Arctic Alaska House race focuses on issues that candidates say unite the remote region

Snow-dusted Copter Peak, at the northern edge of Noatak National Preserve in Arctic Alaska, is seen from a valley. The mountain is near the boundary between the Northwest Arctic Borough and the North Slope Borough, which are combined into sprawling District 40 in the Alaska House of Representatives. (Photo provided by National Park Service)

The person who represents the nation’s northernmost legislative district in the Alaska House of Representatives is tasked with achieving a special balance.

Sprawling and remote House District 40 encompasses both the oil-rich North Slope and the less-wealthy Northwest Arctic Borough. That means it has two separate hub communities – Utqiagvik and Kotzebue. While both regions are majority Inupiat, they have significant differences in their economies, histories and cultures.

The incumbent House member, who is from Kotzebue, and the two candidates challenging him, one from Kotzebue as well and the other from Utqiagvik, acknowledge that the district’s makeup creates a special challenge. But all three – all of them Inupiat — say there are ways to bridge those differences.

Properly representing the district, with all its diversity and remoteness, requires working with cities, tribes and any organizations that represent residents, said Thomas Baker, the incumbent.

“You’ve got to work with each community individually, see what their wants and needs are, and then you work bigger and then you see what the overreaching, overarching needs are,” said Baker, whom Gov. Mike Dunleavy appointed to the seat in November to fill the vacancy left when then-Rep. Josiah Patkotak,I-Utqiagvik, was elected mayor of the North Slope Borough.

Despite the differences, there are common interests, said Baker, who was a Republican when appointed but is now unaffiliated. “We are the isolated north. We are the northern end of everything,” he said.

Democrat Robyn Niayuq Burke of Utqiagvik said a key difference is the wealth gap. Communities in the North Slope have the advantage of decades of oil money.

Burke, who is president of the North Slope Borough School District Board of Education, said she is keenly aware of how oil money has allowed her home borough to provide services that are unavailable in parts of the Northwest Arctic Borough. “It’s not lost on me, especially when I go to the Northwest Arctic and see that there are so many communities that don’t have water or have problems with their water,” she said.

Some of her understanding of needs outside the North Slope comes from her service as an officer with the Association of Alaska School Boards, she said.

Democrat Saima Ikrik Chase, currently Kotzebue’s mayor, also pointed to those wealth differences. That gives the North Slope communities more focus on policies, while the Northwest Arctic communities are more dependent on state-provided services, she said. Still, there are common concerns, like housing, education funding and teacher retention, she said. “They have the same issues. It’s just that they have more resources to depend on to get to where they need to get to,” said Chase, whose professional experience is in health care and emergency services.

Resource money is the obvious difference between the North Slope and the Northwest Arctic. The North Slope, site of Alaska’s big oil fields, has a vast borough infrastructure and service network built on oil money. The Northwest Arctic does not have nearly the same deep pockets, though it benefits economically from the Red Dog mine, one of the world’s largest zinc producers.

Some other differences stretch back further in history. Subsistence food gathering on the North Slope, which has shaped the culture, is largely about hunting bowhead whales and other marine mammals, while terrestrial mammals like caribou and fish, including salmon, make up the bulk of the subsistence harvests in the Northwest Arctic region, according to the Alaska Department of Fish and Game. Even though the Inupiaq language is spoken in both parts of the district, there are different regional dialects.

In the past, the North Slope and Northwest Arctic have been represented by some legendary and powerful lawmakers, like Al Adams and Frank Ferguson, both of Kotzebue.

Decades ago, each borough had its own representative in the state House. Now, they share one.

Effective advocacy for the district requires looking past whatever splits might exist between localities, corporations, nonprofits or other entities, said another of those powerful lawmakers who represented the district in the past, former state Sen. Willie Hensley.

“We need to not confine ourselves to our individual cells,” said Hensley, who is also from the Kotzebue region. Doing so in that Arctic region requires special skills. “You really need to put your best people in there,” he said.

Primary results suggest Chase-Burke contest

Results from the primary suggest that Baker faces an uphill climb. Chase and Burke finished in a near-tie at about 35% each, with Chase eking out a three-vote margin over Burke. Baker lagged with 29% of the vote. Since Burke and Chase have similar positions on the issues, ranked choice voting in this three-way contest is expected to be important to the outcome.

