Rural Alaska

+ Economic Development

• Directing federal funding and resources to fight the damaging effects of climate change in villages and rural communities.
• Federal investment in infrastructure for our Alaska Native communities is key. We can lower energy costs through development of low-cost, local energy sources and improving energy efficiency. We also need more investment in broadband internet, so that all of Alaska can participate in the digital economy.
• We need to reduce transportation costs by improving our ports, roads, and airports across Alaska.
• We can help transform our economy by listening to Alaska Native concerns and learning from Alaska Native innovation.
• We must ensure that all people have access to adequate basic and affordable necessities like water, affordable heating, and broadband internet. Energy costs are sky-high in rural Alaska and focused investment by Congress can help bring down these costs.

+ Public Safety

• Strengthening public safety in rural Alaska, including increased federal funding to combat drug, alcohol and opioid abuse, as well as domestic violence and sexual abuse.
• One-in-three Alaska villages have no local police. Our State Troopers and Village Public Safety Officers are understaffed and underfunded. More than 70 Alaska communities — places with some of the highest rates of sexual assault in the U.S. — have no local police protection. That means, unlike most anywhere else in the United States, emergency help is hours or even days away
• Indigenous women are facing an epidemic of disappearances, homicide, violent crime, and trafficking, and the responsibility to stop it falls on all of us. Our leaders have failed these women and we need representatives actively working to protect them
• I will work to ensure that the Violence Against Women Act (VAWA) is reauthorized and strengthened in later iterations, strengthening tribal courts’ authority to process offenders

+ Subsistence

• Maintaining subsistence rights is critical to the well-being of our rural and urban Alaska Native communities. As your Congresswoman, I will stand up for subsistence rights in Congress and will work at the federal level to protect them from encroachment or limitation
• I support efforts to allow for enhanced tribal management of subsistence resources, including more involved co-management, recognizing that Indigenous peoples and organizations have the knowledge and skills to manage resources, like they have for thousands of years
• I am committed to pushing back against federal overreach where it interferes with our tribes’ livelihoods and cultures

+ Tribal Sovereignty

• I believe our 229 federally recognized tribes in Alaska must be seen and treated as sovereign and the federal government must work to empower tribal governments to deliver services to their members
• Advocate for increased tribal participation in natural resource management
• I will fight to give Alaska Native communities a stronger voice in deciding issues of land usage, public safety and economic development. In Congress, I would oppose any federal efforts to re-examine Alaska Native authority in villages and rural lands

+ Universal Broadband

• In today’s economy, reliable high-speed internet is critical.. Even after many years of commitments and promises, many areas of rural Alaska are still seriously underserved by broadband providers
• Without subsidies, our geography and small population means that high speed broadband likely isn’t economically viable, but it is essential to the health, education, and vitality of our rural communities
• We need to include funding for rural broadband in all of the COVID recovery efforts. We also must look for opportunities to partner with the private sector and government agencies to share the costs of providing affordable high speed internet to all Alaska
• To ensure that this gets done, we must have a champion in Congress who understands the power and promise of technology and will build the bipartisan relationships necessary to get this done