Voices

Editor's note: A version of the following open-letter commentary first appeared on the blog 147 Degrees West , and it is used here with permission.

Dear Governor Parnell:...

An open letter

To: Hon. Eric Holder, US Attorney General

and Michele M. Leonhart, Administrator of the Drug Enforcement Administration

From: David G. Evans, Executive Director of the Drug Free Schools Coalition

Dear Mr. Holder and Ms. Leonhart:...

For thousands of years, Native Alaskans have studied and learned about the ice. They learned what to expect from different seasons and changing weather patterns. They learned what ice to trust, and what ice was unstable. They learned because their existence depended upon it.

For hundreds of years, explorers and scientists have been studying the ice, too. A body of scientific data has been developed and used to predict ice behavior. Those predictions are used to inform mariners and industry operating in Arctic waters. And increasingly, they are unreliable, asserts Hajo Eicken, a professor of geophysics at the University of Alaska Fairbanks. Eicken recently attended the Arctic Observing Summit in Vancouver, Canada and reports that the stakeholders agreed...

We recently took a family trip to the Havasupai Reservation, located in the Grand Canyon. We drove five hours from Phoenix after attending my brother-in-law's college graduation, where Kalla Peacock earned his bachelor of arts in education from Arizona State University.

To make the trip for Kalla's graduation a vacation, we drove from Phoenix to Las Vegas, with a three-day camping and hiking stop at the Havasupai Reservation. The tribe offered us Alaska Natives discounts on services. Which made me wonder why we don't do the same for American Indians when they travel to Alaska?

...