All three candidates noted that turnout in August was low, and that results could change considerably in November, when voters will also consider the presidential candidates. Additionally, the two Democrats also noted that during the primary election, there were malfunctions at certain outlying communities that either interfered with people’s ability to vote or impeded the vote count.

Burke pointed to three North Slope precincts that failed to open. “I had people who reached out to me and said, ‘I tried to vote for you, but I just couldn’t,’” she said. Chase pointed to delays in counting votes in some outlying Northwest Arctic precincts.

While they come from different regions in the district, Burke and Chase have similar positions — and similar complaints about Baker’s record.

Possibly topping that list is Baker’s vote in March that upheld Dunleavy’s veto of a permanent increase in the base student allocation, core of the formula that decides the per-student funding provided by the state. The override failed by a single vote.

For Burke, who had traveled to Juneau to lobby for the increase, Baker’s action on that issue was a tipping point in her decision to run for the seat.

She blasted the action in an op-ed published days after the veto override failed.

“Baker’s vote virtually assured deep education cuts that make it improbable to adequately staff our schools or provide basic materials. As damaging as his vote is for the North Slope, it is even more devastating for the Northwest Arctic Borough, which does not have our property tax base from oil infrastructure,” she said in the op-ed, published in the Arctic Sounder and Anchorage Daily News.

Chase, too, said she was upset with Baker’s position, as were many of her neighbors.

“A lot of our residents here in the north were like, ‘What?’ Because, Number 1, he comes from a family of teachers and it’s like, ‘Come on, man, your sibling is a teacher, and your grandmother was a teacher.’ So I guess his actions speak louder than his words on that,” she said.

Baker, defending his decision on that vote, said it would have been pointless to override the veto because Dunleavy would have simply vetoed the money for the next year needed to pay the increase in the formula.

It isn’t clear whether that hypothetical would have come to pass. Dunleavy ultimately signed a budget containing a one-time funding bonus equivalent to the permanent boost envisioned by the Legislature. But the failure of the bill means that there is no long-term change.

His vote on the veto override notwithstanding, Baker said he supports an increase in the BSA, which is why he voted for the final budget and its one-time $680 boost. But addressing education challenges in the far-north district will require more adjustments, he said. “The BSA does need to be higher, but at the same time, the cost of fuel needs to be lower, the cost of energy needs to be lower,” he said. “We deal with a lot of issues in rural Alaska that other parts of the state and the country don’t deal with.”

Splits with Native leaders

Another point of criticism is Baker’s attempt to rejigger the state’s subsistence policies, a subject on which he clashed with Native organizations.

Baker introduced a bill to amend the state constitution, House Joint Resolution 22, that was aimed at unifying state and federal subsistence management — but his version omitted the word “rural,” in contrast with federal law’s requirement for a rural Alaska subsistence priority. Baker’s effort got pushback from the Alaska Federation of Natives, creating an unusual situation in which Alaska’s largest Native organization, along with other prominent Native organizations within his district, opposed legislation sponsored by a Native lawmaker.

“Rep. Baker’s bill came out of the blue,” Julie Kitka, then AFN’s president, said in a March 20 hearing at the House Resources Committee.

AFN and other Indigenous organizations, though they advocated in past decades for a state constitutional amendment, have come to prefer federal management as more dependable and more supportive of Indigenous rights.

Baker, who is on the council that advises the federal government on subsistence management in the Northwest Arctic, defended his constitutional amendment idea, adding that he, too, favors a rural priority.

“The main goal with that piece of legislation was to get the conversation started because it is an ongoing issue that no one was really addressing in the legislature,” he said.

Both Burke and Chase criticized Baker’s effort as ill-conceived and lacking proper consultation with affected people and organizations.

The proposed constitutional amendment lacked support from any other Native lawmaker, and it died in committee.

Election legislation is another area where Baker split from Alaska’s other Native legislators.

Those members staunchly supported a legal change that would have removed the requirement that absentee voters secure witness signatures from designated officials. That witness-signature requirement has proved to be impractical and burdensome in rural Alaska and effectively discriminates against Native voters, said lawmakers who favored the change.

In floor debate on May 15, Sen. Lyman Hoffman, D-Bethel, defended the elimination of the witness-signature requirement. Hoffman referred to the high rate of rural mail-in votes that were invalidated during the 2022 special election to fill the vacant U.S. House seat. “Because of the witness verification provision, I’ve had 15 percent of my voters – 15 percent of my voters — their votes were thrown out. Imagine how you would feel if that happened in your district,” he said.

