Indian Country Today

Berries, wildlife and toxic land: The continuing push to clean up contamination in rural Alaska

When a string of Yup’ik elders from St. Lawrence Island, Alaska, all received the same cancer diagnoses, officials initially shrugged it off as a bizarre medical mystery. But not long after, a different village reported an increase in unusual cancer symptoms as well.

Can Indigenous subsistence rights still be protected in Alaska?

Subsistence, a practice which past generations participated in without question, has become a complex legal puzzle — “a very unsettled and unsettling [legal landscape] for Alaska Native people,” according to one lawyer who has spent decades working on subsistence cases.

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