KCAW

Sitka Fine Arts Camp’s Musical Theater Camp will present “The SpongeBob Musical” this weekend, Aug. 1 and 2, at the Sitka Performing Arts Center.

Theater Director Zeke Blackwell and cast members join the Morning Interview to discuss the musical’s appeal, noting its uplifting spirit and diverse musical artists like Aerosmith and Cyndi Lauper. Listen here:

Photo: Hope McKenney interviews Vince Tutiakoff Sr. about teaching traditional skills to youth at the Qawalangin Tribe’s Camp Qungaayux

An impassioned op-ed about community radio in high school jumpstarted Hope McKenney’s radio and journalism career. As KCAW’s new reporter, McKenney is new to Sitka but no stranger to Alaska. She has worked in public media in New York and California, and more recently for KUCB in Unalaska, and KBBI in Homer. She joined Katherine Rose for the Morning Interview to discuss how her work and experiences led her to Sitka. Listen here:

Mary Goddard picks salmonberries as part of her project “90 Day Native.” (KCAW/McKenney)

Kaa,laa Mary Goddard plucks golden and red salmonberries from bright green bushes near Starrigavan Estuary on the northern part of Sitka’s road system. The skies are grey and rain drizzles down on her head as she fills her blue plastic bucket. 

Goddard, a Lingít artist in Sitka, is just over a month into a three-month challenge of eating only Alaska Native foods.

“So anything that I can fish, forage or hunt for here,” she says. “That just means nothing from the grocery stores, like refined sugars, flours, processed foods, anything that’s not natural to Alaska.”

Traditional foods were a cornerstone of Goddard’s diet growing up in the small Southeast Alaska village of Yakutat. 

“We lived off of fish, moose meat and berries,” she says. “But one thing that didn’t seem to be a lot of knowledge around was a lot of the Indigenous plants…I spent a good portion of my time learning about the plants just from books and anyone that was willing to teach.”

Now, she’s trying to put that knowledge into practice and incorporate all the ingredients: the fish, the meat, the plants. 

“The Lingít culture is over 10,000 years old,” Goddard says. “Lingít people had exactly what they needed here, and so I just wanted to lean into that a little bit more.”

Goddard says her journey to take on the 90-day challenge began with the spring herring egg harvest, which kicks off the foraging season. 

“I’ve heard a lot of Lingít people refer to the herring egg harvest as the new year, and it really feels that way, because once that happens, it’s almost just like one thing after another,” she says.

Since then, she’s harvested black seaweed, sea lettuce and kelp. Sea cucumbers, sockeye salmon and lovage. Chocolate lily bulbs and salmonberries. Rose petals, white clovers and fireweed for tea. She’s also been gifted seal meat and seal oil, and even a boat ride to further her foraging. 

“That’s almost as important as a car in Sitka, or maybe even more so,” Goddard laughs. 

Over the course of the three-month project, she wants to highlight as much of the harvest as possible and celebrate how amazing local food is. 

“And then we thought, what would it look like if I was dedicated to eating only that? What would be the health benefits? Would there be any? Would I see a drastic change?” she says. “So instead of just doing it for 30 days, we figured 90 days would give us more time to measure if there’s any changes that can be seen.”

Goddard says eating only traditional foods has been challenging at times — mainly at night when she wants to sit and enjoy something big and comforting, like mashed potatoes and gravy or some cake. But, she says, while she was expecting to feel hunger pains, overall she’s felt very satisfied. She’s also sleeping better and having fewer stomach issues. 

She says harvesting can be a lot of work, but it’s worth the benefits so far.

“The food here seems very nutrient dense,” she says. “It’s also not traveling from Seattle or beyond to get here in containers. It is literally outside our door. It is in our backyard. It’s at our beach. It’s in the forest.” 

Goddard has a background in regenerative tourism. She says through that work, she learned that food is a major contributor to environmental harm and climate change. So, she says, even if people can switch out some of the beef that they eat on a daily, monthly, or yearly basis for something that they can harvest themselves, they’re contributing to a healthier environment and a better world.

“I feel like there’s so much connected to the food,” she says. “It’s respect for every plant, every animal that’s out there. When you respect the plants or the animals, you’re going to be a better steward of the land.”

In everything she does, she says she considers why she’s doing it, why it’s important, and how it will connect to her culture and community. 

“What’s so cool about the harvesting is that you may know one piece of the puzzle or a couple more, but there’s always someone who knows more than you. So I’m eager to continue learning,” Goddard says.

