ALASKA — Tucked up into the northern extents of Southeast Alaska’s Inside Passage, where the ocean mingles with braided, glacial rivers that wind up towards interior mountain passes, access to food can be challenging in communities like Haines, Skagway, Klukwan and Mosquito Lake. This area makes up what is known as the Upper Lynn Canal. Challenges include avalanches or landslides cutting off road access, weather disrupting barge services, high costs for groceries, old or spoiled goods, and generally an absence of robust local food-system infrastructure. USDA Southeast Alaska Sustainability Strategy investments are making strides to address food security, support community leaders and bolster interconnected local food systems.

Since 2021, the Southeast Alaska Sustainability Strategy has been working alongside communities in Southeast Alaska to achieve local priorities and sustainable solutions. The Sustainability Strategy was created to support local economies, enhance community resilience, conserve natural resources and strengthen collaboration with Tribal governments and Alaska Native corporations in Southeast Alaska.

Katrina Aklá Hotch works for the Sustainable Southeast Partnership as the community catalyst in Klukwan and Haines. The partnership is a collective network focused on creating culturally, ecologically and economically thriving communities Southeast Alaska. Sustainable Southeast Partnership supports seventeen positions, known as community and regional catalysts, that provide support, capacity and acceleration towards community-driven projects and regional focus areas. Funds for these efforts are provided through the Southeast Alaska Sustainability Strategy.

“Food harvested on the land, the river and the ocean plays such a major role in our food security here,” says Hotch, speaking on the relationship between stewardship and abundance that exists on Lingít Aaní (Tlingít land) and Klukwan since time immemorial. “If you know how to harvest, what to harvest and when to harvest — it strengthens your ties to the land, it increases the land’s importance to you and it solidifies that relationship.”

Hotch facilitates projects around cultural programming, traditional skill learning, Lingít language, food security, and food sovereignty. Though much of Hotch’s community work involves food, she says there is also more to it. “Food gets a lot of attention, but it's all interconnected. Harvesting, planting, and preparing food — it’s how we all connect.”

In these communities, the Lynn Canal Food Web, founded with Sustainability Strategy funding as a local food network and idea incubator, is connecting a growing constellation of grassroots food-related efforts, volunteers, and community gardens across the Chilkat Valley and Upper Lynn Canal. Erika Merklin, founder and director, says, “The more we are all working together, the healthier and stronger our food systems can be.”

The Sustainability Strategy’s flexibility and encouragement of partnership development enabled the Food Web’s span of work to support local agriculture, increase regional food security and increase asset development to prepare, preserve, and store food.

Merklin shares how financial support for team building is the needed lubricant to get the gears turning on great local projects, “It’s one thing to dream and another thing to create. Technical assistance and leadership development require money…the initial Southeast Alaska Sustainability Strategy support nurtured relationship building and flat out made projects happen,” says Merklin. “Investing in local leaders to support team building is a great way for the USDA to help local projects gain traction.”

Just down the road from Merklin, Hotch also supports the Aan Táayi Community Garden, started in 2005 in Tlákw Aan Klukwan. Hotch highlights the connection and coming together that is at the root of all food activities. “We're really just trying to build up people's confidence in gardening by just experimenting with it. I want to model gardening after our subsistence camps with how we're processing seaweed, berries or salmon all together. It's all shared work and it's this great community time.”

Hotch and Merklin look to complement each other's efforts where possible. Whether growing food, harvesting food or processing the food for winter, bringing people together is building that interconnection among community members and partners with regional support from the USDA Southeast Alaska Sustainability Strategy. By working together to grow the connectivity of local foods in their little corner of Southeast Alaska, Merklin, Hotch and so many other community leaders are building togetherness, bolstering nutritional well-being and creating sustainable, climate resilient food systems for the future.

Read more about the food-related efforts in the Chilkat Valley and Upper Lynn Canal in this recent Juneau Empire column.