KCAW

Girls on the Run, a program for 3rd to 5th graders in Sitka, is in its 17th season of training 5k fun run. SAFV’s Claire Weber, coach Anna Schumacher and participants Clara Scotchmer and Willa Pilch joined KCAW for the Morning Interview to discuss the program, which culminates in an upcoming “Dance Party” 5k on December 13. Listen to the conversation here:

Local art galleries are inviting Sitkans to enjoy a post-Thanksgiving Day walk at the Downtown Winter Soiree from 5-8 p.m. on November 28. Pat Kehoe and Will Peterson joined KCAW for the Morning Interview, to discuss the event highlighting Sitka’s vibrant arts community, which will feature art music and food at participating galleries on Lincoln Street in downtown Sitka. Listen to the conversation here

Sitka Nutcracker, The Land of the Sweets premieres in early December. Melinda McAdams, Ella Colliver and Kincaid Parsons joined KCAW for the Morning Interview to discuss the program, which features new choreography and over 60 performers. Listen to the conversation here:

Performances are scheduled for December 5-7 at the Performing Arts Center, with shows at 7 PM on Friday, 2 PM and 7 PM on Saturday, and 3 PM on Sunday. The theme this year is “The Land of the Sweets.”

Landslide-induced tsunamis are a rare but worrisome phenomenon that has a history in Southeast, Alaska. Perhaps the most infamous happened in Lituya Bay in the 1950s. It generated a massive wave–  a “megatsunami” that killed five people. Decades later, in 2015, 180 million tons of rock slid into Icy Bay, about 40 miles northwest of Yakutat, triggering a tsunami over 600 feet tall. No one was injured, but the event raised concerns for community members like Melenda Lekanof.  

“At that time, I was working with Native allotments, and we have quite a few Native allotments, we have lodges up there,” Lekanof said. “But we don’t really have any kind of rescue agencies or anything that could reach that, other than Coast Guard. So that was kind of a big concern for me.” 

Lekanof has always been curious about the land and concerned about safety, something instilled in her by her elders.

“I was raised by my grandmother, and a lot of them talk about the old times, and things that we need to look out for,” Lekanof said. “Whatever happens below us from Southeast Alaska will soon catch up with us. Even though we’re covered by glaciers, and we’re refrigerated in our temperatures, and everything is changing, and our lands are changing and shifting. And so just keeping an eye on that, and looking at the safety, has always been kind of a passion of mine.”

When Lekanof moved back home to Yakutat several years ago, she began to keep tabs on nearby earthquakes. She was often in a helicopter for her day job, and would observe landslides from the sky. She realized the two could be connected, and began working with researchers to monitor the slides.

Lekanof is using her connections to help a project called Ḵutí, which is a Lingít word for weather. The 5-year grant project, funded by the National Science Foundation, is researching geohazards like landslides caused by extreme precipitation events, in six communities across Southeast, including Yakutat. 

Luka Silva manages Ḵutí for the Sitka Sound Science Center.

“What the project really was focused on was working with local tribal governments in each of those communities to get a sense of what research concerns and interests there were for those communities and for those tribes, and how we would be able to support them as a group of scientists,” Silva said.

Silva said the group first traveled to Yakutat last fall to meet with community members, and landslide-induced tsunamis were a high priority in those conversations. Silva says landslides like the one that created a tsunami in Icy Bay are different from the slides most Southeast communities are familiar with.

“Truly these huge chunks of rock and Earth from mountains are falling due to a wide variety of reasons and factors, but these are truly, I mean, pieces of mountains that are sloughing off off of them,” Silva said. “Because of the geography of Southeast, the geography of Yakutat, these slopes that we are concerned about could slough right into these large basins of water, and create these huge waves in a way that is mechanically different from how shallow-seated landslides work.”

So the Ḵutí project got to work, and with the support of Arctic T-Slip brought together a group of visiting experts and researchers, scientists from the Yakutat Tlingit Tribe, and community members, where they could share ideas and make plans for how to address the issue.

The group met for a two-day conference this October. On the first day, they discussed where the science is–what’s known and what isn’t– about landslide-induced tsunamis. On the second day, they discussed the next steps for ways to mitigate the risks. And landslides weren’t the only geohazard that came up- for years Lekanof says the nearby Anklin estuary has been eroding, slowly moving towards town.

“And this has been years, over 40 years,” Lekanof said. “We can’t stop it. You know, the only thing we could do is monitor it. But in the meantime, it’s taken down trees, just so many acres of trees that are just falling over and into the water as the water migrates and the sand is moving.”

Luka said while the slides and erosion seem like distinct events, that’s not really the case.