She hopes she will come out of this project with a better understanding of local foods and how to harvest them. And also hopes this project will help inspire others to connect with their food sources, including her nine-year-old son.

Goddard is sharing her project “90 Day Native” on social media and is also working on a documentary about her experience.

(KCAW Photo/Justin and Shannon Elmquist)

Shannon Elmquist moved to Sitka earlier this month to be closer to her family and new grandson.

“My youngest son, Justin Elmquist road tripped with me from Gardnerville, Nevada,” Elmquist said in an interview with KCAW on Thursday (7-24-25). “We caught the ferry in Bellingham, Washington, and arrived [in Sitka] on the 14th of July.”

Shannon and Justin made a lot of memories on their long drive, taking plenty of silly selfies along the way to commemorate the journey. But Justin, a recent high school graduate, won’t need a selfie to remember the most unusual part of his capstone summer vacation– fighting an active house fire. 

They were pulling into their driveway after a family trip to the Raptor Center. That’s when Shannon said her daughter-in-law smelled something unusual.

“She says ‘It smells like trash, like they’re burning trash.’ And Justin’s like, ‘Well, let’s go to the end of the road…and check it out'” Shannon recalled.

“Yeah, being snoopy,” Justin added.

They saw smoke ahead, so they drove down Andrew Hope Street and found the source– a single story duplex with fire creeping up its side. 

“I don’t even think I got the truck in park, and he was already out the door,” Shannon said. “I was running out the door. We started banging on the doors and the windows not getting any response.”

“I wasn’t really thinking, it was like, ‘Holy crap! We’ve got to get those people out of there,” Justin said.

They caught the attention of the woman in the opposite duplex unit, and through the window she directed them to a garden hose. Shannon ran to grab the hose, and Justin turned it on. Shannon says that’s when they learned that someone was home in the burning duplex unit.

“So he takes over, and he’s putting out the fire and I run into the house,” Shannon said.

Inside, she found a sleeping woman and her 18-month-old baby.

“I just opened the door and went in, and I was like, ‘your house is on fire!'” Shannon said.

She helped the pair out of the house. The fire department arrived shortly after Justin had extinguished the fire, and Fire Chief Craig Warren said they were able to cancel their call for a fire engine. Warren says the house had vinyl siding, which tends to burn fast and hot.

“Little bit of charring on the edge of the porch, but, all in all, it was very low damage,” Warren said.

He said the source of the fire is still under investigation– he doesn’t believe it was caused by negligence. But he said quick thinking prevented the situation from being much worse. 

“The reason that we have extinguishers staged everywhere is because you get ahold of a fire when it’s very small, and it’s easy to contain,” Warren said. “When you get a fire in a house, and it’s taking a whole room, that garden hose isn’t going to be able to put that much fire out.”

Justin is training to be a professional mixed martial arts fighter. He thinks those skills steadied  him in a moment of crisis. 

“With fighting…we have to keep a level head and all that, through people throwing punches and kicks at your head, or especially through Jiu Jitsu, when you get frustrated in certain positions,” Justin said. “Just keeping a level head through everything. And so that definitely did help in the firefighting.”

With everyone safe and the fire contained, Shannon and Justin celebrated with a few high fives and fist bumps, then went home for dinner. But Shannon kept playing over the scenario in her head. 

“Just the whole divine intervention, like, had we not come home when we did that fire would have gotten so much bigger, and nobody would have noticed,” she said.

Warren hopes like the mother-son pair, Sitkans will remember to stay aware of what’s happening in their neighborhoods, and maybe help a neighbor out.

“Justin and Shannon are really the heroes of the day,” Warren said. “Truly another great story of Sitkans helping Sitkans.”

California author Jerry Martien will give a reading from his new book Waveshock: Ed Ricketts, the Voyage of the Grampus, and Our Biopoetic Future on Saturday, July 26, at 7 p.m. at Yaw Chapel.

Martien was a writer-in-residence with the Island Institute in October 2009 and his book has strong ties to Sitka, primarily through two of its main characters, Ed Ricketts and Jack Calvin.

Martien and Carolyn Servid, former director of the Island Institute, joined the Morning Interview to discuss Martien’s book, their time in Sitka, and what to expect from Saturday’s event. Listen to their conversation here:

Should restrictions be lifted on a city hospital fund to pay for upgrades to local recreational facilities? Sitka voters will consider that question on the municipal ballot this fall. 

