffers Tuesday instead included two EPA representatives. While the topic had originally been planned to center on the agency's grant system, the officials instead fielded questions about changes at the EPA.

The order to reduce staff numbers at the conference is the latest sign of a shift in priorities for the EPA under a new president. Days after President Trump's inauguration, Ericksen said the agency's scientists will likely need to have their work reviewed on a "case by case basis" before it can be made public.

On Thursday, the fourth day of the weeklong conference in Anchorage, attendees kicked snow off their shoes as they walked into the Dena'ina Center. Many were unaware that the EPA presence had been slashed. Organizer Elio acknowledges that the agency worked hard to minimize disruption from the change in plans. In the end, only one of the conference's more than 100 sessions had to be canceled.

The conference drew attendees who had flown in from Alaska's rural communities where the EPA works with tribes to fund programs on drinking water, sanitation and trash collection. Breakout sessions focused on issues such as brownfield cleanup, emergency response and dealing with coastal erosion due to climate change.

Billy Maines is the environmental coordinator for the Curyung Tribal Council in Dillingham, Alaska, who also serves as an adviser to EPA Region 10 on its tribal programs. He said the agency's direct assistance to Alaska's rural communities is vital.

"They're trying to take up and clean up their dumps, landfills, trying to recycle and get what waste goes into their communities, out of their communities," he said.

Maines and others worry the cutback on conference attendees might be a sign of broader, and more painful, budget cuts to come.

Trump's nominee for EPA chief is Scott Pruitt, the Oklahoma attorney general who has criticized — and repeatedly sued — the agency he's now in line to lead.

Pruitt's nomination was advanced to the full Senate last week, after Democrats on the Senate Environment and Public Works Committee refused to attend meetings that were meant to hold confirmation votes on Pruitt.

During his confirmation hearing weeks earlier, Pruitt said his past actions had been made out of concern for his home state and that if he were to lead the EPA, his decisions would be dictated by "the rule of law."

Pruitt, who has questioned climate change, also sought to answer critics who have faulted him for that stance, saying in a January hearing:

"Let me say to you, science tells us that the climate is changing and that human activity in some matter impacts that change. The ability to measure with precision the degree and extent of that impact, and what to do about it, are subject to continuing debate and dialogue. And well it should be."

Rachel Waldholz reports for Alaska Public Media.

Copyright 2017 NPR. To see more, visit http://www.npr.org/.

Polar bears aren't the only beloved Arctic animal threatened by climate change. Scientists believe reindeer are at risk as a warming world makes their main winter food source disappear.

But reindeer on one Alaskan island are surprising researchers.

And that surprise doesn't just come from the fact that the reindeer are hard to spot.

On St. Paul Island, Lauren Divine of the EcoSystem Conservation Office was not having luck seeing a herd of 400 reindeer, even on this treeless island with tundra as far as the eye can see.

Divine helps manage the reindeer on the island, but on this windy day, she's hunting them.

Reindeer aren't native to Alaska. They were brought to rural villages across the state in the late 1800s.

In communities like St. Paul, where grocery prices are astronomical, Divine says residents depend on reindeer to feed their families. And to make it through winter, the reindeer need something as well.

"Reindeer all over the world depend on lichen," Divine says. "They're very high in sugars and starch, and they're considered like a Snickers bar for reindeer in the winter."

But the reindeer on this island ate the lichen faster than it could regrow. Now, it's gone.

Without lichen, reindeer experts would expect to see malnourished or starving animals. And in some places, that's already happening. But the animals on St. Paul Island are thriving.

Greg Finstad, with the University of Alaska Fairbanks Reindeer Research Program, came to study and evaluate the island's reindeer and environment.

On a visit to the island last year, he saw something he had never witnessed before.

"The reindeer are doing something really very interesting," he says. "They have managed to find other things to eat. They've gone underground."

Finstad discovered that instead of lichen, the reindeer are digging up roots and grazing on grass. He says that's good news.

Lichens thrive in arctic climates, but the Arctic is warming faster than the rest of the globe. These higher temperatures mean more wildfires, erratic rainfall and better conditions for other plants that can crowd out the lichen. All of this could mean less lichen for reindeer.

On top of that, a warmer climate means what used to be snow is now rain. A few years ago in Russia, that created an icy barrier so thick the reindeer couldn't stamp through it to get to the lichen. Tens of thousands starved to death.

That's why Finstad thinks it's important that the reindeer in St. Paul are finding something else to eat.

"There's a lot of scientists, researchers, reindeer producers waving their arms in the world [saying] 'Oh climate change, it's the death of reindeer and caribou,'" he says. "But you know what, we have forgotten to tell the reindeer and caribou. Things change, and they change with it."

But ecology professor Mark Boyce of the University of Alberta is not convinced.

"It's an island population, and a very small sample of our global populations of reindeer and caribou and the general pattern has been one of decline," he says. "So I guess I'm not very optimistic."

