Lakota McRoberts, the Food Sovereignty Coordinator for the Copper River Native Association, sits on a raised bed on June 24, 2025 in Copper Center. She runs a permaculture garden for the tribe. (Photo by Nathaniel Wilder)
On a plot carved into a forest of white spruce and aspen near Glennallen, Lakota McRoberts strolled through a collection of raised garden beds earlier this summer, calculating how many neighbors she might feed.
“I’d like it to be probably three times the size,” she said. “But last year we were able, in August, to feed 148 families, which is like 258 individuals, to give them a pretty decent basket.”
McRoberts, 25, who also works for the food bank at the Copper River Native Association, is part of the newest generation of a tribal gardening movement that’s grown quickly in recent years, driven by compounding concerns about food security in mostly Indigenous communities at the northernmost end of America’s grocery supply line.
The Copper River sits a few hundred yards from the Copper River Native Association’s permaculture garden in Copper Center. During the peak summer salmon run, salmon wheels are set up to provide fish to offset food insecurity for tribal members — along with vegetables from the nearby garden. (Photo by Nathaniel Wilder)
Farming advocates in Alaska say shipped-in food has always been expensive, but the supply chain disruptions during the COVID-19 pandemic highlighted the fragile nature of stocking village groceries. Meanwhile, climate change has upended subsistence salmon fishing, derailed hunting and even left berry patches barren, making wild food harder to harvest. Volatile global economics, the threat of tariffs and shrinking support for government food assistance further heighten concerns. All of that, plus a post-pandemic bump in government funding for small agriculture projects, has stoked community food-growing projects from Metlakatla to Tyonek to the Yukon River to Kiana to St. Paul Island.
For McRoberts, who grew up in Glennallen, the community’s hunger feels urgent.
“It’s harsh, especially with a lot of the federal budget cuts, a lot of more people have signed up for the food bank … we probably added at least 50 more families to our list, which is quite a few people,” she said. “And a lot of them will come in and will be like, ‘Oh, if I didn’t get this today, I wouldn’t have a lot of food.’”
A small permaculture garden run by the Copper River Native Association sits a few hundred yards from the banks of the Copper River. (Photo by Nathaniel Wilder)
Alaska’s rural communities tend to have higher rates of food insecurity than urban ones. According to Feeding America, an organization that tracks hunger, about 1 in 5 people in the Copper River Borough are considered food insecure, among the higher rates in Alaska. More than half of those food insecure people did not have incomes low enough to meet the requirements for government food assistance in 2023, which is the last year data was available. It’s not totally clear yet what new cuts to federal food assistance might do.
When people are low on store-bought food but have incomes too high to qualify for food assistance, subsistence foods can make up the difference. But when it’s harder to hunt, fish and gather, McRoberts said, people have a harder time staying fed.
“I rented a fish wheel last week for three days,” McRoberts said. “I got six fish. How many people are you going to feed with six fish?”
Lakota McRoberts, the Food Sovereignty Coordinator for the Copper River Native Association, stands in a greenhouse at the tribe’s permaculture garden. (Photo by Nathaniel Wilder)
In the Glennallen region, the Nelchina caribou herd, which has been traditionally hunted for subsistence, has retracted to historic lows — a decline brought on by extreme precipitation, part of a pattern linked to a changing climate. The herd is also one of the few that’s accessible from the road system, which means it’s also under pressure from lots of urban hunters. Recent herd population estimates have been so low they’ve led to hunting closures.
Similarly, failures of fisheries elsewhere in the state have brought more people to the region to fish, increasing pressure on the Copper River. King salmon, once a subsistence staple, have declined steeply there, part of a statewide chinook decline scientists attribute to a complex nexus of factors, including stress caused by climate-driven increases in air and water temperature and heavier precipitation. The harvest forecast for king salmon in the Copper River at the beginning of the season this year was weak, at 25% below the 10-year average, leading managers to restrict fishing. Sockeye salmon, though, were forecast to be plentiful.
McRoberts’ project is funded by the Copper River Native Association and the Copper River Watershed Project, along with some smaller partners. It may be the only community garden in the state that’s planted using the permaculture method, which emphasizes designing organic gardens in harmony with the surrounding environment, intermingling perennials, native plants and food crops with an eye on climate resilience. McRoberts maintains the garden with colleagues and volunteers. Native cranberry, yarrow, chamomile and Jacob’s Ladder grow along with cucumbers, sunflowers and cabbages. The garden plan even takes into account the appetite of moose.
“When you’re setting up your plants you purposely plant some that you know is gonna get eaten by a moose or by a bird, because it’s finding that balance in nature,” she said. “You know they’re always going to be around.”
