John Wayne Howe of the Alaskan Independence Party is one of four candidates running for Alaska’s sole U.S. House seat. Incumbent Democratic Rep. Mary Peltola is running for reelection against Howe and two other challengers: Republican Nick Begich III of Chugiak and Eric Hafner, a Democrat who is incarcerated in New York and has never lived in Alaska.
Peltola spoke with KYUK Saturday, but Begich has not responded to KYUK’s request for an interview. Howe sat down with KYUK to talk about what motivates him to run for Congress.
Read a transcript of the conversation below. It has been lightly edited for clarity and flow, but may contain transcription errors.
KYUK (Sage Smiley): Thank you so much for joining us today, John Wayne Howe. You’re running for Congress to represent the whole state of Alaska. Can you tell us a bit about yourself? Who are you?
John Wayne Howe: I am an Alaskan. I have been – but I got transplanted. I gotta say, you know, well, I view all Alaskans as Alaskans, those that want to be here. There is a group that I don’t really think of as Alaskans that are here, and there’s a lot of those that come up to work many jobs for 10 or 20 years so that they can have a retirement home somewhere down in the lower 48. And while they are temporarily Alaskans, they are part of our landscape. I don’t really consider them the main core of Alaska. I consider it the people that plan on dying here and being buried here, raising their kids whatever they can do here. I really consider those Alaskans. I came up in 1979 and it was because I was just not real happy with where I grew up, even though I don’t think it was that bad. And I am a person that tends to not move recently, I traveled to Kodiak for the Fisheries Debate, which opened up a whole bunch of new ideas to myself. And boy, if I would have traveled around some years ago, I don’t think Kodiak would be the place, even though the weather there was absolutely gorgeous for the two days I was there. People tell me of the rain, and rain was part of what I didn’t like where I grew up. So maybe I wouldn’t have gone there, but I would go somewhere else, probably rather than Fairbanks, if I really traveled around the state, it’s hard to say. I’m so settled in here, though, and have made so many friends. And like I say generally, I’m a stay put person, and I’m in Alaska. I am here. I got into the Alaskan Independence Party initially because I met Joe Vogler. He was the starter of the Alaskan Independence Party. I’m actually the chairman of it at this point too, which is part of why I ended up running for this particular office. And I could rattle on about a whole bunch of irrelevant stuff, but there’s only so much time, so we’ll get back to your next question.
KYUK: So I mean, with the Alaskan Independence Party, what’s motivating you to run for office?
Howe: What’s motivating me to run is I’d like to see more Alaskans be interested in building up this nation-state of Alaska. And you say that, ‘Oh, my God, how could you say that? Is that secession?’ You know, no, actually, there were 13 nation-states that pulled together to become the United States of America originally, and they have every right for each of them to call themselves nation-states. But we don’t usually do that. And I think by not doing that, we miss the fact that we have a lot of rights we just don’t take as Alaskans, whether we use the tool of a U.S. House of Representative[s seat], or a tool of a governor or whatever else. But these are peaceful tools, as opposed to people that would like to see the problems in society fall apart and go to anarchy and fighting against each other. And I’m very peaceful. In fact, I call myself a peacemonger. So it’s the fact that we can transform the nation-state of Alaska. And I’d like to go towards that concept and work forward with it, instead of going backwards into something that’s perverse.
KYUK: So what does that look like, then? What are the top issues that would move you toward your vision for Alaska, or in this case, representing Alaska in Congress?
Howe: In the U.S. Congress, one of the top things is banking. We need to be able to bank here in Alaska with real money, not some phony crypto, which is where the U.S. government is trying to head the money currently, beyond the inflation that they’ve got started. We need solid money that is available for individuals to start their own banks and have their own currency that is not authorized by the state or the nation of the U.S., necessarily, but not unauthorized, not illegal, to do so that you have the right to do whatever with money that you want to if you exchange with your neighbor. I am 100% anti-tax. Anything that funds the government should be voluntary. Otherwise it’s theft, and it’s not a matter of theft. And we encourage this many times. Unfortunately, we’re so used to this, we encourage the theft of our neighbors so that we steal things from our neighbor through using the government as the tool. And that’s just evil if the government is not doing something we want, right? Then we should have a way to stop that by just plain not funding them, which there’s nothing more peaceful than that, and everybody has a voice in it, instead of like voting, where 51% of the people can vote, that 49% pay for something that they don’t want to pay for. My ideal goal is not really available on a national scale, but I’ll go ahead and put it out there. It’s something that needs to be done. I believe, within the nation-state of Alaska, we need to take all of our royalty money that comes in, make it available to everybody 100%. But the way this would work is initially 50% of the money, you choose how much goes to which department of government, you choose how much goes to schools, how much goes to roads. If you want to dedicate it to a certain area of the roads, you dedicate it to that area. You choose where that 50% of the money goes, not just an arbitrary the government gets this to spend however they feel like you fund the part you want to. The other 50% is yours to either keep or add additionally. So you could put 100% of the money into the government if that is what you want, or you could keep 50% of it. The next year, there would be 40% of it that is guaranteed for the government and 60% for you, so that in a matter of five years, we would be transformed into a society that is used to understanding and funding the part of governments that we want. Now, to actually make this happen, we need a good governor that’s on board with that. We need some people in the legislature, in the Senate for the state, and most of all, we need the people of Alaska to care about their neighbors, to care about not forcing them into paying for things or being out of things that they should have. And I’m a little saddened over this election cycle of seeing less and less care in Alaska, of neighbors, for their neighbors. I’ve seen a decline in that, instead of a increase like I had hoped for.