Still, on this island, reindeer are doing just fine for now. And hunting them is more popular than ever.

This report comes from Alaska's Energy Desk, a public media collaboration focused on energy and the environment.

Copyright 2017 Alaska Public Telecommunications Inc.. To see more, visit Alaska Public Telecommunications Inc..

Most American school children learn that Japan attacked Pearl Harbor on December 7, 1941, leading us to join World War II. This week marks the 75th anniversary of Japanese-Americans being subsequently rounded up and interned as suspected enemies of the state. But there's another tragic and untold story of American citizens who were also interned during the war. I'm a member of the Ahtna tribe of Alaska and I've spent the better part of 30 years uncovering and putting together fragments of a story that deserves to be told.

In June 1942, Japan invaded and occupied Kiska and Attu, the westernmost islands of Alaska's Aleutian Chain, an archipelago of 69 islands stretching some 1,200 miles across the North Pacific Ocean toward Russia's Kamchatka Peninsula. From a strategic perspective, Japan wanted to close what they perceived as America's back door to the Far East. For thousands of years, the islands have been inhabited by a resourceful indigenous people called Aleuts. During the Russian-American Period (1733 to 1867), when Alaska was a colonial possession of Russia, Russian fur-seekers decimated Aleut populations through warfare, disease, and slavery.

Shortly after Japan's invasion, American naval personnel arrived with orders to round up and evacuate Aleuts from the Aleutian Chain and the Pribilof Islands to internment camps almost 2,000 miles away near Juneau. Stewardship of the internment camps would fall under the jurisdiction of the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Services (USF&WS). Furthermore, orders included the burning of the villages to the ground, including their beloved churches, as part of a "scorched earth" policy. The Army's stated purpose was to protect the Aleuts, who were American citizens, from the dangers of war. But one officer told astonished Aleuts that it was, as he put it, "Because ya'll look like Japs and we wouldn't want to shoot you." That exchange is part of a documentary video called Aleut Evacuation.

With only the clothes on their backs, 881 Aleuts from nine different island villages were forced aboard the USS Delarof and transported to dilapidated abandoned salmon canneries where the roofs and walls had holes, the windows and doors were broken, and the floors were so rotten that people fell through them. There was no electricity, sanitation, or running water.

The Aleuts were interned against their will for the duration of the war, long after the Japanese were routed out of Alaska, and were largely neglected by the very government that said it was protecting them. Ironically, less than 30 miles away, over 700 Nazis who had been captured in North Africa were imprisoned at a POW camp at Excursion Bay. The Nazis, sworn enemies of America and our allies, were treated far better than the Aleuts, so much so that military historian Stan Cohen later wrote in The Forgotten War, "All in all, the German imprisonment in Alaska was quite pleasant."

In May 1943, the United States government even enslaved many of the men from the Pribilof Islands. The government threatened that none of the Aleuts would ever be allowed to go home (even after the war) if the men didn't "volunteer" to harvest fur seals for the war effort. By international treaty, only Native Pribilovians could harvest fur seals. They were told the furs would be made into liners for aviation jackets and helmets for American pilots and bomber crews, which was a lie. The men spent the summer sealing season on the tiny Pribilof Islands clubbing over 125,000 seals. The government sold the furs to the Fouke Fur Company of St. Louis, Mo., for $1.5 million in profits, all of which went straight into the government's coffers.

The Japanese invasion of Alaska never made it very far beyond the westernmost Aleutian Islands of Kiska and Attu. Over a period of 15 months, American soldiers eventually recaptured the mountainous islands in a series of battles which came to be known as the Forgotten War. In all, half a million soldiers — American, Canadian, Russian, and Japanese — were involved in the conflict, one of the least known yet toughest-fought battles in WWII, as explained by Brian Garfield in The Thousand Mile War. Some of the most horrific accounts of hand-to-hand combat in World War II happened at the end, when over 500 Japanese soldiers, unwilling to surrender or to be taken alive after a desperate banzai (suicide) attack, blew themselves up en masse with hand grenades at the foot of Engineer Hill.

The war in the Aleutians gave America its first theater-wide victory over Japan and the first experience at amphibious assaults in the war. Some 118 Aleuts perished from lack of warmth, food, and medical care. Smaller Aleut villages lost as much as a quarter of their pre-internment population. The Aleut deaths were avoidable. Medical supplies that had been allocated for the internment camps were instead taken by the military. The 700 German prisoners all returned home after the war without a single one dying during their imprisonment.

Although the Japanese invasion was defeated by the fall of 1943, the Aleuts remained interned until the end of the war in mid-1945. In 1980, President Reagan signed the Commission on Wartime Relocation and Internment of Civilians Act, which authorized the establishment of a commission to review the facts and circumstances surrounding the relocation and internment of tens of thousands of American civilians during World War II.

Forty-two years after the Aleuts returned to their burned and ransacked villages, the U.S. government finally recognized that their constitutional rights had been violated.

