Independent gubernatorial candidate Meda DeWitt, originally from Wrangell and Yakutat, Alaska, and her running mate, Chris Steere of Unalakleet, Alaska, visited Nome this week as part of their campaign for Alaska’s 2026 governor’s race. While in town, they spoke with KNOM about their campaign priorities, economic plan, and approach to climate resilience and adaptation.
This interview has been edited for length and clarity.
Margaret Sutherland (KNOM)
Thank you guys so much for being here. It's such an honor to sit down with you guys. You're currently running for governor. Can you tell us a little bit about your campaign and the priorities that you guys are focusing on?
Meda DeWitt
Yeah. Thank you. So right off the bat, we're nonpartisan and independent, like 65% of the state. Our priorities are Alaska and Alaskans. We don't have to engage in the two-party rhetoric that, you know, tells you what to say from the Lower 48. So that gives us the freedom to be able to tell the truth and really speak about the issues in a way that represents our experience and also our communities across the state, their experience.
My historical background and educational training are in traditional healing, which really goes into systems-level thinking and addressing systems issues. And our budget, as everybody knows, has been cut and whittled down for not only eight years, but even when Walker was in office, for 12 years. So our state has a lot of infrastructure issues. Our schools aren't funded correctly. Our healthcare is just barely hanging on. We don't have enough public safety. We have crime rates– and we could go on all day about the issues. So what we've done is taken the time to really look at the systemic problems and how we are going to address them. And what we found is not only can we address them, we can actually reduce the budget because when you have planning, prevention, and care, it's always more affordable than crisis management. So, looking at things like making sure that we're expanding public school funding, and not only expanding the funding, but expanding the time that school is available across the summer, so then kids could actually have that place to be to learn more and have that regular schedule, but then also parents don't have to worry about paying for childcare. You know, right now we have 40,000 students who are chronically absent. We can address that through things like feeding them breakfast and lunch, and having, you know, bring back our music and sports and art and all the things that they love to do and be there with.
We have infrastructure issues across our roads and even into, like, the marine highway with the ferry that have degraded. You know, up here you don't have the ferry; you have barges, but there are road issues as well, especially with storm surges and the erosion of the banks. So our whole state needs funding to support, you know, that intentional migration away from the coast and rebuilding that function of connectivity between communities. So it's easier to visit family, to go hunting and fishing, to bring in food and goods.
On top of that, we also have, you know, public safety, like missing and murdered Indigenous people, and we have a lot of houselessness issues, along with drug and alcohol abuse. And so, if we invest in caring for people and invest in treatment, that is going to go a long way to reduce the costs that we're spending in jails. And those private-run jails, they make a lot of money off of our people. And we can actually do the work to help build them up and support them so that they can transition into functional living and taking care of themselves.
I'm going to pause there. I'm going to hand it over to Chris. He can talk about some of the things he loves about our policies.
Chris Steere
Yes. To continue with that, the other leg of that is opportunity. You know, there's a lot of people who are dealing with houselessness; they're dealing with addiction. But those are partially, and sometimes largely, due to them not really having a means to provide for themselves. So one of our big platforms is developing our state in ways where there are those opportunities there. And what that looks like is allowing our mining, oil, and gas to be a part of our economic infrastructure, but making sure they're hiring Alaskans and that they're paying their taxes, so that we can build our infrastructure of tomorrow. Right? We have so many energy opportunities with tidal, hydro, solar, wind, geothermal, even nuclear, possibly. And when we have those things, it gets us off of the boom and bust cycles of oil and gas. It also creates a lot of new and lasting quality jobs in rural communities. It gives us the energy infrastructure we need where we're not looking at $17, $20 a gallon heating fuel in homes, you know, where people are having to pick between feeding themselves and heating their homes.
So that's where it all ties together, right? We collect the taxes, we build the infrastructure, and then once we have that cheap energy, we can go into powering our greenhouses, where we can do agriculture in our state at scale, where we can feed people high-quality food for much less money, and it ends up saving us. We have double the coastline of the rest of the United States. We have tremendous tidal opportunities. There's no reason our energy costs should be so high when we have such energy potential in our state.
Thank you, guys, so much for laying that out for me. What Im hearing in these conversations about school funding and climate mitigation, and energy is: how are we going to pay for it? And in a lot of ways, what I'm hearing you guys say is, it's easier, it's cheaper to do the prevention work than actually pay for it on the back end.
