Against ‘one way’ communication

IN THE EARLY FALL of 2018, Marina Anderson sped down the rough road connecting one side of Alaska’s Prince of Wales Island to the other. She had only a few hours to get to a public meeting over the potential opening of the Tongass National Forest, her tribe’s ancestral land, to logging and mining.

Mail is delivered by floatplane once a week to the Organized Village of Kasaan’s tribal office on a rugged island in southeast Alaska. But the mail can be delayed for a week, or even a month, by high winds and rough waters. Anderson, who was then working as a tribal office assistant, had opened an important letter barely in time: The U.S. Department of Agriculture had notified the tribe of a public hearing, to be held that very day, on whether to remove Roadless Rule protections from the Tongass National Forest. “We were blindsided by it,”