Cucumber leaves catch the sun in a greenhouse. The permaculture garden is a project the tribe recently began to work toward a greater food sovereignty. (Photo by Nathaniel Wilder)
Lakota lost her mother when she was a toddler and she was raised by her grandparents on a nearby small farm. She had five foster sisters and two foster brothers, five half-sisters and a half-brother, she said. When her grandparents grew more food than they could use, she watched them give it to people who were in need, she said. Later, she got a job at the food bank and saw she liked working with food and people. When the Native Association sent her to get a gardening certification, her curiosity about plants exploded, she said.
“I feel like growing up here in Glennallen as a youth, there were a lot of us that struggled mentally and got really depressed,” she said. “I didn’t really get happy and spark my joy until I started working in the garden.”
Heidi Rader, tribes project director with the Cooperative Extension, was one of the authors of a University of Alaska Fairbanks report last year on food security and sovereignty in Alaska Native communities, which documented the growth of the Indigenous gardening movement and its challenges.
Among the report’s observations: “… the decreasing availability of wild foods, like salmon, are driving Tribes to look at alternative sources of food — which includes the use of agricultural means to produce more locally — not necessarily out of desire, but out of necessity.”
The program Rader works with sends seeds to about 500 gardeners and 25 to 35 villages. That number has remained steady, she said, but what has changed is the number of community- or tribe- sponsored projects like McRoberts’ garden.
“A lot of those other larger projects are often supported through various grant funding,” she said.
Much of that funding comes through the U.S. Department of Agriculture, she said. Funding sources increased in pandemic years and helped start lots of projects. RurAL CAP, an anti-poverty organization, for example, houses the GROW program, which provides training and funding opportunities to food security projects across the state, including the Glennallen project.
Common sunflower plants grow in the greenhouse. (Photo by Nathaniel Wilder)
Most of the work of community food growing is done by Mother Nature, said Emily Becker, the organization’s gardening program coordinator, but the organization has found that for projects to really work, it’s important that a garden coordinator or leader be modestly paid.
“This is not going to be volunteer work, but it’s a small amount of money, like it really is, and it’s so satisfying,” she said. “I just got pictures from Kwethluk of some radishes that they got to deliver to elders, and how happy and proud that made them.”
Funding for a number of agriculture programs in Alaska has recently been frozen or pulled back. A large blow came in July when the U.S. Department of Agriculture unexpectedly terminated $6 million in funding that had already been approved for a multiyear program meant to boost small food producers, processors and distributors in remote, underserved communities in Alaska.
“We have definitely seen through the pandemic, storms, natural disasters and low salmon returns that rural communities are redefining what food sovereignty means to them and, in some cases, it is small-scale agriculture,” said Robbi Mixon, executive director of the Alaska Food Policy Council, which works to improve food systems in the state.
The program was formed after 10 years of planning with lots of small communities, she said.
“It would have provided tangible investment into equipment, skill-building, investments like cold storage and processing equipment to further actualize their vision,” she said.
The UAF report describes how historically, agriculture projects have had painful associations for Indigenous communities because farming land was a way settlers took territory away from tribes. Cultivation and stewarding plants, however, is a tradition that goes back hundreds of years in Alaska before contact. That’s best documented in Southeast, where Tlingit and Haida people grew a special kind of potato and created terraced gardens to create growing space for edible plants. Over the last 200 years, many people in Indigenous communities grew crops, especially things that could be root-cellared, like potatoes, root vegetables and cabbage, but larger-scale farming rarely took hold.
Katie Herzner works as a technical assistance specialist in Alaska with the Intertribal Agriculture Council, a national organization that supports tribal growers and aims to strengthen relations between tribes and the federal government. She listed a number of new garden projects in Golovin, Elim, Stebbins in the Nome region and in Kwethluk, in the Bethel region. Sometimes the tribe sponsors the garden, other times it’s the local government, she said.
“And then in other places, you know, it really started with an individual that was really passionate about it, and they are, you know, able to provide this service for the community,” she said.
Lakota McRoberts pulls weeds in the tribe’s permaculture garden. (Photo by Nathaniel Wilder)
The younger generation have never known the kind of abundance of animals that their parents and grandparents did, she said, blaming both a changing climate and poor fish and game management.
But, lots of people are taking a new look at growing their own food.
“It’s actually really exciting to be in this line of work right now, because there’s kind of like this, this movement happening where we definitely want to revive our cultures and preserve our traditions but at the same time, this new generation is realizing that we are going to have to adapt and change if we want to be able to survive,” she said.
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