In 1988, Congress passed the Aleutian and Pribilof Islands Restitution Act, which paid $12,000 to Aleut surviving victims of the internment camps. By then, about half of the survivors had long since passed away.

John Smelcer's forthcoming historical novel, Kiska, is about the Aleut Internment experience.

Copyright 2017 NPR. To see more, visit http://www.npr.org/.

Mitch Seavey has been the first to cross the finish line under the famed burled arch before — he previously won the famed Alaska Iditarod Trail Sled Dog Race in 2013 and 2004.

This year he became the fastest and the oldest musher to win the race.

He also beat his son, defending champion Dallas Seavey, who had wins in 2012 and 2014.

In fact, Mitch Seavey shaved several hours off the record that his son set last year.

Seavey won the race, arriving in Nome in 8 days, 3 hours, 40 minutes and 13 seconds, race stats show.

"Fifty-seven used to be old, and it's not anymore," Seavey said during a post-race news conference.

The Seavey family's history goes back to the first Iditarod in 1973 when Mitch Seavey's dad raced in it.

Dan Seavey raced in five Iditarods.

On March 6, more than 70 teams started the 1,000-mile course in Fairbanks.

The Alaska Dispatch News interviewed the winner after the race:

"'They love speed,' Seavey said of his sled dogs. 'I think it frustrated them to go too slow, so I just let 'em roll. It was scary because I've never gone that far that fast ever, but that's what they wanted to do and maybe it's a new chapter.'

"Seavey's team recorded 10 and 11 mph runs and the separation he built over other racers gave him the flexibility to bank generous rest for his dogs, and himself, as they moved up the Norton Sound coast in the race's final days.

"'They only know one thing and that's 9.5 to 10 mph and they hit their feet, and they hit their speed and that's what they do. And they trusted me to stop them when they needed to be stopped, and feed them, and I did that, and they gave me all they could. But I guarantee they're tired now,' said the new champion."

With the victory, Seavey gets a $75,000 check and a new truck.

Copyright 2017 NPR. To see more, visit http://www.npr.org/.

By a largely party-line vote Tuesday, the Senate approved a bill that repeals Obama-era hunting restrictions on national wildlife refuges in Alaska. The House already voted last month to abolish those restrictions — which were instituted by the Fish and Wildlife Service in 2016 to protect predator species from hunters — and so the bill now heads to the desk of President Trump, who is widely expected to sign it.

The FWS rule facing repeal explicitly prohibited many kinds of "predator control" on the 16 federally owned refuges in Alaska. That prohibition included a ban on the aerial hunting, live trapping or baiting of predators such as bears and wolves — as well as on killing those predators while near their dens or their cubs.

Alaska Rep. Don Young, the Republican sponsor of the bill passed Tuesday, says these restrictions represented federal overreach.

"Not only does this action undermine Alaska's ability to manage fish and wildlife upon refuge lands," Young said, "it fundamentally destroys a cooperative relationship between Alaska and the federal government."

Republican Sen. Dan Sullivan, also representing Alaska, echoed those concerns Tuesday, saying the restrictions changed the state's relationship with FWS "from one of cooperation to subservience,"The Associated Press reports.

"This rule is about Alaska," he said.

Others, like Democratic Sen. Maria Cantwell of Washington, were not convinced.

"This isn't about states' rights," she said, according to the wire service. "It's not about prohibiting hunting. ... It's about how we can manage these wildlife refuges to the degree that agencies believe are necessary for the preservation of these wildlife heritage areas."

As the Alaska Dispatch News points out, this debate gets to the core of a long-running dispute:

"At the heart of the disagreement between state and federal wildlife managers is what each group thinks should guide its purpose. The federal government has argued that the goal on refuges and in parks should be biodiversity. The state Board of Game has an interest in ensuring maximum sustained populations for hunting."

Ensuring the "maximum sustained populations" of commonly hunted prey species like elk, moose and caribou often means reining in the populations of their predators — namely, bears and wolves. In the 2016 restrictions, federal regulators argued that the Alaskan Board of Game had gone too far in prioritizing the populations of prey species over predators.

It was an argument pursued by several Democratic senators, including New Jersey's Cory Booker, and environmental groups who were opposed to the rollback.

"This isn't hunting — it's slaughter," Brett Hartl, government affairs director at the Center for Biological Diversity, said in a statement. "Killing wolves and bears in this cruel, unsportsmanlike fashion is outrageous, especially in national wildlife refuges that belong to all Americans."

He added: "Repealing these protections also undermines the critical role predators play in healthy ecosystems."

Still, Republican Sen. Lisa Murkowski of Alaska says these objections come from activists unfamiliar with Alaska, where "state management of fish and wildlife is practically sacrosanct."

"Opponents will allege that the repeal of this rule will legalize brutal predator control practices," Murkowski said, according to the Dispatch News. "The Senate should know that it is already illegal for hunters to use certain practices — gas against wolves, traps to bears. You can't do this in national wildlife refuges in Alaska."