But when the Senate-passed bill came to the House floor, Baker voted against taking it up, splitting from the other Native House members. The tally was 20-20, so Baker’s vote on the matter was criticized as the decision that killed a bill with a provision important to his own rural constituents.

Months later, Baker said the amended version of the bill was rushed, and he remains unsure of his position on it. “I can’t say that I would have supported that bill because there was no time to review it,” he said.

He also noted that it reached the floor after the midnight adjournment deadline, making it possibly invalid even if it has passed. Dunleavy vetoed several other bills that passed the Legislature after midnight, saying they were unconstitutional.

Burke, in contrast, has been adamant in seeking changes to help rural voters. The current system is plagued with problems, like the lack of polling place access experienced in the primary, she said. And Alaska Natives pay the price, she said in another op-ed essay published in the Anchorage Daily News.

“Barriers to voting in rural Alaska are persistent and glaring, including limited access to early voting tablets, the inability to translate official election information into Alaska Native languages, and the failure to receive absentee election materials before the voting window opens,” she said in the op-ed.

Party affiliations and trends

Baker has another distinction from other legislators representing predominantly Native districts.

He was the first Republican in more than six decades to represent his district or any part of it. The only other Republican representing the Northwest Arctic region was John Curtis, who served one term in the first legislative session after statehood.

After the legislative session, Baker switched his registration to nonpartisan, something that he said was spurred by his experience in the House representing the district.  Party allegiances can get in the way of serving the district, he said. “Sometimes there’s going to be a more conservative way to tackle a District 40 problem. Sometimes there will be a more liberal way to do it,” he said. Seeing how much work goes into the job “that was the reason — becoming someone that could work in the middle of the road.”

Chase said she too sometimes feels like she doesn’t belong to a political party, though she generally sides with Alaska Democrats.

“I feel like I’m always teeter-tottering, with kind of being a Democrat or going, kind of, towards independent,” she said. That is especially true this year, “when the presidential election is happening, and people are so extreme on both sides.”

By extreme, she said, she is referring to policies on mining or other resource development. Extreme Democrats, she said, are “very against any mining or any resource development that could possibly, you know, tarnish the land,” she said. Republicans are extreme in the other way when it comes to mining and other resource development, she said. “That’s all they want to do,” she said.

Burke, who has served on the board of the pro-oil organization Voice of the Arctic Inupiaq, said she remains a loyal Democrat, but of the Arctic Alaska variety. 

“You can’t be a Democrat from the North Slope without being pro-resource development,” she said. “So I would probably consider myself a little more moderate.”

Hensley said the region used to be overwhelmingly Democratic, and the meaningful contests were the primary elections.“If you got through the primary, basically, you were in,” he said.

However, the Republican Party label may not be as much of a detriment as it used to be, at least in half of the House district.

While most of rural Alaska remains solidly Democratic, there has been a shift within the North Slope Borough over the last few presidential cycles, according to results from the Alaska Division of Elections.

That is evident in results from the North Slope’s major population center, Utqiagivik, even as voters in the Northwest Arctic’s major community, Kotzebue, remain heavily in favor of Democrats.

In the 2012 election, voters in Utqiagvik’s two precincts preferred President Barack Obama to GOP challenger Mitt Romney by a 2-to-1 margin. Four years later, the majority of the presidential votes in those precincts went to Democrat Hillary Clinton over Trump, but the margin was narrower, under 12 percentage points.

In the 2020 election, Trump received 52.6% of the vote in the two Utqiagvik districts.

Hensley attributed that trend to the North Slope’s increasing dissatisfaction over national Democrats’ oil development positions and policies.

“Without oil production, they’re toast,” Hensley said. “That is what fuels their entire economy.”

Burke said it would not surprise her if the North Slope Borough tilted to Trump in this election. However, she would not be part of that trend, she said. “I can’t vote for Trump,” she said.

Baker, as of early September, said he had not made up his mind about how he would vote in the presidential election.

“The concern for me is who is going to do what they can to support the Alaskan economy, who is going to support our Alaskan way of life and who is going to make sure that their administration listens when a community says, ’This is what we need, please work with us this way,’” he said.

In another example of the diversity within District 40, Kotzebue, the other hub community, remains a Democratic stronghold in presidential elections, similar to the patterns in most parts of rural Alaska.