Voters approved a tobacco tax 20 years ago to support the city-owned Sitka Community Hospital. When the hospital was sold to the Southeast Alaska Regional Health Consortium (SEARHC) in 2019, that money continued to go into a fund dedicated to former employees’ retirement. Right now, that fund pretty much breaks even each year, and if it eventually has a surplus, the funds are restricted. 

Sponsors of a ballot initiative, assembly members Chris Ystad and Kevin Mosher, have proposed lifting the restrictions, directing future surplus revenue from the fund toward a multi-purpose sports and recreation complex. 

The idea is exciting for some, including Sitka Youth Soccer President Brian Farley. At the Sitka Assembly meeting on July 22, he said the community deserves an outlet for healthy activities, and youth deserve access to more high school sports. 

“Here in Sitka, our soccer program, just last year, had eight kids who were high school aged who quit soccer because they had no ability to compete for their high school team,” Farley said. “We have no high school football in Sitka. However, in Alaska, there are 36 high school soccer programs in both girls and boys competition, and at least 22 football programs. A turf field would allow for our schools to participate in both soccer and football.” 

Getting the assembly to agree on the initiative hasn’t been seamless. At previous meetings, several assembly members questioned if using the surplus for sports and recreation was the best use of the money, when there are a number of issues they say are more pressing to the community. 

There’s also uncertainty over how much surplus the fund will have and when it’ll be available. 

Finance Director Brooke Volschenk said while some former hospital employees might already be a number of years into their retirement, it’s likely many more are not. Because of that, she said there’s no way for the city to know how long it will be paying out retirement from the hospital fund, or whether that number could increase down the line. 

“In a year where we have a lot of active retired Sitka Community Hospital employees, this liability amount could substantially increase from year to year, and then we would be in trouble,” Volschenk said. “If you look at the fact that what we’re receiving now is barely covering, or not quite covering, the amount of the liability for Fiscal Year ‘26.”

That uncertainty is amplified by the fact that the state tells the city how much it has to pay in PERS liability (the state’s public employees retirement program) every year. And Volschenk said that number isn’t consistent. If the city ever gets to a point where the tobacco tax and the hospital payment aren’t enough to cover that liability, it could be in trouble.

For Fiscal Year 2026, the city has to pay $1.4 million for its PERS liability, she said. Between the $700,000 a year payment from SEARHC and the $800,000 or so the city receives from the tobacco tax, Volschenk said that revenue will be eaten up.

At the assembly meeting, Brian McLaughlin, a member of the Sitka Community Outdoor Recreation Project, said he’d love to see a facility in Sitka that would promote health and recreation for the town.

“That said, we’re not quite that far into our discussion yet,” he said. “What we are here to vote on tonight is simply to get this in front of the voters and whether or not to allow the community as a whole a chance to vote on where to use the funds from the hospital sales. In that respect, I’d ask, what’s the downside of putting it in front of the voters?”

While they weren’t convinced at previous meetings, both Mayor Steven Eisenbeisz and assembly member JJ Carlson said they’d been swayed by community discussions, and decided to vote in favor of putting the question out to the public. 

“Prospecting means you’re staking a claim on something and then hoping it pans out later,” Carlson said. “That’s kind of an analogy I see here with this, because we don’t really know what’s happening in this fund and where it’s going to go in the future. In the last meeting, that was kind of a statement of fear from me, but now I’ve had another two weeks to think of it. And I think prospecting is something we do with new endeavors, and it’s a very big part of the state of Alaska.”

Ultimately, the assembly unanimously approved the proposition for consideration in the Oct. 7 municipal election, where Sitkans will decide if recreation is the right use for the future surplus. 

Renovations at Sitka’s airport are well underway, with a targeted completion date of June 2026. Municipal Administrator John Leach joined the Morning Interview to discuss the airport expansion project and what Sitkans can expect when it’s complete. 

On Saturday, Aug. 16 at 3 p.m. there will be an open house and escalator ribbon cutting at the airport. 

Listen to their conversation here:

Harbor Mountain Brewing Co. in Sitka is celebrating its fifth anniversary this summer. In those five years, the local brewery has become a gathering place- often hosting live music, pop-up artists, lectures, political events and nonprofit fundraisers. They’re celebrating on July 26 with community event, featuring live music from The Rain Dogs, a Juneau-based band, and new libation releases. Brewery co-founder and general manager Zach Anderson and band members Anna Mahanor and Avery Stewart joined KCAW for the morning interview to discuss the event. Listen here:

The anniversary celebration is from 5 to 9 p.m. on , with doors opening at 5 PM and music starting at 6 PM.