In working to repeal the FWS rule, Republican lawmakers turned again to the Congressional Review Act, a measure they also used to great effect last month in rolling back another Obama-era regulation.

As we explained then, the CRA is a means to review and cancel regulations issued in the final days of an outgoing administration: "The move allows the Senate to proceed with a simple majority, thus enabling GOP senators to avoid a filibuster by Democrats."

Copyright 2017 NPR. To see more, visit http://www.npr.org/.

In February of last year, Alaskan Gov. Bill Walker signed an administrative order to help jumpstart mariculture, or sea farming, in the state. One Juneau couple is whipping up a recipe to make local kelp an enticing business and snack. They're part of a growing number of startups that see Alaska seaweed as a marketable food.

Kelp has become a big part of Matt Kern and Lia Heifetz's relationship.

"It's basically all we talk about it," Heifetz says with a laugh. "Every day of the week. Every night of the week. Every weekend."

Kern and Heifetz are dedicating so much of their time to seaweed because they've been laying the groundwork for a new business.

"Kelp salsa," Kern says. "It's made predominantly from bull kelp that we harvest from around Juneau."

The Alaska Department of Fish and Game doesn't have a formalized process for collecting wild kelp for commercial use — at least not yet. So, the couple forages under an experimental permit.

A lot of work and late nights go into making a batch of salsa. Kern pops the lid off a small mason jar and opens a bag of corn chips.

"Today we have a green salsa verde," he says. "And another flavor called campfire that has roasted garlic and onions."

Both jars of salsa contain lots of minced bull kelp. The campfire flavor is tart from the seaweed and mildly spiced.

The couple recently received a $40,000 Path to Prosperity grant, which helps Southeast Alaskan entrepreneurs grow their business. Last year, they made about 2,000 jars of salsa, mostly cooked up in their home kitchen and sold at the local public market. But they want to eventually expand distribution beyond Juneau.

Having access to enough foraged seaweed for that expansion could be difficult, but a California-based startup might be able to help. Blue Evolution is looking at the prospect of seaweed farming in Alaska. Right now, the company grows the plant in Mexico, dries it and turns it into pasta.

"They were really interested in doing domestic production," says marine biologist Tamsen Peeples, who is employed by Blue Evolution and works on the science of seaweed farming at the University of Alaska Southeast.

She says coastal states like Maine are already kelp farming, but developing it in Alaska has its advantages.

"Alaska has bountiful amounts of coastline, obviously, and clean water," Peeples says. "As an Alaskan, I think it's a great opportunity for individuals who otherwise in the winter are laying low between commercial fishing and tourism."

But one thing Alaska doesn't have is easy access to kelp seed. The department of fish and game says you can only farm with plants native to the region. An oyster company in Homer, Alaska sells some wild seaweed that grows on its lines. But the farmed variety is only growing at a couple of test sites in the state.

That's where Peeples' research comes in. She's been working on propagating seed from local kelp spores.

"In order for this industry to grow, we're going to have to get a number of other hatcheries to come online," Peeples says.

A new House bill could make it easier for nonprofit hatcheries to receive state loans. Even though those wouldn't apply to a company like Blue Evolution, Peeples thinks it's a good thing.

So far, she has successfully incubated varieties like sugar and ribbon kelp. And those plants are growing in the waters of Kodiak and Ketchikan. Blue Evolution will buy the seaweed back in the spring.

As their kelp salsa business grows, Kern and Heifetz say they're also interested.

"We plan to be sourcing directly from farms in the future," Heifetz says.

For them, it's not about building a seaweed snack empire.

"This wasn't a huge day-to-day leap in our lives ... to go from doing it on our home scale," Kern says. "'Because this is what we'd be doing with our time anyway."

That means building their business sustainably, making thousands of jars of kelp salsa and sharing it with friends and customers.

This report comes fromAlaska's Energy Desk, a public media collaboration focused on energy and the environment. You can hear the audio here.

Copyright 2017 KTOO-FM. To see more, visit KTOO-FM.

On Friday, employees of BP Exploration Alaska discovered an uncontrolled gas leak in an oil and gas well on Alaska's North Slope, near the community of Deadhorse. Soon after, they determined that the well was also spraying a mist of crude oil.

BP reported the leak and formed a "unified command," which included responders from Alaska's Department of Environmental Conservation, the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency, and the North Slope Borough.

The well vented gas throughout the weekend. By Sunday, the crude was no longer spraying, and workers were able to activate a safety valve that reduced the pressure of the gas.

On Monday, nearly three days after the leak was found, ADEC announced the unified command had to managed to "kill" the well overnight and end the gas leak.

"The area impacted is limited to gravel," says Candice Bressler, spokesperson for ADEC. "There have been no reports of impacted wildlife." Oil droplets were found on about 1.5 acres of the well's drill pad, according to The Associated Press.

