Incumbent congressional candidates skip Alaska Native convention’s forum

Mary Peltola, a Democrat in a tight race that might determine control of the U.S. Senate, stood on stage at the Alaska Federation of Natives convention in Anchorage and threw some barbs at the candidate who was not there: incumbent Sen. Dan Sullivan.

Peltola, in a late-afternoon candidate forum on Friday, addressed the news shock of the day: a lawsuit filed by the Trump administration that aims to “not acknowledge a win if the incumbent does not win.”

“This is just flagrant, flagrant corruption, in my opinion,” Peltola said.

Earlier in the day, Peltola criticized the lawsuit, which President Donald Trump confirmed had been filed on his orders. Sullivan is “using his D.C. allies to try to keep himself in power and put his own interests ahead of Alaskans,” the Democratic candidate said in a Facebook message. She discussed the lawsuit in an interview on MSNBC as well. The Sullivan campaign has said it was surprised by the lawsuit.

In a break with past tradition, the incumbent senator declined to attend the AFN candidate forum, which in past campaign years has been one of the most high-profile candidate events. Also breaking with tradition was U.S. Rep. Nick Begich, R-Alaska, who declined to attend the House candidate forum also held by AFN on Friday.

Exactly why Sullivan was not present at the Friday afternoon AFN forum was unclear. AFN leaders said his campaign had cited “security” issues and protests. However, campaign spokesman Nate Adams said that was not correct, but did not specify the reason for Sullivan skipping the Friday forum.

Sullivan did speak at the AFN convention the day before, delivering a wide-ranging speech lasting for over 40 minutes that touted his work in the Senate. It was one of the speeches delivered by the three sitting members of Alaska’s congressional delegation; such speeches are routine during the annual AFN conventions.

Peltola, too, has skipped campaign forums, most recently a scheduled debate hosted earlier in the week by the Greater Fairbanks Chamber of Commerce. The Sullivan campaign on Monday issued a statement criticizing her for missing that and other events in Girdwood, Anchorage and the Kenai-Soldotna area. The statement called her “No Show Peltola.”

However, the AFN candidate events are usually highly anticipated. The federation is the largest organization representing Alaska’s Indigenous people, and its convention is the nation’s largest representative gathering of Native peoples, according to AFN. This year’s event was a milestone for the organization, its 60th convention.

Without Sullivan, Friday’s forum with Peltola was not really a debate but a friendly discussion. Peltola is Yup’ik and from Western Alaska, and she was an active participant in AFN conventions and other events well before she was elected to her single term in the U.S. House in 2022.

The discussion covered a variety of issues important to Indigenous Alaskans, fishers and the public in general.

Much of her time was devoted to the importance of subsistence food-gathering. The word “subsistence,” she said, “is a very inadequate term because ‘subsistence’ implies bare minimum, in my opinion. And being able to hunt off the land and live off the land and teach our children our values through hunting and fishing, that to me is the maximum quality of life.”

Key laws of importance to Alaska Natives and to fishers, such as the Magnuson-Stevens Fishery Conservation and Management Act, are overdue for updates, she said. Those laws “have got to be reauthorized to acknowledge the changes that we’re seeing in the demographics of our communities, in the different threats and challenges to the issues of abundance,” she said.

She addressed the increased cost of living, especially in rural Alaska, where energy prices have soared. “No Alaskan should ever have to choose between heating their home and feeding their family, and that is exactly the predicament we’re in,” she said, repeating a line she has used frequently on the campaign trail.

On energy, she said she favors an “all-of-the-above approach.” Petroleum will continue to be important for the foreseeable future, she said, “But that doesn’t mean that we stop working on renewables.” She fought back tears when she was asked about violence against women and the crisis of missing and murdered Indigenous people. “These aren’t just statistics. These are real people,” she said.

She followed comments about Alaska’s role in the Arctic with a criticism of the Iran War, which she said “is leaving us exposed,” and is “unnecessary” and expensive.

“We need to stop fighting ‘forever wars.’ And that was one of the promises that we heard in the last cycle: ‘No more forever wars.’ And here we are in the most damaging war that I can remember,” she said.

Peltola has repeatedly criticized Sullivan for supporting President Donald Trump’s Iran War efforts. He has voted against War Powers Resolutions that would limit or end the conflict 14 times.

A question about climate change drew more criticism of Sullivan. Climate change is seen in the storm damages affecting coastal Alaska communities, she said. Yet Sullivan has backed Trump administration policies that canceled projects aimed at mitigating climate change, she said.

“One of the issues that I have with Dan Sullivan is that he takes credit for disaster relief and investments in the Railbelt, but he clawed back investments in renewable energy,” she said.

Sullivan, in his Thursday speech to the convention, touted his record over 12 years in the Senate and celebrated federal investments that he said he helped secure. He touched on a broad range of subjects such as energy, federal relations with for-profit Native corporations and public safety.

He took credit in the speech for billions of dollars of military spending in Alaska. “We are undertaking in Alaska the largest buildup of our military since World War II, maybe ever,” he said. The biggest increases have been in the U.S. Coast Guard, which cost $25 billion in the last budget. The Coast Guard is planning to homeport four new icebreakers in Alaska, he said. “Think about that: It took our country 250 years to figure out that you should put the icebreakers in the state with the ice,” he said on Thursday.

He spoke about the Bycatch Reduction Act he introduced this year, which he said is “the most comprehensive bycatch legislation ever to reduce bycatch, protect seafloor habitat, strengthen transparency and accountability in federal fisheries management.”

And he spoke confidently about the massive pipeline project that has been proposed for half a century to transport stranded North Slope natural gas to markets.

 “First of all, don’t listen to the naysayers. They’ve never built a thing,” he said. “We’re never been further along in this project. The federal government is now in the lead. We’re going to get it done.”

As he does frequently, he criticized Sen. Chuck Schumer, the New York Democrat who is the Senate minority leader, and the Biden administration.

While Sullivan did not appear at the candidate forum on Friday, his campaign released a statement that day promoting endorsements from the Safari Club International political action committee, as well as the Safari Club Alaska and two regional chapters of the pro-sport-hunting organization.

The Safari Club and its affiliates have been at odds at times with the Alaska Federation of Natives and other Native organizations over tribal rights. The Safari Club has advocated for the removal of tribal representation from the Federal Subsistence Board, over the objections of AFN, for example.

Before Peltola took the stage, Bill Hill was the only candidate participating in a U.S. House candidate forum.

Hill, an independent, is challenging U.S. Rep. Nick Begich III, a Republican completing his first term. 

Like Sullivan, Begich did not attend the forum, but he did deliver a speech at the convention on Thursday, as did U.S. Sen. Lisa Murkowski, R-Alaska, who is not up for reelection.

The Begich campaign did not respond to an email query about the failure to participate in the forum.

Like Peltola, Hill is Alaska Native. He is Dena’ina Athabascan from the Bristol Bay region.

And like Peltola, he was asked at the forum to describe subsistence.

He spoke about growing up in the village of Kokhanok on Iliamna Lake.

“Every spring we’d see the whole community pack up and move down to fish camp. And they spend the summer down there, and they put up fish for the winter. And they enjoyed their culture. They enjoyed their connection to the land and the water. They taught their children and their grandchildren what their culture was about and how they connected them to not just only who they were but who they were from and where they were from,” he said.

“How can you define that with a single word?”