Youth in Sitka spent five months testing the water as part of an ocean acidification education program called 4-H pH. (Courtesy of Jasmine Shaw)

From January to May, about a dozen elementary students in Sitka shuffled down to Sage Beach each month, thermometers and pH strips in hand, to gather data. The students would throw a bucket attached to a long rope as far out as they could, and slowly pull the bucket back in, careful not to spill the water. Then they’d test it. 

“Before this spring, I couldn’t have told you what the actual pH of the ocean was at different times a year or the temperature even,” said Jasmine Shaw, the Sitka Spruce Tips’ 4-H leader.

Shaw recently wrapped up a five-month project testing local waters for ocean acidification. The education program is called “4-H pH,” and introduced elementary school-age kids in the island’s 4-H program to the world of ocean science. 

The pilot project was the first of its kind, and the curriculum will soon be published for 4-H groups to use nationwide.

Shaw said the goal of the project was to expose younger students to the concern of ocean acidification in their communities. There’s already a lot of curriculum geared towards middle school and high school students around the issue, she said, but not so much towards younger ones.

“I majored in chemistry, but I probably didn’t learn about the pH scale until high school, and so to have these kids learn about the pH scale in second, third, fourth grade was really cool to see,” she said. 

Over the course of the spring, kids learned to measure pH, temperature and dissolved oxygen in the ocean, and the measurements were uploaded to a national database. 

Shaw said pH levels remained mostly even over the course of their testing. But the temperature did rise in March before going back down again during the region’s particularly cold April.

“We had about five degrees Celsius as our low temperature in February, but then it jumped to almost eight degrees in March,” she said.

The “4-H pH” project, funded by the NOAA Ocean Acidification Program, is part of a citizen science program called Global Learning & Observations to Benefit the Environment Program, or GLOBE for short. 

The program is led by NASA. And, according to the NASA website, it aims to bring together students, teachers, and scientists to promote science and learning about the environment.

The great thing about citizen science projects like this one, according to Shaw, is that they show you don’t have to be a scientist to participate. You can collect data no matter who you are or what you do, and it will be useful and important to those in the field.  

“As with any science, you don’t know until you measure it,” she said. “You might think, ‘Yeah, sure, the ocean’s fine,’ but we don’t actually know that until we stick a thermometer in there or a probe and take those measurements.” 

Shaw said part of what made this pilot program so accessible to younger kids is its interdisciplinary approach. 

“Cooking and art are such community spaces,” she said. “So it made it very easy then to approach something like pH or ocean acidification that might otherwise seem a little complicated or overwhelming to learn about, and it made it more fun.”

And the interdisciplinary approach seemed to pay off. Or at least that’s what nine-year-old Greyson Browning said.

“We made sushi and we did a little experiment where we made purple lemonade,” he said. “We put some baking soda in it and we made it fizz.”

Shaw said in this case, they were looking at the reactions of acids and bases in the kitchen, and then talking about how pH and temperature can affect all different things in the ocean, especially sea life. She asked Browning why he thinks it’s important to monitor Sitka’s waters.

Shaw: “What would happen if the ocean kept getting warmer and warmer here?”

Browning: “It could affect some of the marine life.”

Jasmine: “Yeah, and we’re a fishing community and marine-based community right here on the water, so it’s pretty important to know what’s going on in the ocean and the pH of it.”

Browning said that although he doesn’t know yet what he wants to do when he grows up, he loved participating in the program.

“It’s fun,” he said. “You get to learn stuff. And it can inspire kids to maybe grow up and be a scientist and help protect marine life.”

In fact, he enjoyed the “4-H pH” program so much that he said he wasn’t sure he wanted to go on his family’s trip to Hawaii this spring and miss a 4-H meeting. 

“Though, if I didn’t do that, I wouldn’t have been able to experience some stuff I did there,” Browning said. “Like I went snorkeling and I saw sea turtles.”

Because he missed a meeting, Browning did make sure to take the temperature of the ocean in Hawaii during his trip. He said it was much warmer than in Sitka. 

Shaw is heading to Angoon to introduce the program later this month, and to Petersburg in August. 

