ST. PAUL

Dogs are not allowed as permanent residents, but they can now be enlisted in the ongoing campaign to keep the Pribilof Islands rat-free

Last year, Congress rejected a proposal to reduce the Essential Air Service budget by over 50%.

Garrett Pletnikoff and Hannah Zimmerman talk about retelling the famous Rudyard Kipling story “The White Seal”, and starting their Bering Sea based design and education center “Tukuuludaa”

Aleutian Airways flew its first scheduled Saab 2000 flight to St. Paul on Monday, restoring regularly scheduled passenger service to Anchorage nearly nine months after Ravn Alaska ended its route to the Bering Sea community. Since then, residents have relied on expensive charter flights. Now, after months of delays and uncertainty, residents can finally book a regular commercial flight again.

A portion of the lucrative Bristol Bay red king crab harvest nearly went to waste this season, after a catcher processor that was set to take the crab was forced to shut down.

Residents are paying $1,300 one-way to fly to Anchorage after the Bering Sea island community lost its carrier in August.

Unalaska could process St. Paul’s snow crab again next year, but officials won’t know for sure until October.Some fisheries specialists suspect there will be an increase in the total allowable snow crab catch limits, including Unalaska’s Natural Resource Analyst Frank Kelty. He said there may be more crab to harvest this upcoming season than last.“But I don't know if the increase is going to be enough that the operator up at St. Paul will want to operate again,” Kelty said at a recent Unalaska City Council meeting.

Ten fur seals and hundreds of fish washed up dead on a Pribilof beach last year. New research links the die-off to warming oceans.

St. Paul Island, in the Bering Sea, is home to vast marine ecosystems that have supported the Unangax̂ community for generations. But the island’s most iconic species — the northern fur seal — has been in steep decline for decades. Last fall, the tribe began holding listening events to hear from residents about how to protect the island’s ecosystems from threats such as climate change and overfishing. The eventual goal behind that work is designating the waters around St. Paul Island as an Indigenous marine stewardship area.

Unangam Tunuu is taught in only a handful of classes in the public school system, and outside these sessions, the language is seldom spoken in everyday conversation. The struggle on St. Paul mirrors trends across Alaska. A 2024 report from the Alaska Native Language Preservation and Advisory Council, a legislative council that advises the governor's office, found that all of the state’s Indigenous languages are critically endangered, with some spoken by fewer than a dozen people.