In the kitchen of an Airbnb in Kotzebue, state House candidate Robyn Niayuq Burke plopped chunks of bowhead whale into boiling water —the first step in making her signature hot pickled maktak.
“It’s kind of a small pot, so I’m going to have to work in batches,” she said.
Burke, from Utqiaġvik, is running for Alaska House District 40, which covers the North Slope and the Northwest Arctic. The district is nearly as large as Germany. Candidates here face travel costs unknown to urban campaigns. The campaign swag is different, too.
For a reception in Kotzebue last month, Burke brought pounds of frozen maktak — strips of white whale blubber and black skin. Actually, she explained, what she brought is called unalik (pronounced Oo-NAH-lik), boiled maktak.
“We have an abundance,” she said. “I know that here, they don’t always have the opportunity to eat unalik or maktak. So I was coming this way, and I figured I would just bring a whole bunch.”
Airbnb’s terms and conditions have no prohibition on pickling whales, so, with help from her campaign manager — Ira Slomski-Pritz, of the firm Ship Creek Group — Burke mixed the boiled maktak with oranges and hot peppers, packed it into three dozen little Mason jars and added brine.
Burke is president of the North Slope school board. She and Kotzebue Mayor Saima Chase are both Democrats, running against Rep. Thomas Baker, of Kotzebue. Baker was a Republican when Gov. Mike Dunleavy appointed him to the vacant seat in November. Now he’s running as an independent. The contest is one of the Democrats’ best hopes to flip a seat and could determine which party controls the House.
The issue dominating the race is Baker’s vote this spring to sustain the governor’s veto of education funding.
Baker had voted in favor of Senate Bill 140, which increased per-student education funding. But then the governor vetoed SB140 and Baker voted to let the veto stand. The Legislature fell one vote short of overriding the veto.
Burke said she watched the live feed and was devastated.
Alaska schools have been losing financial ground for far too long, she said.
“It was heartbreaking for our students. I remember texting our student representative after the vote came through, just to let her know, and just she was so disappointed,” Burke said. “We’re letting our kids down.”
Burke’s decision to run was born in that moment, she said.
“Thomas Baker made clear that he represents the person who put him in office, and is not voting in the best interests of his constituents,” Burke wrote in an op-ed published in the Anchorage Daily News.
Burke has raised $25,000 for her campaign, much of it from Anchorage Democrats who held a fundraiser for her in June.
As of mid-July Thomas Baker had raised $1,000, most of it from Republican House members.
He said he got a lot of “feedback” from the district after he voted to sustain the veto, but said he wasn’t driven by loyalty to the governor who appointed him. Baker said that if Dunleavy’s veto of SB140 didn’t stand, he might’ve vetoed other education money in the budget.
“Essentially, once I’m able to get that across to folks, they’re pretty agreeable,” Baker said. “They may have some feelings about you know, ‘I would have done it this way if I were you. I would have done it that way,’” he said. “But at the end of the day, that’s how it goes when you’re making the hard votes for the people.”
Baker is a construction manager for a subsidiary of the local Native corporation. He also served on the Kotzebue City Council. If elected, Baker can’t say yet which party he’d organize with. Last year, he often broke from other lawmakers in the Bush Caucus, a historically powerful bloc representing districts off the road system.
“What I’m concerned with is the needs and goals of my district,” he said. “If those align with another district, that’s great. But at the end of the day, my goal as a legislator is to make sure that my people are taken care of.”
Baker’s vote to let the education funding veto stand also inspired Saima Chase to challenge him. Chase works for the tribe in addition to serving as Kotzebue mayor. She said she can’t really judge Baker after only a few months in the Legislature. But she said the Bush Caucus needs to remain unified to hold sway.
“I know when Thomas first took office and he kind of broke that Bush Caucus, it was a little bit jarring for us,” Chase said, “because we need those participants to push funding and legislation to benefit our people here in rural Alaska.”
Chase recently got her first yard signs in Kotzebue, which cost more than the $400 she’d raised by mid-July. She and Burke are aligned on most issues.
Friendly as they are, Chase did not make it to Burke’s meet-and-greet at the Kotzebue Lions Club, where the tiny jars of pickled maktak were a big hit.
Liz Ruskin is the Washington, D.C., correspondent at Alaska Public Media. Reach her at lruskin@alaskapublic.org. Read more about Liz here.
