Deb Haaland, the first Native American cabinet secretary, made no commitments to building a road long sought by residents that would cut through a national wildlife refuge on the Alaska Peninsula. But she listened intently on a whirlwind day of flights, tours and meetings.
Interior Secretary Deb Haaland speaks to students and community members at the King Cove School on Wednesday.
For decades, King Cove has pushed the federal government for permission to build a road through the center of the refuge that would end in the nearby community of Cold Bay. A huge jet runway there — a relic of a secret World War II military base — would allow better access to lifesaving medical flights than does King Cove’s dirt airstrip.
But Haaland, who listened attentively and quietly, made no commitments in her brief comments at the end of her last meeting — though her voice shook with emotion. Since 1980, King Cove residents have endured plane crashes, innumerable rough boat rides to Cold Bay and helicopter rescues, which leaders and residents have long cited as they push for access through the refuge.
Trump’s administration was good to King Cove. After a federal judge invalidated a land exchange aimed at authorizing the road, Trump’s Interior Department redid the plan and tried it again. Dunleavy was not a formal participant on Haaland’s trip, but he came anyway — in his own plane, accompanied by Dr. Anne Zink, the state’s chief medical officer, and several other aides.The governor has been a strident critic of Biden’s administration and Haaland’s agency in particular, accusing it of “turning its back on Alaska” by reconsidering Trump-era approvals of natural resource extraction projects.
Thirty-two-year-old principal Paul Barker introduced a youth group of traditional Native dancers, who performed a piece symbolizing a volcano. “She’s the first Native American woman to hold the Department of Interior, the place that was sent to eradicate us as Native people,” Newman said. “She broke the ceiling for us and showed us as Native people that we have the ability to hold power.”
A young mother, Marylee Yatchmeneff, pleaded for road access so she could count on easier evacuations for her infant daughter, who she said had to fly to Anchorage a half-dozen times in the past nine months for medical care. And another woman described loading her 4-month-old baby onto a heaving fishing boat.
Others complained to Haaland that outsiders can access Izembek to hunt and fish, and that much of the opposition to the road comes from conservation groups based on Alaska’s road system or in the Lower 48.
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