“That’s not really the way that a lot of people who live in Yakutat are seeing them as well, and seeing the topic of geohazards, the topic of changing landscapes, and how these landscapes are interacting and impacting the community,” Silva said.

Lekanof said it was great to get folks in the same room, and on the same page. 

“I think the Ḵutí brought in, not only about concerns about landslides, but concerns about what is going on in our community, and to be able to give a safe space, an open space for all of our agencies plus experts, to be able to talk with us about, realistically, what’s what’s happening,” Lekanof said. “And so now we’re working together on trying to monitor it, [and] come up with a plan.” 

She said they’ll develop a community safety plan and a monitoring and alert system – finding the money for that project is next. Silva said the Ḵutí group, along with the National Science Foundation funded Arctic T-Slip, intends to help Yakutat Tlingit Tribe and other community agencies secure funding to pursue the additional research, which they hope will lead to a safer community.

Sitkans Against Family Violence (SAFV) is hosting a food drive this Saturday from 9 a.m. to 3 p.m. at Sea Mart to support their shelter and food box programs. Emma Bruhl and Natalie Wojcik joined KCAW to discuss the drive and their 45th anniversary membership drive, raising $50,000 to secure future operations. Listen to the conversation here:

Young Performers Theater’s fall show will be gracing the Odess Theater this weekend, following the adventures of everybody’s favorite cast of characters from the 100 Aker Wood, including not one, not two, but THREE Winnie the Poohs. Actors Myles Hutchinson, Liz Pearson, and Louisa Sorrill join KCAW for the Morning Interview alongside director Zeke Blackwell on bringing the iconic bear to life, as well as what audiences can expect from their fun-filled production.

Eleven-year-old Thomas Montion wanders down the aisle between two long tables covered in dishes of herring egg pasta, tandoori salmon bites, octopus and potatoes, and bull kelp pickles. Two hundred Sitkans line up in the hall, anticipating the many dishes they’ll try at this year’s feast.

They’re here for Sitka Conservation Society’s annual wild foods potluck, where locals share dishes featuring ingredients fished, foraged, hunted, or cultivated in Southeast Alaska. 

“All of this stuff looks so good. I’m going to get some of these black bear enchiladas…black bears don’t live here, so they must have hunted this somewhere else,” Thomas says, as he places a spoonful on his plate. “I’m going to get some of these salmon cakes. Venison, mushroom, meatballs? That sounds good. I’m gonna get one of these. I love deer.”

Thomas is joined by his mom, dad, three siblings, and friend Luke. 

“I’m really excited just to see what different types of food they have that I’ve never heard about before,” Thomas says. 

Thomas’s dad is in the U.S. Coast Guard, and moved with his family from Oregon to Sitka in June. Since then, Thomas started a Youtube channel called “The Wild Tom & Chuck Show,” where he and his brother make videos about “fishing, exploring and messing around outside.” Tonight, he’s using his GoPro to film his experience at the annual potluck.

“Oregon was sort of like here, just not quite as big of a salmon run,” Thomas said. “It used to be really big along the Columbia River, but kind of was overfished and dammed. We had some seafood, but not quite as much as here. So it’s been a really cool experience to have all this wild food.”

Kathleen Montion, Thomas’ mom, says Thomas is known for his adventurous palate.

“We have really good eaters,” she says. “We do a lot of foraging and hunting and fishing. We’re not super good at it, but we try, and they love finding chicken of the woods and all different sorts of things. They’re always up for trying anything.”

Kathleen says Sitka has been extremely welcoming to her family, and she wants her four kids to understand how lucky they are to live in such an abundant environment as the Tongass. 

“I want them to know just what a unique experience that is, and how we’re so blessed to have all of these foods available to us, and definitely how important it is to make sure that the food sources are protected so that we can continue to do this in the future as well,” she says.

SCS has hosted this potluck for about two decades. Deputy Director Katie Riley says this year, the gathering is a celebration of the many ways we connect with the public lands and waters that sustain us — through the foods we harvest, the cultures we practice, the places we explore, and the communities we build together. She says the theme is especially important in light of the Trump administration’s recent efforts to develop and reduce protections for public lands.

Riley says the event is the conservation society’s chance to say thank you to the community, and celebrate all of the effort that everyone puts into protecting this place and caring about their neighbors. And sharing food, she says, is such a great way to do that.

“One of the things that’s so unique about Sitka and about Southeast Alaska is that food is really one of the core reasons that people have been able to thrive here for so long. Like these healthy, abundant salmon runs that provided for Indigenous people to really be able to flourish in this place,” Riley says. “So when I think about food, I think about my connection to place, land. I think about sharing all of these values that we want to instill in current and future generations about how to take care of a place. It’s really how we can take care of the place that nourishes us and provides us with so much.”