DeWitt
100%, 100%. So even, we found a couple examples to boil it down for people. You know, and we're finding this over and over and over across the whole budget. But one of the examples I like to share is, well, I'll share with two.
One of them is that we have a recidivism rate— that's when people come out of jail, and they go back into jail— of 60%. It's just off the charts. And when we're looking at how we can support them, an easy fix is that when they're in the institution, they have Medicaid. The day they get out of the institution, they lose their Medicaid. That means that they're not having access to, you know, therapy or meds or all these services that they need to transition well. And they have to reapply, and it takes a long time. But if we extended that care for 90 days, even after the amount of money we would pay to extend that care, we would still save $15 million by keeping them out. I looked at the research from three other states that implemented that 90-day coverage; they reduced their recidivism by 11% to 16%. That means, you know, people's family members are coming out of prison, they're getting the care they need. They're getting jobs and cleaned up and putting themselves together and being able to be providers and rebuild their self-esteem and self-respect. And so it's not the silver bullet to all of it, but if we could reduce by 11% to 16%, provide that, and save money, like why aren't we thinking in that way? We haven't had that.
Another one is with our kids. Denali Kid Care, about 14% of the children who qualify aren't on it. And what happens is we have hundreds of people who are paid to be gatekeepers and keep people out of the programs if they don't qualify or if they're on the line, and then they successfully keep a lot of people out. We also, because we cost-share with the federal government, get fines for not having those kids on Denali Kid Care who qualify. So we're spending millions of dollars to keep people out, and we're spending millions of dollars in fines and fees because we kept too many people out. So if we did something like just use Denali Kid Care and the PFD system, auto-enroll all the children, make it a second payer, we actually then save millions of dollars, and that can then go into other health and safety things.
If we look at VPSOs, when you have a VPSO — a village safety police officer— in the village, it actually helps to reduce crime, and it's shown that it reduces the severity of crimes. So we can pay a VPSO and for their housing. If you have a medevac after a crime, and that alone, with those injuries and whatever's happening, is $100,000. You put on top of it the troopers, the investigators, everybody that comes in afterward, and that one incident pays for the whole year of having a safety officer in the community.
I'm gonna share time with my running mate. But like these are things that are so easy.
Steere
Yeah, and these are wonderful examples. I mean, just the math of it. When you see programs get cut that the federal government has matching funds for. You know we've been living under this austerity of saving money. Well, when the government is matching $3 to every dollar we spend, when we cut that spending to save money, we actually lose three times as much as we were trying to save, and we lost those programs that were being funded, and we lost the care it was providing.
So we talk about prevention is more affordable than crisis management, but that prevention, that's not even counting the costs of the suffering that we save, the opportunity costs of who could be working. We were talking about the recidivism rate a minute ago: 11% to 16% reduction in recidivism when we have 60% of our people going back into jail after they get out. I mean, that's huge savings, not just in the cost of what it takes to prosecute them and put them in prison and keep them in prison, but it’s also harm that's not being dealt: vandalism, assault, those kinds of things, where people are losing work, they're losing opportunity to become workers again, reintegrate into society. So there are so many ways things are currently being mismanaged that we could bring money in and save money by doing right.
DeWitt
And we're talking about millions of dollars, right? And there's several of them, and they do add up. But then there's other things that we have to look at, like villages that have to relocate due to climate change and coastal erosion and extreme storm events.
Our state has 141 communities that have to move [Editor's note: The Alaska Native Health Consortium identified 144 communities], whether it's a full migration to a new location or a managed retreat away from the coast. So, in the next 10 years, we can spend $4 billion and take care of our rural community and Alaskans. Or, you know, what we've been seeing—manufactured neglect— would end up costing almost $30 billion, just in rough numbers.
We've had these misaligned priorities in the state. Rural Alaska is Alaska. It's a huge part of our economy, our identity, our culture. And it's been neglected, and sometimes it even looks like it's on purpose or managed neglect. So when we go into these things, we're like, okay, what are some of these things? We can do to get more money into the community and jobs. You know, you talked about village safety police officers. We're also talking about extending the school year so teachers can work through the summer.
We're talking about bringing in guardians and stewards. You know, it would be through a cooperative agreement with the state, the feds, the tribes, the borough, and the corporations to have then managed areas where you have guardians on the land who are collecting scientific data and research, so we know what's happening, and implementing traditional ecological knowledge to care for that area, and then sharing and teaching that knowledge with the community and the schools, while also teaching kids how to harvest and hunt and fish and process and prepare food. And so that's going to bring more money to the community, more self-sufficiency, and improve the baseline of the behavioral health of the community as well.
