Tucked up into the northern extents of Southeast Alaska’s Inside Passage, where the ocean mingles with braided rivers that wind up towards interior mountain passes, access to food can be challenging. In the Upper Lynn Canal, regional sustainability initiatives are working to solve that by helping to develop community leaders and bolster interconnected local food systems.
Ideas are like seeds: once planted, they require watering, nurturing, and tending to sprout and grow to full potential. That is the inspiration behind the Lynn Canal Food Web (LCFW), a local food network and idea incubator that is providing support for local projects and priorities in the Upper Lynn Canal including Deishú Haines, Tlákw Aan Klukwan, Xunt’i Áa Mosquito Lake, and Shgagwéi Skagway.
Erika Merklin, founder and director of the Lynn Canal Food Web, 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,” she says. “Technical assistance and leadership development require money that is not easy to come by in small, rural towns in Southeast Alaska, especially for our anemic agriculture industry.”
Breaking ground on the Four Winds Resource Center Victory Garden in 2020. Their motto is “You Belong Here.” Since the Haines Borough allocated funding to keep the Four Winds Resource Center open, the board has initiated steps to create a Community Resilience Hub with emergency supplies, cots, blankets and a pantry of shelf stable foods. (Photo by Dawson Evenden)
The Lynn Canal Food Web serves as a connective network for an ever-growing constellation of grassroots food-related efforts, volunteers, and community gardens spread across the Chilkat Valley and Upper Lynn Canal. “The more we are all working together, the healthier and stronger our food systems can be,” says Merklin, who aims to connect efforts around gardening, food access, food security, food businesses and knowledge-sharing in the region.
Katrina Aklá Hotch, who lives in Tlákw Aan Klukwan and works as the Chilkat Valley community catalyst for the Sustainable Southeast Partnership, reflects on food in the area.
“Food harvested on the land, the river, and the ocean plays such a major role in our food security here,” says Hotch, speaking towards the important relationship to stewardship and abundance that has existed on Lingít Aaní and Tlákw Aan 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, who’s position is hosted at the Jilkaat Kwaan Heritage Center speaks fondly of the year-round camp programming she supports related to the seasons, listing the spring saak hooligan run, low tides for red ribbon seaweed, summer salmon camps, and fall moose camps. The camps bring instructors and participants together to prepare foods for winter and exchange knowledge and stories. 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,” she says. “Harvesting, planting, and preparing food — it’s how we all connect.”
“For example, what I love about berry picking — other than coming away with berries — is that time with people.” Hotch continues. “We usually go picking the same time of year and the same kind of stories get told each year even though we had heard that same story last year, and the year before. This is what we do while we’re picking berries. It’s that time where we get to remember our grandmas or our uncle that we did this with and who taught us.”
The Four Winds Resource Center Victory Garden is going strong with weekly volunteer work parties this summer every Sunday from 1-3 p.m. Victory Garden Coordinator, Sierra Thomas, pictured on far right, has helped to grow and expand the garden including a new “u-pick” strawberry field. (Photo by Shaelene Grace Moler)
Whether wild harvested or planted right in the yard, families, friends and neighbors build a sense of connection through processing and putting up foods together. As is the way of life, but it is also a critical activity for people to sustain their communities when external food supplies come with their own set of challenges.
Merklin shares about difficulties in the Upper Lynn Canal: “Similar to hardships faced by other Southeast communities that are off of the road system, we see barge dependency, old and often spoiled produce, high prices, and a lack of community and regional food systems infrastructure and support to grow the agriculture industry.”
Strong local food systems come with an array of benefits that range from freshness and better nutrition, to building community around shared goals, supporting local economies, and most important to those benefits, resilience and adaptation to new challenges related to climate change. The area has experienced barge delivery disruptions, landslides and avalanches that have cut-off road access to supplies. Consider also the potential for global food systems to experience shortages that quickly ripple out to affect Southeast Alaska communities.