Then, the curriculum will be published as an official 4-H “CLOVER” curriculum that can be used by any 4-H club or afterschool program throughout the country. 

The Sitka International Cello Seminar culminated in a pop-up cello presentation at Harbor Mountain Brewing Company on Sunday evening. (KCAW/McKenney)

The Sitka Music Festival recently wrapped up its 54th summer season in the island community, featuring a month of classical music performances and artists from around the world.

The festival culminated in a pop-up cello presentation Sunday evening at Harbor Mountain Brewing Company.

The event was a fresh take on classical music performance, reflecting a cornerstone of the festival’s philosophy: like pizza, classical music is meant to be shared.

Seven cellists sat throughout the brewery, intermixed with customers drinking beers and eating wood fired pizzas. They played Fauré’s “Pavane,” Haydn’s “Cello Concerto in C,” and even the theme song from “Game of Thrones.” With no one place to look, the audience members’ attention darted between soloing cellists around the room.

The musicians were here as part of the Sitka International Cello Seminar — a two-week intensive designed for emerging professional cellists. 

“Cellists, for whatever reason, love each other’s company,” said Zuill Bailey, artistic director of the Sitka Music Festival, and a Grammy award-winning cellist. 

He said they wanted to create a space for early-career cellists to commune together, meet Sitkans and learn from mentors and each other. Now, in its 12th year, the seminar covers not only musical instruction and performance, but also ways the young musicians can present and promote themselves, how they can take care of their bodies and why community is so important. 

Bailey said this year, mentors included a sports medicine doctor focused on performing arts medicine, a media specialist, the principal cellist from the Houston Symphony and a staff pianist.

“And we all live in the same building. That’s the key of it, all of this,” Bailey said. “We dine together, we rehearse together, we chatter together, we go on hikes together.” 

During their two weeks in Sitka, the cohort played for elders at the island’s assisted living home, put together a “cellobration” program, which started with a cello solo and added cellists as the performance progressed, and even played for the brown bears at Sitka’s bear sanctuary.

According to Bailey, getting out into the community is what it’s all about. The role of a musician, he said, is so much bigger than just playing their instrument. 

“I want to make sure that they are not a one trick pony,” he said. “I want to make sure they can play their instruments, but they can also use those assets as human beings to really bring community together, which is kind of what concerts are. We bring people together to be inspired, to feel different, to be together, and then to kind of disperse and spread positivity and hope.” 

This year’s seminar had one of its largest applicant pools ever. William Harris is from the UK and was part of this year’s international cohort. This was the 24-year-old’s second time participating in the seminar. He’s an accomplished cellist, pianist and vocalist who is about to start a Doctorate of Music program at the University of Southern California in Los Angeles.

“I needed this to lower my blood pressure, because when I think about moving to Los Angeles, it’s a bit scary,” he said. 

During his time in Sitka, Harris said he enjoyed the chance to play exclusively with other cellists, which is quite rare, and it led to strong bonds.

“The main thing is just how connected we all feel with each other after two weeks,” he said. “We come in having one thing in common: the cello. And then we leave and we realize we have so many things in common, and also that we love Sitka and the people we meet and the music we play. And it’s a great time to explore new things in a safe place that is very friendly and open and warm and welcoming, if not a little bit rainy.”

For many years, according to Alex Serio, the festival’s executive director, music schools have taught musicians to practice in their rooms, learn their parts and then go audition. But, he said to function and thrive in society today, musicians — especially in the classical music community — need to be able to connect with people, bring in new audiences and make their music more accessible. 

“When you get out and play like today in a pizzeria with drinks, you’re going to reach a whole audience that may never come into a concert hall,” Serio said. “So you’re providing access to classical music and you’re spreading the art you love with other people.” 

Harris, the British cellist, agreed. He said going to a concert is very often formal, but music should be accessible because the whole point is to share it with people. 

“If you’re only willing to do it in a formal setting, then I think we’ve kind of missed the point,” Harris said. “We should be exploring all ways that people can enjoy music because it’s not always people that want to sit down and listen. Music should just be able to wash over you. And it’s so perfect here because there are so many wonderful places, and people are so supportive of the festival and the seminar that it seems to be part of Sitka life in the summer, which is wonderful.” 

Back at the brewery, the musicians wrapped up their music, put their cellos away and ordered some pizzas and pints. Then they sat at a long table for one last dinner, elbow to elbow, cellist to cellist, before hopping on a plane and heading back to their various corners of the world.