Sutherland
I want to zero in on that example of climate impacts and mitigation; that is something that is targeted as one of your main initiatives. Several communities in the region are either partially or fully looking to relocate. Golovin is looking for infrastructure relocation; Shishmarof is looking for full relocation. I'm wondering, collectively, when you're looking at addressing a warming climate and climate change, what other forms of adaptation and resiliency would you like to implement?
DeWitt
Yeah, well, so I have kind of two parts to that answer. One of them is that the communities need to decide what they want to do, and we need to work with them as they have that sovereignty and ability to make choice. And so there isn't just one answer for each community, but that is part of the answer. We need to listen to them. And historically, we have communities who've been trying to move for decades, and it's so expensive, and there hasn't been the right kind of agreements and coordination. Because it's like if you buy one report on soils for a potential area and one off, one off, one off, it's expensive, you know; there's just millions of dollars that go out the door. But if we were working in a coordinated effort between the state, the tribes, the Alaska Native Tribal Health Consortium, the universities, and have this really beautiful group of partners working together, and this is what they're doing over and over and over again. We can actually reduce cost, make it tailored for the communities. And the thing about money and grants is, you know, we can put out a few dollars and then have it matched. And like he [Steere] was saying, just in that other implementation earlier, one to three. But that works even in climate change, even in relocation, you know, or adaptation.
So we have this ability to work together, help communities move, but then we're not just moving buildings. What does it mean to be Alaska Native, you know, Inupiaq or Tlingit in the 21st century? We're coming out of the industrial era into the technological era, and we can actually very mindfully build our communities in a way that's blended between traditional values and contemporary access to the best materials and science available.
Those communities may remember me. I've worked with UAF to help create a culturally aligned adaptation planning process with Malinda Chase and some really beautiful people at the Tribal Learning Network, and I've been working with traditional healing and climate change for many decades. And so we know that the plants and animals are changing, and how do we be good stewards so that they can continue to survive and even thrive in these areas? But also so that we can bring in new ways to help feed our communities and take care of them.
We ship in 95% of our food and goods. You know, if we're looking at renewable energy and we have lots of energy, we can have greenhouses that are also attached to the schools and the kids can be learning. Somebody asked me, like, ‘Well, how are you going to get kids to eat all those vegetables?’ I'm like, ‘Have you ever been with a kid who grew their own vegetable?’ Like, it's the best thing in the world, and they love to eat it. And what's even better than that is if they get to share it with somebody else. It's like our traditional rites of passage. You know, when kids get to give their first fish, or moose, to the community, they beam with pride, and people pour love on them. You know, that's what we need to do: build those core connections through intentional community structures based on our values.
Steere
That hits really deep for me because I know I was one of those kids in school, ‘What am I doing this for?’ ‘What is this about?’ And something I don't know that we hit on directly is not just expanding the school for the summer so these kids have these opportunities to be with their friends, do their sports, catch up on school, but also tailoring our schools, particularly in our rural communities, to teach them things that are useful to them. The hunting, the fishing, and giving them opportunities to do that. And really giving our young people opportunities to do things that matter in their communities, with their school system, and making them care about it, make them enjoy it.
Sutherland
Can you talk a little bit about what made you want to run for governor, and why you're deciding to come into politics in this way?
DeWitt
Yeah, thank you. So my primary training is as a traditional healer. They recognized me when my mom was pregnant, and taught me. And of course, I rebelled a little bit in high school, but had to surrender in my 20s. And the thing about traditional healing is you learn systems-level thinking, and how to understand what's out of balance and how to work to correct it. So I've worked throughout the state, the whole state, teaching traditional plant medicine, traditional bodywork and energy work, and talking circles, all of that. I always run into laws and policies that keep people sick, or like, if it was just this way, it'd be so easy, we could do so much.
And so I started doing more community advocacy work many years ago, over 10 years ago, and really digging into law and policy. I helped to write the traditional health resource guide for the state of Alaska that's used in behavioral health case plan management. I helped to change some of the policies around traditional healing to allow those things to occur under case plans. And we've helped with traditional foods, plants as food, and medicine revitalization and revolution. I did lots of work around women's health, maternal-child health, and pregnancy, and implementing our traditional values in that way.