Riley says every year, community members bring a variety of dishes to the event, and usually there are a couple of really exciting, novel things that people might not get a chance to try in their everyday lives. One that stood out to her this year? The black bear enchiladas.

“This black bear was harvested this spring in 2025 and we made sure to save enough for the wild foods potluck,” says Jordan Tanguay, who, along with her partner, harvested the bear near Juneau, where they used to live.

This is their second year participating in the potluck.

“It’s great to see the community come together,” Tanguay says. “And understanding what it means to be a conservation society, I think that theme came through really strongly last year. This year, we’re talking about being connected to the land and why it matters to us. And I think during this time, I find myself really finding that joy of being outside, and a lot of our recreation in not only the state of Alaska, but elsewhere, is really based on things like this.”

Wrapping back around to Thomas towards the end of the potluck, I ask him what his favorite dish was, and the answer is no surprise.

“I think my favorite food was probably the bear enchiladas. Black bear enchiladas. That was very good,” he says. “I think it had some sort of jalapeno pepper in there, very spicy, and I loved it.”

But what’s even better than the bear enchiladas, he says, is the community. 

“It’s so fun that everybody showed up, like everybody’s here, almost everybody from around the island,” Thomas says. “A lot of people showed up. So it’s really fun.”

And, he says, he looks forward to trying even more local foods at next year’s event.

Sitka’s annual fall art walk is this Saturday, November 22 from 4-7 p.m. Greater Sitka Art Council’s Melinda McAdams, Bette Gray and Marshall Barg joined KCAW for the Morning Interview to discuss this weekend’s event, including the 23 businesses participating this year, as well as the artists and music that will be featured. Listen here:

A short film based on a traditional Lingít tale will be premiering at the world’s largest Indigenous film festival this weekend. The 11-minute film made in Sitka is narrated entirely in Lingít with English subtitles, and features several Sitka locals.

The film opens with a scene of a man donning regalia, intercepted by aerial shots of Sitka. In Lingít, he says, “The berries were ripe. They were so good at that time.”

The short film is based on the traditional Lingít tale “The Woman Who Married A Bear.” There are multiple versions of the story, but the basic premise is that a woman is disrespectful to a bear while out picking berries with a friend and ends up marrying the bear disguised as a man and having a family with him. 

“What I did with the traditional Lingít story was I wrote a contemporary version of it,” said Kaa,laa Mary Goddard, a Lingít artist and filmmaker based in Sitka, who wrote and produced the short film. “I wanted it to resonate with audiences today, but still be told in our traditional way, which is the oral Lingít storytelling.”

Goddard said the project has been in the works for several years, and was filmed last summer during salmonberry season.

In this modern, condensed retelling, a cell phone is central to the plot. Goddard said some themes she wanted to pull out of the story are being aware and being present.   

“In modern society, a lot of times we are so distracted by our phones, we are so distracted about what looks good, what sounds fun, that we can be swept away into a completely different world, whether that world is addiction, whether that world is not living out your values,” she said. “And so without giving too much away, I want people to be able to watch this film and take away what they need to take away from it. But I believe the story is just as relevant today as it was hundreds of years ago.”

The 11-minute film is narrated completely in Lingít by X̱ʼunei Lance Twitchell, professor of Alaska Native Languages at University of Alaska Southeast. Twitchell said he’s studied the traditional tale quite a bit. 

“The story is a really incredible Lingít story,” Twitchell said. “And what I really love is we have these different retellings of it, which I really like, because Lingít are not flat, one dimensional peoples. And so any story we have, there might be 10 different ways to tell it, although there are certain things that usually, most people want you to sort of get to.”

One of the biggest lessons from the story, Twitchell said, is to be respectful of nature.

“Ch’a Idakát át a yakg̱wahéiyag̱u ḵudzitee, ách áwé ch’a ldakát át a jeex̱ tootée at yáa awuné, there’s a living spirit inside of everything, which is why we give respect to all things. And when those things don’t happen, they’ll say, ‘Ux̱ kei kg̱watée i ḵutseeyí,’ your life will spin out of control,” he said.

Twitchell said he had fun finding translations for modern words and concepts in the script that haven’t traditionally existed in Lingít, like “taking selfies” and “texting,” which he translated to “yoo gushdatánk,” which means “thumb talking” in Lingít.

“For Indigenous languages, there’s a real challenge of modernizing our languages, because our languages were actively banished. We were forbidden to speak our own languages,” he said. “These were governments, these were churches, these were leaders who actively forbade us from speaking, so we didn’t get to hang out with a world as all these different things were being developed: boilers and engines and cell phones and all this other stuff.”