The community of Nuiqsut, 50 miles west of the site, had been notified of the incident, but was not evacuated.

"Responders determined that the well had 'jacked up,' or risen, approximately 3 – 4 feet; this vertical movement of the well caused the pressure gauge to break off and prevented operations from pumping into the well to kill it," ADEC reported.

BP began drilling at the massive Prudhoe Bay oil field in 1968. It has generated more than 12 billion barrels of oil, according to BP, and remains one of North America's largest oil fields.

The leak happened amid efforts to boost output from aging wells and reach new supplies in the North Slope's oil fields, reports Bloomberg:

"North Slope production rose to 565,000 barrels a day in March, its highest level since December 2013. That's still down by almost three-quarters from the peak of more than 2 million barrels in the late 1980s."

In a 2011 settlement with the Department of Justice, BP agreed to pay a $25 million civil penalty and carry out a "system-wide integrity management program" after it spilled more than 5,000 barrels of crude oil from its pipelines on Alaska's North Slope in 2006. Five years later, BP agreed to pay more than $20 billion in penalties for the 2010 Deepwater Horizon accident and oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico.

Copyright 2017 NPR. To see more, visit http://www.npr.org/.

Buy a ticket in the Nenana Ice Classic and you could win nearly $300,000. All you have to do is guess when the ice covering Tanana River at the city of Nenana, Alaska will break up.

Brothers Josh and Judah Ridgeway live in Nenana, a community of 375 people, about an hour southwest of Fairbanks. The brothers were hired by the Ice Classic to make regular ice measurements. They use a gas powered drill to bore through 3 to 4 feet of ice — though it's sometimes more. They do this at several locations on the Tanana, a few times a week, in April.

"It's actually kind of a fun project, coming out here and drillin' the holes for 'em," says Josh. "Get out here in the morning when the sun's comin' up and — play."

Back in 1917, railroad engineers in Nenana wagered bets on when the ice would break up on the river. It evolved into an annual statewide guessing game in which hundreds of thousands of tickets are sold. On each ticket the buyer writes when they think the ice will go out, down to the minute.

The winning time is determined by a Rube Goldberg contraption, involving a tripod on the river ice, connected to a clock on shore.

It's all good fun, and possible good fortune for ticket holders, but the Ice Classic also provides a record of climate change.

Dating back 101 years, Ice Classic records are valuable data to National Weather Service climatologist Rick Thoman. According to Thoman, it's not just the breakup dates, but that they've been gathered in a consistent way for so long.

The ice has gone out on the Tanana River at Nenana as early as April 20, and as late as May 20, but Thoman points to a gradual trend toward earlier breakup dates. He says what's now an average breakup date, about April 30, would have been an unusually early date in the first part of the 20th century.

Dennis Argall has been involved in the Nenana Ice Classic for 50 years and is the president of the board. He sits at a 1980s vintage computer terminal inside the Ice Classic headquarters. In recent years, Argall has witnessed the second-latest breakup on record, as well as several of the earliest. But he says he doesn't believe in "that global warming stuff," or at least the human-caused aspect.

"I think humans would think a whole lot of themselves if they think they could affect the globe," Argall says. "You know, it's a big world."

That sentiment contradicts widespread scientific consensus, but it's a belief common among some Alaskans. Ice driller Josh Ridgeway says he thinks it's a cycle that human activity might be contributing to. The Ridgeway brothers made the final ice measurement of the season on April 24. It showed 29 inches of deteriorating ice, too risky to walk on. That means Alaskans will soon know who wins this year's Ice Classic jackpot, and that summer is on the way.

Copyright 2017 KUAC-FM. To see more, visit KUAC-FM.

In rural Alaska, providing health care means overcoming a lot of hurdles.

Fickle weather that can leave patients stranded, for one.

Also: complicated geography. Many Alaskan villages have no roads connecting them with hospitals or specialists, so people depend on local clinics and a cadre of devoted primary care doctors.

I followed one young family physician, Dr. Adam McMahan, on his regular weekly visit to the clinic in the village of Klukwan.

It's a speck of a town alongside the Chilkat River in Southeast Alaska, framed by snowy mountains that loom in the distance.

The clinic staff drives up to Klukwan twice a week from the bigger town of Haines, 22 miles to the south.

On our drive, McMahan points out the clouds of dust blowing off sandbars along the river: "Likely today we'll see somebody with a lung issue because of the sand coming off the river."

Klukwan is populated mostly by Alaska Natives of the Tlingit tribe, fewer than 100 people in all, with a few hundred more people in the surrounding area.

Over the three years that he's been practicing medicine in Klukwan, McMahan has come to know his patients well, and that becomes clear as he begins the day's consultations.

With patient Lani Hotch, along with reviewing her cholesterol and blood sugar levels, McMahan remembers that she has a new dog. "What type of puppy did you get?" he asks her. (A yellow Lab.)

With fisherman Henry Chatoney, he wonders, "Hey, did you find a deckhand?"