And then I also am really good at— I say my superpower is untying knots. So when I look at the state, I just see a giant knot. And I'm really good at, you know, like pulling the threads and problem solving, and then like pulling it out, organizing it, weaving it together in a way that's then functional. And I've done that for other communities and organizations. I've also done things statewide. I ran the recalled Dunlevy, and that was the largest grassroots movement in the history of the state, and I was a statewide organizer and chair for that. And of course, that brought together a lot of people, actually, and people from different political identities and communities, and we worked together to do that.
I am the president for Yak-Tat K̲wáan Inc, which is a village corporation. And they had a board that was not doing well before, and they asked us to come in. It was actually a really long story; you have to go look it up. But we came in, we took back our corporation, and we won the right to shift and change the way the model is made. And we've realigned it so that the values— because by law a corporation has to provide value to its shareholders— so we changed the value from just money to traditional values, which is inclusive of wealth. But what is wealth if your ecosystem is dead? You know, what is wealth if most of your population is in poverty or homeless or overcrowded in homes? What is wealth if there's no food available for the children? So we can't have wealth honestly and with integrity unless we have care for community and the base needs are met.
So I've had people ask me to run for office for a very long time. In any office, but in particular governor, and especially the last eight years since the recall. And it's not something I probably would have ever picked for myself, even though I get very impassioned by elections and policy and governance. But I've been asked by my elders and mentors to step in. I've been asked by my children and other children to step in to help fix their future for them, because people have seen me do big things, and so they've put their trust in us to do it.
Sutherland
So you guys have been in Nome a couple of days. Chris, this is kind of home for you, or close to. What is your takeaway after these two days here, meeting with the community and campaigning?
Steere
It's been really nice to see how people are aware and invested, and to connect with them and tell them what they're about and see them light up with a hope for politicians that they don't normally have. You know, everyone's down on politicians, for good reason, and they see who Meda is, who I am, and what we're doing this for. And that reception has been really, really strong and really powerful.
DeWitt
Yeah, you know, we've been listening. We had a community listening session yesterday. We're not doing the normal politician thing, you know. Like they come in, they have their stump speech, they try to extract money, because campaigns are really expensive. But we've done it a little bit differently, where we're coming in and just building relationships. And then we feed people. And you know, we don't even ask for money because that's not our priority. Our priority is listening to the local people, and in Nome we got to hear from many different people, socio-economic levels, backgrounds, about the challenges and the things that they hope for, the things that they are fearful of, the things that are frustrating.
And I want everybody in this region who's listening: you have power. You know, we've been told we don't, and we get disenfranchised and trodden down. But we need you to vote. We need you to take the power that you do have access to, and express it fully. Because we have so much happening in our state, you know, two people can't do it by themselves. We need everybody to come together. And there's a primary on Aug 18, one person, one vote, and then there's a general on Nov 3, which is ranked choice voting. But, you know, rural Alaska needs support. We're listening. We're here. We're here to do the work, and we want to do it together.
Steere
Now is the time to fight for our state and for our future.
Sutherland
There is a quote on your website that talks about how your campaign is for everybody and that everybody can be a part of this process. How can people's voices be involved in your campaign?
DeWitt
Well, you know we're competing against people who have hired outside consultants; they've got millions of dollars. They're buying up all the airtime. They're all trying to yell louder than each other. And so that's not what we're doing. We want to believe in the people. We need people to tell their mothers and fathers, their brothers and sisters, their cousins, their coworkers, their neighbors, the random person you see on the street, that they need to go out and vote. And they need to vote for me and Chris Steer. And you know, if you even look at our campaign team compared to other campaign teams, we have the most diverse campaign team. You know, different ages, socio-economic levels, different colors of melanin in their skin, and they've come to the campaign. None of them are normal campaigners. They've come to the campaign because they believe in what we are doing, and they want to work and fix the state.
So we need to go out together and bring out, like I said, your whole community, all of your cousins. If you go to our Facebook page, Meda DeWitt for Alaska, and our website's medaforalaska.com. We also have Instagram and TikTok and a few others. Oh, YouTube, go to the YouTube page, Meda DeWitt for Alaska. And like, comment, share. And when you put questions on the videos, we're going to use those to make more videos and answer those questions. If you want to have a personal Zoom, like if you have a community that's small, because we don't have a lot of money to travel, but if you want to do a Zoom with just the community, we'll make time for that, just to visit with them. And yeah, so that amplification, grassroots, peer-to-peer amplification, that's what we're trusting in. That's our campaign plan: we're putting our trust in Alaskans, in the people.