Twenty-three-year-old Gavi Kay Stroemer is an Indigenous Nakota Sioux model from Sitka, who makes her acting debut in this film as the woman who marries a bear. She thinks the modern retelling of the traditional story will help reach a younger audience.   

“So I think this was a really, really brilliant idea,” Stroemer said. “Most people do respond well to modern teachings. They can hear the stories traditionally, but I think they more see it as like an old thing, you know, and teaching it in a more modern way, like a film, is, I think, a better way to speak to people now.”

Twitchell hopes the film gets people interested in learning more — to learn, or continue learning Lingít, and to delve deeper into Alaska Native stories.

“There’s a lot of people who taught me the stories of our people, and their voices echo through me,” Twitchell said. “As people listen to me, they’re listening to all the people who taught me Lingít, and then their intention in doing that was to make sure that all of our grandchildren would be speakers of the language. And I think that’s the direction we’re going, is that we’ll have a generation someday that’ll look back and say, ‘Whoa, this was almost gone? It’s all over the place.’ And we got a long road ahead of us to get there, but I think this project is one part of that road construction that gets us to a place of safety, which is where we deserve to be.”

The film team said they hope to continue to make more of these short films showcasing Alaska Native stories, or possibly even a full-length feature, in the future. 

“This film is probably one of many to come, because it’s such a cool way to not only highlight Lingít stories, it’s a good way to get it out there to the younger generations,” said Lucas Goddard, who plays the bear in the film.

The Woman Who Married A Bear will premiere at the Red Nation International Film Festival in Los Angeles on Saturday, Nov. 15. It will also be showing in Sitka on Dec. 5 and at the Anchorage Film Festival on Dec. 13.

Several months after announcing a plan to sell the company, the Hames Corporation has found a likely buyer. Owners of the Sitka grocery business announced on Tuesday (11-11-25) that they have signed a letter of agreement to sell the business to Albertsons-Safeway, a national grocery chain.

Under the tentative agreement, Safeway, an Albertsons subsidiary, will purchase all of the businesses under the Hames Corporation umbrella. That includes Sitka’s largest grocery store, Sea Mart, Watson Point Liquors, Market Center, and Cascade Convenience Center, as well as Newtown Liquor in Ketchikan.

Earlier this year, owners Roger and Mary Hames announced their plans to sell the multi-generational family-owned business. Roger says while they’ve signed an agreement, there are still more steps before the sale is finalized early next year.

“I would say it’s probably, at this point, a 95% chance that they will be the one, in the end,” he said in an interview with KCAW on Wednesday (11-12-25). “So we’re well on our way, and again, we’re in the due diligence phase now. That includes many, many questions as it gets into the fine details all about your operations, and that’s the process that we’re working through.”

He says they announced the sale update in a staff meeting on November 11, and have kept them informed on the process along the way. Under the agreement, Safeway plans to retain all employees that wish to remain with the company, but they will have to fill out new employment applications for Safeway’s records. And he says the buyer does not plan to change the names or logos of any of the stores, at least initially. 

Mary said the process of working with the buyer has been a positive one.

“We have every every faith that is going to be great,” she said. “What I appreciate was that they understood the connection to our community. They have really got it ingrained in them, what our businesses mean to the community and what the community means to us. They’re getting it, and that’s important to us.”

She said they’ve received a wide range of community feedback since announcing their decision to sell earlier this year.

“We have received very kind notes and thanks, and ‘Oh, we’re so happy for you, and we wish you all the best’ to ‘Oh, my goodness, I’m depressed, I’m so sad, you know, why are you doing this?’ And I get it,” she said. “But I think that, overall, we’re really feeling the love from the community.”

They hope the new owner will continue their many local events and charitable giving programs the company is known for, but Roger said they recognize that once the business is finally sold, it’s out of their hands. 

“We’re hoping and praying the fit will be really, really good, but they’re not us, and we have to move forward, and we’re not going to be able to, nor should we really lament about anything or have any regrets about what we’re doing,” he said. “This is a chapter in our lives that is changing. It’s not easy, like Mary said, and we take it very personal and take it very responsibly, and we just want to move on at this point.”

At the same time, he said they’re not going anywhere.

“Sitka is our home. I was born there. Mary’s been there for close to 50 years. Our kids were born, all there,” he said. “All of our kids and all of our grandkids are there, and we’re very involved in their lives. And Sitka is home, it’s going to remain home.”

Both the Hames Corporation and Albertsons-Safeway have agreed on a closing date of January 30, 2026.