OPINION: Secretary Haaland, see us in King Cove as we are

We are women of Aleut heritage, and each in our way represents the depths of those connections. Individually, we represent the King Cove Corp. and the Agdaagux and Belkofski tribes respectively. Together, we have banded as a force to be reckoned with, each of us mothers and sisters and friends, each of us dreamers and doers and believers in the notion that to be part of this place, King Cove, Alaska, is a sacred trust. A sacred trust that we strive to uphold so that our children, grandchildren, and all future children will have a place called home as our ancestors have given us for thousands of years.

While we accept that in some courtrooms and newspaper print, conservation and subsistence are discussed as terms of legal authority, that is not so where we live; where we live, they are terms of an art that we are always striving to perfect. They are the promise that we make to our children and all the newborns of the Izembek that ours is a way of living as partners to the natural world, not pitted against it. This land called Izembek holds many Aleut village sites that our ancestors left to remind us of who we are.

The colors outside our windows in King Cove are muted, the wind picks up its pace and we watch with mixed emotions as the season slides to winter. Our thoughts turn with hope to the year to come, while we keep front of mind the history that brings us to this moment. Our history includes having a wilderness refuge established in our backyard, without our input, denying us the opportunity for a transportation corridor to the all-weather airport in Cold Bay, Alaska. Our memories include finding our traditional hunting cabins burnt to the ground by U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service employees. Our elders remind us that before Cold Bay, it was named Fort Randall, built for its World War II runway, with materials that residents of King Cove, an established community since 1911, ferried across the bay.

The Izembek National Wildlife Refuge, all 310,000 acres of it, is a beautifully intact expanse of wilderness because millennia of Aleut families knew how to leave it be. That’s our history, too.

For many decades, Alaska’s congressional delegation effort, led by Sen. Lisa Murkowski, has pressed our case to the Department of Interior. We traveled to Washington, D.C., consulted on legislation, and spent thousands of hours and dollars arguing with Interior officials as only one can when matters of life and death are at stake. We offered to exchange land and agreed to reasonable restrictions on how this road would be used. We implored them to allow construction of a single-lane gravel road, so that King Cove (pop. 845) ambulances may drive to an all-weather, 24/7 airport in Cold Bay (pop. 68), where flights depart over 95% of the year, even as winter closes in.

To our great sorrow and disappointment, again and again, we were shown the door. Opponents derided our project as the “Road to Nowhere” and told us that if we don’t like it here, we can always move. Now, Secretary Deb Haaland has come along and breathed new life into our efforts. She’s learned our history, visited us where we live, listened to our stories of close calls and missed heartbeats, then with tears in her eyes and a smile that lit the room, she graciously accepted the name that we bestowed upon her: Agdaagum Ax^aasniikangin (Mother Bear.) As we work with Alaska’s U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service in conducting a Supplemental Environmental Impact Statement, there is hope that at long last a process is in place that values the health and safety of the Aleut baby as being of equal consideration to all the other beating hearts who wake each morning and call the Izembek home.

We’ve heard a lot of talk that allowing this road to happen will set a dangerous precedent for other — potentially bad — actors to follow. Our answer to that is to bring it. Should there be a community, living on the edge of a wilderness designated without their input, comprised primarily of Indigenous people with deep roots in the land, and tribal leaders are offering comparable wilderness acreage in trade for a single-lane gravel road right of way, for the purpose of allowing medevacs for its residents, then Department of the Interior should be urged to make that deal.

We ask for Haaland’s help to keep doing what we’ve always done. We live in this place, where the shoreline gives way roughly to the sea, and we challenge ourselves always to be innovative and find better ways to survive. We are a community that has set the standard for how to bring renewable energy to remote, rural Alaska. (Almost 100% of our electric power is from a renewable source.) We are the community that is always looking ahead to innovations because we never want to be left behind. And once we are no longer limited in our medevac capabilities, we will be that community that leads the way in demonstrating how to build and use a road with good intentions.

Della Trumble is the CEO of the King Cove Corp., Etta Kuzakin is president of the Agdaagux Tribe of King Cove, and Lynn Mack is president of the Belkofski Tribe.

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