And knowing that Everett Simons grows great potatoes and has been put on a low-starch diet for his diabetes, the doctor joshes, "How often are you sneaking a potato?"

This is the kind of intimate, full-spectrum family medicine the 34-year-old doctor loves.

"I know that Everett, he's an amazing potato farmer," he says. "I know that Henry is full of adventures and has fished Bristol Bay for longer than I've been alive. You get to know your patients as human."

McMahan can trace his inspiration to become a physician back to a striking series of black-and-white photographs he saw in a magazine when he was a teenager. His grandfather was a pediatrician and had a 1948 issue of Life magazine on a shelf in his office. The photo essay by W. Eugene Smith, "Country Doctor," shows a dedicated general practitioner tending to his patients in rural Colorado: making house calls, taping up broken ribs, stitching wounds.

"Those stills were really captivating," McMahan says. "I was looking at those the other day and they're not that different than what we do now here in Alaska."

The Klukwan clinic is open on Tuesdays and Thursdays. It's part of the Southeast Alaska Regional Health Consortium, or SEARHC.

The clinic has two exam rooms, a dental suite and a small lab for basic diagnostics.

"A lot of it is doing the best we can in the moment with limited resources," McMahan says. "I can't send you down the street to go see a cardiologist. I can't get a CT [scan] done in 10 minutes."

On the day we visit, McMahan is seeing mostly elderly patients, including one, a Tlingit elder named Evelyn Hotch, who is confined to her bed after a stroke.

So with stethoscope looped around his neck, McMahan walks down the road to pay her a house call.

Once we're inside her home, the first thing Evelyn Hotch does is offer all of us a snack: dried red seaweed. "You came to an Indian house," she says, "and this is what Indians like to eat!"

It's only after McMahan has shared her seaweed and inquired about the grandchildren whose photos cover just about every inch of her walls that he turns to her medical issues, asking about pain and what supplies she needs. "We'll see you next week, OK?" he says as he heads out.

The goal with regular primary care like this is to keep people out of the emergency room. But in such a small, remote town, what happens in an emergency? There's a volunteer ambulance squad that will drive up from Haines, about a half hour away.

Haines doesn't have a hospital, though, so critically ill or injured patients might need to be medevacked by Coast Guard helicopter from Haines to Juneau.

"The vibratory effect of that, when your heart rate's beating fast and you've got a really sick patient, hearing the helicopter, hearing the blades, is such a relief," McMahan says.

Once a patient makes it to Juneau, he or she might still need to be flown by air ambulance to bigger hospitals in Anchorage or Seattle, hundreds of miles away.

"The Rubik's Cube of resource coordination and transport is probably one of our biggest challenges," McMahan says.

In part because of these complicated logistics, Alaska has some of the highest health care costs in the country.

For people who don't have health insurance, "it's often cause for catastrophe, financially," McMahan says.

But, he adds, since Alaska expanded its Medicaid program in September 2015 under the Affordable Care Act, he is able to treat patients now who had gone for years without access to primary care.

More than 32,000 Alaskans have gained health coverage through Medicaid expansion.

McMahan worries about what might happen to his patients if the ACA is repealed and replaced by Congress: "I think if the Medicaid expansion is undercut, people will go without care," he tells me. "They're not going to be able to afford it."

Even though the current health care debate is taking place thousands of miles away from his clinic, it hits home.

"It's amazing how politics impact my day-to-day life when it comes to just getting somebody basic, basic care," he says.

For now, though, Dr. McMahan turns to his immediate concerns: He has more patients to see, and more stories to hear.

The "Our Land" series is produced by Elissa Nadworny.

Copyright 2017 NPR. To see more, visit http://www.npr.org/.

Hours after President Trump criticized Republican Sen. Lisa Murkowski's vote on debating health care legislation, Secretary of the Interior Ryan Zinke reportedly called Murkowski and fellow Alaskan Sen. Dan Sullivan to say their state could run into trouble with the Trump administration.

Describing the call from Zinke, Sullivan told the Alaska Dispatch News, "I'm not going to go into the details, but I fear that the strong economic growth, pro-energy, pro-mining, pro-jobs and personnel from Alaska who are part of those policies are going to stop."

Zinke's message, writes the Dispatch News' Erica Martinson, was that Murkowski's vote "had put Alaska's future with the administration in jeopardy."

Murkowski's office confirmed that Zinke had called her and issued a statement in which the senator notes that while she hasn't agreed with the Senate's approach, she agrees with Trump that the health care industry needs reform.

"I continue working to find the best path for what I believe will achieve that," Murkowski said, "a committee process where we can work issues in the open and ensure Alaskans have the health care choices they want, the affordability they need, and the quality of care they deserve."

The phone calls came one day after Murkowski and Sen. Susan Collins, R-Maine, voted against debating a replacement for the Affordable Care Act on Tuesday. The next morning, the president singled out Murkowski, saying in a tweet that she had "really let the Republicans, and our country, down yesterday. Too bad!"