KYUK: As you’ve been campaigning, obviously, KYUK covers the Yukon-Kuskokwim (Y-K) Delta – the lower part of the Yukon Delta, and a lot of the Kuskokwim. What have you heard about the biggest issues that constituents bring to you in the Y-K Delta, in terms of what can be done or should be done by a Congressional representative?
Howe: The biggest thing that I hear is about the subsistence issue. And subsistence is kind of a mixed bag. Well, it’s a very mixed bag. There’s some people that want subsistence based on race, and I really think we need to be Alaskans, you know? I think it’s great if a person is doing subsistence and they happen to have come from a family that’s done that for thousands of years. But what if your next generation moves into a big city, and then they’re going to have a preference given to them over someone that stayed in the village? That’s not right, you know, that doesn’t really do what we want to do as Alaskans. We have another big problem too, is there’s an idea of people that are in subsistence, but they’re in like a smaller method of fishing or getting crab, or smaller boats and such, that is sort of subsistence. It’s not the big commercial but it still is, that’s the way they subsist. That’s how they make their living, and that plays into the whole dynamic of things. I am more based towards the ones that are direct subsistence, but even direct subsistence, you’re still using a lot of times a you’re using your refrigerator, you’re using your snowmachine, you’re using things other than just totally living off the land 100%, so we’re not totally in that situation where we used to be.
We get into something else that I found out about by going into the Fisheries Debate. But on the fisheries there’s another thing that I found out now, some of this is rumored. It had been rumored that some of the larger seining vessels that are doing the massive fishing are actually funded by the state of Alaska. Had given them the funds to buy some of those boats. I’m not hearing the problems in the Alaska waters now, of foreign vessels, there’s a lot that’s not really 100% where I know the answers, so I can’t really give the answers on the lack of fish. I know it’s terrible. As far as just telling the people that are near physical subsistence, that they can’t have any fish in the village. I also had talked to one person, and I can consider this. I talked to one person that claimed they were running one of the big boats now, or part of it – one of the managers. And it could be hearsay, because so but what they told me was that there was a problem. They get these king salmon that come in, and I was saying, “Well, how about shipping them up to the village,” which was mentioned by several people, who said, “Yeah, well, ship them to the village, then the villagers really like the kings. They don’t get much of a chance to get them these days. So ship them to the village.” And he said that that had been mentioned by several other people. He said, what I had not realized, though, is that when they pull in their nets in, that salmon gets squished underneath the weight of all the rest of the fish. And it went over my head at first, but hours later, I’m thinking about this, and I’m going, “Why are we fishing with such big nets that it squishes any of the fish? It’s like the whole idea is to obtain good product.” It may be okay for something that we’re just going to make fish blobs out of to go to McDonald’s, but it didn’t sound like a good idea to me, you know. And there’s this idea, one of the ones that Mary Peltola was mentioning a lot about, a lot about was getting funding from the federal government, which, to me, the stolen money. I just don’t like the whole idea of the funding processes, but getting money from the government for these bigger boats so that they can use cameras to guide their nets. Well, even if you use a camera to guide the net, if the net is too big and ruining product, I don’t think that that’s the answer. There’s just, there’s a whole lot of things that are problems with these larger vessels. And then there’s the fight, again, between the larger vessel and the smaller boats. And the initial permits they gave according to the fact you’re on the dock today, so you get to fish a certain percentage, and then, or you could buy rights, and then when you get into the Northern Pacific Fisheries Commission, you notice that a lot of the decision makers on that are from Oregon and Washington. Even though it’s 100% Alaskan waters that it regulates. There’s just a whole host of problems in this but all I can say anyway, the truth is, very few people have directly contacted me from your area, and the one or two that have have been concerned about subsistence. And so that’s my answer for that question.
KYUK: Thanks. Another major issue in this region that is a divisive subject is the proposed Donlin Gold mine. I’m wondering if you have an opinion on that mining project.
Howe: You know, I’ve got some Native friends that had been working for Donlin that were very positive on it. I tend to be positive about mining, I am negative to some extent, the bigger mining. I’d like to see us do more of the small mining, which the regulations that work for a big mine, jumping through hoops make it nearly impossible for small miners. I originally was in plaster mining and, well, I know some people that are based out of Bethel. I don’t know, do you have plaster miners around there? I know some people that were based out of Bethel that go plaster mining, but I don’t know if it’s in the Bethel area, or if they travel out further to go mining. Are you familiar with that?
KYUK: I’m not, no.
