Latest Breaking News
In reply to the discussion: CNN has called Alaska for Sanders [View all]Blue_In_AK
(46,436 posts)for the folks out in the villages, printing ballots in the Native languages, etc., but it is quite challenging. I'm not exactly sure how they handled this caucus. During regular elections, they do have polling stations set up in the various hub villages. As for food, many people out there rely on subsistence - salmon and moose, whale up north - for most of their food, traveling into the hub villages by four wheeler or boat in the summer and snow machine in the winter for staples. Store food is extremely expensive, though, off the road system, and gasoline is four or five times what it is in the city. Living in Alaska's Bush is not for the faint-hearted. Some villages don't even have indoor plumbing yet.
Back in the old days, the Native kids were sent out of the villages to boarding schools for their education. In the '70s a lawsuit was brought on behalf of the Native kids to provide schools in the villages and subsequently many schools were opened out there. It's very expensive, though, and hard to keep teachers, especially non-Native ones who have trouble adjusting to the village lifestyle. With Alaska's current budget crisis brought on by the declining oil prices (and our stupid legislature), a lot of the schools are in serious financial trouble. It's a big issue here. There is also a lot of home-schooling out of necessity more than ideology. GCI, our cable company, has done a pretty good job of providing Internet statewide, although it's really slow in some places.