This point was underscored by the arrival of the COVID-19 pandemic in 2020, when supply chains were disrupted, access to food was in question, and, just to the north, the border to Canada was closed, Hotch says.
“COVID really revealed a lot of weak spots in our systems across the board, and it led a lot of people to become more interested in increasing our locally grown and harvested foods,” she says.
Sustainable Southeast Partnership Chilkat Valley Community Catalyst Katrina Aklá Hotch also works in and supports the Klukwan Aan Táayi (Community Garden) which was established in 2005. (Photo by Ḵaa Yahaayí Shkalneegi Muriel Reid)
Just five miles up the road, during uncertain times, Merklin and other residents of the Upper Chilkat Valley, came together behind the former Mosquito Lake School — now the Four Winds Resource Center, a multi-use community center — to take shovel to earth and create a community garden that would come to be called the Victory Garden. The name “victory garden” is a callback to World War I and II era efforts to create small public gardens that alleviated pressure on food supply systems. For Merklin, this Victory Garden represents a community victory to prevent the Four Winds Resource Center from being defunded. With money from the CARES Act Fund in 2020, the Haines Borough allocated funding to keep the doors open.
Over 60 volunteers came together to break ground and work on the Victory Garden in 2020. Four years later, the Victory Garden has expanded beyond Merklin’s vision. Rain or shine, weekly work parties are a time for neighbors to connect, collaborate, and strengthen friendships. Program outreach has increased under the leadership of Sierra Thomas, Victory Garden Coordinator, a position funded through 2026 by RurAL CAP’s Growing Rural Opportunities for Wellness program.
There, in the Victory Garden’s soil, behind the Four Winds Resource Center, the idea for the Lynn Canal Food Web was sown. An idea to provide resources and support for locally led food efforts, catalyze volunteer gardening days, food distributions, biannual foods strategy gatherings, and a calendar of other community food events such as the Chilkat Challenge, a salmon-focused cooking competition coming back to Deishú Haines this October for the first time since 2019.
In 2021, the U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA) announced the Southeast Alaska Sustainability Strategy (SASS), a new way of working across Southeast Alaska to support local economies, enhance community resilience, conserve natural resources, and strengthen collaboration with tribal governments and Alaska Native corporations in Southeast Alaska. This strategy, which represents an important and welcomed shift by the federal agency, has created pathways for the USDA to work more reciprocally alongside communities to achieve local priorities and sustainable solutions.
Katrina Aklá Hotch’s recent batch of smoked salmon. Food harvested on the land and water is a core source of sustenance that can be complemented by local garden and community agriculture efforts. (Photo by Katrina Aklá Hotch)
The USDA rolled out SASS with initial investments in new and existing sustainability projects in the region. Merklin’s original proposal for the Lynn Canal Food Web was funded to establish an agricultural association. The flexibility of the investments and encouragement of partnership development, enabled the LCFW work to include a current and future strategy that helps support local agriculture, increases food security for the region, and bolsters asset development to prepare, preserve, and store food.
So the new seed began to sprout. Merklin partnered with Ecotrust to assist with managing the SASS funds and supporting future steps. Those next steps include growing a relationship with Chilkoot Indian Association (CIA) specific to the local food system, to support further development and implementation of CIA’s existing food security strategy. In June, with coordinated support from Ecotrust and the Lynn Canal Food Web, CIA received funding from the Equitable Food Oriented Development Fund, which finances “community-led, justice-first, food-based community economic development.”
LCFW’s partnership with Ecotrust has continued to blossom with the establishment of the Chilkat Valley Food Hub (CVFH) in April of 2024. The CVFH is one of two Regional Food Business Center’s pilot projects underway in Alaska and marks the ninth food hub in Alaska. Since April, CVFH Director Stacee Powlison has implemented the Summer Food Service Program, become a satellite food bank with the Southeast Alaska Food Bank, and provides fresh Victory Garden produce on a weekly basis while continuing monthly Salvation Army distribution, which has been the foundation for upper valley outreach.