Howe: But yeah, the Donlin Mine. I tend to think that it would be a good thing. One of the big arguments with that is the Ambler road. And the Ambler road, there’s two points to that. There’s both the point of the right of way to get there, and there is the fact of the cost of building the road. I don’t like the idea of the cost of the building of the road coming from state funds, unless those state funds were again, decided by individual people who on their checkoff list, again, as I say, for the state royalties that currently would come in, you could decide where it goes if a portion of that you wanted to go for a road, either as a generosity to give that in into the fund, or if you wanted to put that in as an investment, either could be offered. But I’m not really in favor of the I don’t like the Alaska Economic Development Authority for the most part. They tend to go out and make buddies and do deals that I think it needs to be decided more by the people, instead of just a handful of people. I’m not real pleased in that concept. As far as right of way, and this is going to hurt some people that have a idea of like in love with a particular block of land that a corporation might have, and they don’t want to have a right of way by someone going across it. I believe that we should use all of the right of ways that we’ve got available in the state. They’re currently called RS2477s. I actually got stopped on one many years ago when I was traveling into a mine with Joe Vogler. It’s “Battle at Weber Creek” is the University of Alaska little video on Joe talking about that, and we got stopped in the middle of a national park. But if we allow those all to it to be used by the populace here in Alaska, now that we have those right of ways guaranteed to us by the federal government, that’s been agreed upon, that they do exist, but they only exist as state government uses, and the state government doesn’t want to push them across either national parks, which would upset the the feds, or across various Native corporations, which may upset the corporations, but when you give a right of way across a corporation, it doesn’t just allow a right of way for someone to travel across their that’s non-Native. That gives a right of way for other Native corporations. It allows food to come in to different people. It allows a lot of positive things without even spending one dollar if we had a right of way. And I think they should be designated by GPS so everybody could use them if we had a right of way. Tomorrow, we could have, using the RS2477s. We could have a road to Nome tomorrow. It wouldn’t be a travelable road by everything, but you could take a snowmachine on it legally tomorrow, if the state government just decided to do it. And, you know, a few places here and there. I’m really sad and I’m not one to want to overturn the Native settlements where the Natives have the corporation land that has been given them, but I would like to see them take more positive use of it for the individuals, and give the individuals better use of it within the Native corporations, rather than, again, a smaller group. It ends up getting used too many times as a way to divide us from as Alaskans, rather than to unite them, even the Native group together, but it is 10% of the ground that has been allocated to Alaskans. I think we need to use that in a positive way. And as far as in the U.S. Congress, again, the Bureau of Indian Affairs, instead of going to them to ask for little handouts and trollops of help give them 100% ground title. You know, there’s no reason. We’re talking Alaskan full grown adults that have children. We’re not talking little kids that need to be led by the U.S. government on how to live.
KYUK: So one last question: there are many communities in this region facing a need to fully or partially relocate because of climate impacts, whether that’s permafrost degradation or erosion, what do you think the obligation of the federal government is to help those communities?
Howe: I think that, again, I think we should pull together as Alaskans and financially to help some of these communities. As far as the moving, the federal government definitely should not be withholding other land for them to move to. I think the influx of technology has caused a lot of these villages to move to a more stable type of a building with structures that are not their normal that would have been moving away from the waterline as it eroded. It would have been a different lifestyle altogether than what’s been encouraged by the current technology. And I think a lot of the technology, even in California, Florida, other places, it’s stupid, because we as human beings tend to be prideful and say we want to live right next to the ocean, when in reality, we should probably be 5 miles back from it with our hard structures and then have trails and ways to go down to the beach, a river, an ocean, whatever, to not be interacting so close with it in the first place.
I would like to mention something else while I’m on it is: climate change, and a lot of people blame it on CO2, which our plants and plankton and things love the CO2. But something that is real interesting to do is when you watch the news, pay attention to the traditional high and low for a given day and see how long ago it was if we really have a dramatic climate change where it’s way different than has been for centuries past, then our high and low should have been within the last two or three years. It should be relatively close to where it is now. And I think if you look at the actual numbers that you get from your news report, you’ll find that the same as when I was a little kid, the last high or low was 20, 50, 80 years ago. It’s just an interesting thing that, without any additional equipment, you can watch and see that the exaggeration of climate change, I think, is more a matter of reporting changes and our way of dealing with coastal areas is different than it used to be.
KYUK: Thank you for your time and for sharing your thoughts with KYUK today.
Howe: Thank you too, very, very pleasant. Have a good day.
KYUK: You too.
Stay tuned to KYUK 640 AM and online at KYUK.org for interviews with other candidates running to represent the lower Kuskokwim in the state House, and running to represent Alaska in Congress. That coverage can all be found under the “Elections 2024” here.
In Bethel, early voting is open until Election Day at the ONC building from 1 p.m. to 5 p.m., Monday through Friday.
Anyone who has received a mail-in ballot must have it postmarked on or before Nov. 5. Mail-in ballots also need to have a voter signature, a witness signature, and a voter identifier like a driver’s license number or the last four digits of a Social Security number.