Sullivan says he tried to push back during the call with Zinke on Wednesday afternoon, "But the message was pretty clear."

Messages to Sullivan's and Murkowski's offices were not returned as of early Thursday afternoon.

A number of Alaskan officials' plans and projects would benefit from support in the executive branch, the Dispatch News says, listing road projects, drilling rights and other issues.

But reliance often works both ways. In the Senate, Murkowski chairs both the Committee on Energy and Natural Resources and the Appropriations Committee's subcommittee on the interior — which means, asRoll Call reporter Niels Lesniewski notes, that Murkowski "is the top authorizer and the top appropriator for the Department of the Interior."

Murkowski doesn't face re-election until 2022.

As member station Alaska Public Media reports, Murkowski responded to Trump's tweets by saying that she's focusing on her work in the Senate, not her next election.

"I don't think it's wise to be operating on a daily basis thinking about what a statement or a response that causes you to be fearful of your electoral prospects," Murkowski said on MSNBC. "We're here to govern."

Copyright 2017 NPR. To see more, visit http://www.npr.org/.

Like many states, Alaska is struggling under the burden of opioid abuse.

Prescription painkillers and heroin accounted for 74 percent of Alaska's drug overdose deaths last year.

Transmission of blood-born viruses like hepatitis C, which can cause liver scarring, cancer, and death, is exploding, increasing in some rural areas by 490 percent in just the last few years. One calculation estimated that to treat all the Alaskans who contracted hepatitis C from injecting drugs in 2015 would cost $90 million.

This is driving up healthcare costs at a time when low oil prices have left the state in a years-long financial crisis. And public health officials think this is just the beginning of the epidemic and its fallout. One program is working to prevent the transmission and spread of the disease.

On a recent afternoon in Anchorage, dozens of orange-topped plastic needles clattered into a brimming red trashcan.

Inside a supply closet, 22-year-old volunteer named Zane Davis runs through routine questions with a young woman who, like all the others who come to the clinic, isn't required to give her name to get fresh supplies.

"How many needles did you have?" Davis asks.

"I had like, 80," the 26-year-old woman replies. (NPR is not using her name because she uses illegal drugs.)

"Awesome," he says cheerfully. "Just so you know, we can only give you 50."

The Alaska AIDS Assistance Association, known as Four A's, runs one of just four syringe exchanges in the state, and by far the biggest. The 50-needle cap is a new policy the organization implemented to keep up with surging demand.

The busiest time of the week is Friday afternoons, explains Davis. "People are prepping for the weekend."

In just a few hours, dozens of people come through, throwing out hundreds and hundreds of needles. Just before 5 p.m. when Four A's closes, a receptionist started taking information and sending people to Davis with post-it notes to get through the line that had formed. A cardboard box in the corner is filling up with Gatorade and soda bottles packed tight with syringes. The plastic drink containers are puncture proof, so they're a safe way to carry needles around.

Last year, Four A's gave out nearly 500,000 syringes, which was double the number dispensed just two years earlier. This year they'll outpace that. This is the only place to trade in needles for hundreds of miles in every direction. Even in small towns where there is a pharmacy, there's no guarantee the staff will sell syringes over the counter.

"They'll be like, 'Where's your prescription? Ya junkie,'"says Kerby Kraus. He has been clean for four-and-a-half years, and now helps run a recovery program. His path to shooting heroin started like a lot of others, first with strong painkillers that he found around the house.

"It was just being in high school and popping some pills, and then you're snorting some pills, and then you're smoking some pills, and then all of the sudden you're IV-using pills," Kraus says.

Kraus is from Wasilla, which is about 40 miles north of Anchorage. Back when he was using heroin, Kraus would stop at Four A's for clean syringes if he happened to be nearby. But if he was broke or sick from withdrawal, that was an insurmountable distance, and he'd shoot with used needles. That's how he got hepatitis C.

"I know who I got Hep C from," he says. "But I worried more about not being sick. It was 'I feel like absolute crap, and I don't want to feel this way no more.'"

In Alaska, the virus is exploding among people ages 18 to 29. It's a trend that is mirrored nationwide. A recent study in Alaska found that the hepatitis C rate among young people doubled between 2011 and 2015. Rural parts of the state are being especially hard hit. In the remote islands of Southeast Alaska, where the capital Juneau is located, the rate nearly quintupled, rising by 490 percent.

"We talk mostly about opioid overdose deaths, but there's a lot more that happens related to opioid use than just deaths," explains Jay Butler, chief medical officer for Alaska's health department.

Butler says worries about hepatitis C keep him awake at night, partly because of the wave of costs he sees approaching for Alaska and the country. Treating hepatitis C is extremely expensive. Until recently, the treatment available was ineffective and fairly toxic. But in 2013, the FDA approved a new class of antiviral drugs which can clear the body of hepatitis C 90 percent of the time. It is effectively a new cure to a dangerous and widespread chronic condition.