The Lynn Canal Food Web’s SASS project also includes support for the Klukwan Mercantile, which is the only grocery store between Deishú Haines and Haines Junction, about 140 miles to the north. The Mercantile is located in Tlákw Aan Klukwan, operated by the Chilkat Indian Village, and managed by Mary Jane Valentine. Plans for the store include accepting SNAP EBT cards and providing more convenience type hot foods for their customers.
“The initial SASS support nurtured relationship building, uplifted local leaders 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.”
Families regularly participate together as Victory Garden volunteers bringing their children, parents, step family, dogs and more. This little one harvested freshly grown broccoli with her family. (Photo by Shaelene Grace Moler)
USDA Sustainability Strategy funding for the Lynn Canal Food Web is run through Tlingit and Haida’s regional strengthening partnership. Tlingit and Haida, Spruce Root, and Southeast Conference were selected as three locally rooted partners who are able to steward and properly allocate the investments of the Sustainability Strategy further into the communities of the region.
Spruce Root’s regional strengthening agreement with SASS includes an emphasis of investments towards the Sustainable Southeast Partnership (SSP), a collective impact network focused on creating a culturally, ecologically, and economically thriving Southeast Alaska. The SASS investments in SSP helps fund 17 partnership positions named “Catalysts.” Catalysts, as the name suggests, provide support and capacity towards community-driven projects in their home communities like Katrina Hotch for the Chilkat Valley. Other catalysts have regional focus-areas such as energy, healing, economic development and more including mariculture and food, which are SSP positions hosted by Ecotrust.
Hotch works to support and facilitate projects around cultural programming, traditional skill learning, Lingít language, food security, and food sovereignty. Within those focus areas, she also supports the Aan Táayi Community Garden in Tlákw Aan Klukwan that was started in 2005. It is the connection and coming together at the root of all food activities that Hotch highlights. “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.”
Connecting people to their food also creates pride and responsibility.
“I grew up gardening at a big family garden between my mom’s house, my aunt’s, and my grandparents.” Hotch says.
“When I didn’t want to eat my potatoes as a kid, my mom would say, ‘Well, that’s what you planted. That’s what we dug up earlier,’ and I realized, ‘Yeah, OK,’” Hotch says with a pause. “‘Yeah, that’s my potato.’”
Hotch and Merklin look to complement each other’s efforts where possible, and have partnered on proposals to increase collaboration between the Klukwan Community Garden and the Victory Garden. This season the Klukwan Garden planted a SASS-funded Lingít Potato patch. 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, the Sustainable Southeast Partnership, Ecotrust, Spruce Root, and more.
“Food is so foundational to all we do,” Merklin says. “If you look at our world or the economic drivers in our region, like fishing, tourism, logging, or any human driven industry, it all requires that initial input. Food fuels everything.”
By working together to grow the connectivity of local foods in their little corner of Southeast Alaska, Merklin, Hotch, Powlison, Thomas, and so many other community leaders are building togetherness, bolstering nutritional well-being, and creating sustainable, climate resilient food systems for the future.
Beyond the Upper Lynn Canal, the USDA’s Sustainability Strategy has also invested in community gardening, greenhouses, and composting efforts throughout Southeast Alaska including in Yakutat, Hoonah, Kake, and Juneau. SSP, Tlingit & Haida, Spruce Root, and Ecotrust continue to support those projects and more.
• Lee House is currently working in a storytelling position for the Sitka Conservation Society and the USDA Forest Service, Alaska Region, in collaboration with the Sustainable Southeast Partnership to highlight accomplishments of the USDA’s Southeast Alaska Sustainability Strategy (SASS). “Woven Peoples and Place” is the monthly column of the Sustainable Southeast Partnership (SSP). SSP is a dynamic collective impact network uniting diverse skills and perspectives to strengthen cultural, ecological, and economic resilience across Southeast Alaska. Follow along at sustainablesoutheast.net; on Linkedin, Instagram and Facebook at @sustainablesoutheast; and on YouTube @SustainableSoutheastAK.
