Thursday, November 20, 2025

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Photo: Breakfast bar at the Wingate Hotel in Anchorage, Alaska. (Courtesy Wingate by Wyndham)

Hundreds of evacuees from Western Alaska are staying in Anchorage hotels after last month’s storms destroyed their homes.

The Alaska Desk’s Alena Naiden from our flagship station KNBA spoke to a few families who are adjusting to their new daily lives, so far away from everything they know.

Ally Shangin’s room at the Wingate hotel is crowded. On one bed she sits with her two year old daughter. Her partner sits on another while their children play nearby.

Shangin and her family are among around 650 evacuees from Western Alaska who are staying in Anchorage after being displaced by a devastating storm last month. State and federal agencies are working to rebuild the affected villages. But for many, returning before winter is not an option.

“Moving here with our family – it was okay, but it’s not okay. I want to go home.”

For Shangin’s 9-year-old daughter Katelynn, that means homeschooling so she can help her parents take care of her siblings.

Shangin says the family gets breakfast every day, but the hotel room has no kitchen, so they order fast food for the remaining meals.

“They are used to homecooked meals all the time. They’re used to the Native food and stuff that we eat.”

Julia Tuutaq Stone is Kipnuk’s police officer and another evacuee. She is staying at the Aspen Hotel in Anchorage, along with her two adult sons and young grandsons – each family in their own room.

“It was gonna be heartbreaking if they didn’t come with me.”

Stone says the hotel provides them with free meals and snacks. She takes buses to go to the store and to play bingo. And her grandsons attend the Yup’ik immersion program at College Gate Elementary School.

Her son, Alexie Aqumkallak Stone, says his kids are having more fun than him.

“They’re enjoying their stay here. …It’s not fun for me, that’s for sure, because it’s not my kind of life. My life was subsistence.”

Back at the Wingate, Shangin says her family has been looking at apartments already. They even filled out paperwork to receive assistance for rent.

“But some of us are tired of waiting.”

The family especially liked a two-bedroom apartment they looked at. Shangin says it was big enough for the older children to share their own room.

“My family will be happy. I’ll be happy because I’ll be able to cook my family food.”

Shangin already knows what their first meal will be: a rice dish baked in the oven with meat and seasonings.

She says that will be enough for the whole family.

More than 100 winter items and more than $15,000 dollars were collected this week, during a winter coat drive at the National Congress of American Indians (NCAI) annual convention in Seattle.

Attendees brought in new coats and other cold weather essentials from gloves to scarves to hats.

The items will help support unsheltered Native people in the city and will also benefit evacuees in Alaska affected by last month’s devastating storm.

The Seattle Indian Health Board was among organizations that teamed up with NCAI on the coat drive.

Abigail Echo-Hawk (Pawnee Nation of Oklahoma) is the executive vice president of the health board.

“It’s really important for us as Native people to come when we come to areas and we think about how we contribute not just to the local economies, but to the people itself. And so here in Seattle, we have a very large unhoused population.

“Native people in the Seattle area are 10 times more likely than non-Hispanic whites to live unhoused on the streets of Seattle. And organizations like the Seattle Indian Health Board, United Indians of All Tribes, we work with a lot of these relatives.

“Having a coat drive really allows us to get some really high quality, nice things out to our communities, both our unhoused relatives and also for our youth and folks who are in need of a nice warm coat in a cold Seattle winter.”

Echo-Hawk says distribution of the winter items will begin as soon as her organization receives the donations from NCAI.

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