But there's a catch.

"The price is the downside and why I usually don't say it's a miracle drug," Butler says. Because miracles don't come with a price, they're gifts."

A treatment course of Viekira Pak or Harvoni, two common medications, can cost between $85,000 and $94,500. At that price, Butler estimates it would cost more than 10 percent of what we currently pay for all medical care annually in this country to treat the roughly 3.5 million Americans estimated to be infected with hepatitis C.

Though those prices have come down slightly in the last few years, the cost of hepatitis C treatments still put real stress on the health care program for the poor.

"We've seen definitely an increase in the number of individuals who access these medications," says Erin Narus, the lead pharmacist for Alaska's Medicaid program.

As patients and doctors have grown more familiar with the new anti-viral meds, they're being prescribed with greater frequency. In 2015, Alaska's Medicaid program spent $5.9 million dollars on hepatitis C treatments, according to Narus. The next year, that more than doubled to $13.6 million. And that money only bought treatment for around 150 people.

Public health advocates say syringe exchanges are extremely cost effective in the long-term — especially when it comes to preventing people from getting hepatitis C in the first place or spreading it to others. State officials like Butler are pushing for more access to needles, especially in rural areas. For the cost of curing one person with the new antiviral meds, Four A's could run nearly a full year of its syringe exchange program.

Copyright 2017 Alaska Public Media. To see more, visit Alaska Public Media.

This archipelago in the Gulf of Alaska is home to one of the busiest commercial fishing ports in the country. Inside the Ocean Beauty seafood plant in Kodiak, where a maze of conveyer belts carry gutted salmon past workers in hairnets and gloves, manager James Turner ticks off everything that contributes to his monthly electricity bill: canning machines, pressure cookers, freezers lights.

"We use a lot of power here," he says.

Plus, down the road is the nation's largest Coast Guard base and to the south is a state-owned rocket launch facility. It's no small feat, then, that the power for all of this is generated right here on the island, from almost entirely renewable sources.

More places are exploring creating microgrids after a spate of hurricanes and other storms knocked out power to millions in recent years. In Puerto Rico, especially, advocates say this could help key institutions like hospitals and military bases keep the lights on when the larger grid goes down. They might want to look north — far north — for guidance.

"Alaskans have been doing this for 50 years," says Ian Baring-Gould, of the National Renewable Energy Lab in Boulder, Colorado. He says the state's remote communities have "an amazing wealth of expertise in that area."

Of course, not all of Alaska's microgrids run on renewable energy.

Kodiak has long gotten most of its electricity from a hydro dam. But a decade ago, as demand grew, it was relying more and more on diesel generators. The cost of diesel was high and unpredictable, a problem for businesses trying to forecast their expenses.

"When you have that threat of a diesel bill hanging over your head every month, that is very motivating to find solutions," says Jennifer Richcreek of the Kodiak Electric Association, or KEA.

"Everyone's TV's are going to brown out"

In 2007, the utility set a goal of 95 percent renewable power. It built a handful of wind turbines, plus a bank of batteries to supplement the community's hydro power. That worked for a while. But then came a new challenge: the Kodiak port wanted to replace its old diesel-powered crane with a giant electric one.

The 340-foot tall shipping crane would be a massive power hog. Demand would spike every time it lifted a container off a cargo ship. When Rick Kniaziowski, the terminal manager for the shipping company Matson, first asked about getting it, the head of the local utility said no.

"His eyes got really big," Kniaziowski says. He was told, "Everyone's TVs are going to brown out, and they're either going to hate you or they're going to hate us.'"

But the utility looked around for a solution, and it found a European company, ABB, that offered a new kind of energy storage: flywheels.

There are two here now. From the outside, they look like a couple of white trailers behind a chain-link fence. But inside, they're cutting edge sci fi. In the corner of each trailer is a "six and a half ton of spinning mass," says KEA's Richcreek. "It's in a frictionless vacuum chamber hovered by magnets."

Here's how it works: When there's excess power on the grid, it spins the flywheel. The flywheel stores that energy as motion, and then pumps it back out the second a big surge is needed. When the crane isn't operating, the flywheels respond to fluctuations in wind power, working with the batteries to stabilize the grid. Kodiak is one of the first places in the world to use flywheels this way.

Altogether, Kodiak's microgrid operates like an orchestra, each piece responding millisecond by millisecond. The wind drops suddenly and the flywheel kicks on. As the flywheel slows, the batteries step in. And behind it all, the hydro ramps up. And Kodiak has managed to do all this while keeping rates stable. In fact, the price of electricity in Kodiak has dropped slightly since 2000.

Richcreek says this is the future.

"The solutions are out there," she says. "They're outside the box. They may be different. But the industry is changing."

The system has drawn international interest, and Kodiak hopes other American communities will take note, too.

Copyright 2017 Alaska Public Media. To see more, visit Alaska Public Media.