This feature is part of a six-month series from Magic Canoe’s Contributing Writers. Four writers were selected to each cover Salmon, New Economies, Environment, or Indigenous Leadership. This is the third story for the New Economies Desk. (You can read the second installment here.) Major support for the Contributing Writers Series is made possible by a gift from Priscilla Bernard Wieden, in loving memory of Dan Wieden.
A major experiment unfolded in Old Harbor, Alaska, this summer. The tiny Alaska Native village of about two hundred residents greeted its first cruise ship ever on August 2, marking the town’s first foray into the rapidly expanding world of cultural tourism in Alaska.
“When events like this happen, things change. Some for the good, some for the bad,” said Jeffrey Peterson, city mayor and chief of the Alutiiq Tribe of Old Harbor. “We’ve never had a vessel that big tie up to the dock.”
In late July, Peterson was unsure how the influx of tourists would affect his sleepy town located 322 miles southwest of Anchorage on the tip of Kodiak Island, surrounded by the Gulf of Alaska. By the end of August, Peterson expressed relief. “From the passengers’ perspective and the cruise ship company, HX, they really enjoyed the visit.”
A lodge and charter business owner, Peterson is also a board member of Old Harbor Native Corporation—an Indigenous-led corporation created by Congress under the 1971 Alaska Native Claims Settlement Act (ANCSA). The corporation recently surveyed Old Harbor residents about how things went for them. Peterson looks forward to seeing and discussing the results in mid-September at a village summit.
Like other ANCSA corporations, Old Harbor Native Corporation’s for-profit mission is to create economic opportunity for its Alaska Native shareholders. The board had decided the previous year that Old Harbor needed new revenue sources. The rustic Alutiiq (also called Sugpiaq) village had long relied on commercial fishing as its economic engine, supplemented with subsistence food gathering and cottage industries.
But Old Harbor had recently determined it could no longer rely on the ocean for revenue. Policy shifts in the management of Alaska’s fish stocks severely dropped the number of coastal Alaska residents—many Alaska Natives—who make their living from the sea.
“We used to have forty boats and now we have three in Old Harbor for commercial fishing,” said Kristina Woolston, Old Harbor Native Corporation’s chief executive. “There just isn’t an economy anymore.” With the board’s support, Woolston is charting a new course for Old Harbor, with cultural tourism at the center.
A fast-growing sector of the global tourism industry, cultural tourism showcases the history, art, food, language, geography, dance, and other features of a given area. It generates about 40 percent of all tourism-related revenue worldwide, according to the United Nations.
Tourism is already big business in Alaska, a state defined by majestic mountain ranges, glaciers, fjords, and copious fish and wildlife. The state also has the most federally recognized tribes, 229 in all. Increasingly, Indigenous-led tourism is playing a larger part in the state’s tourism portfolio.
According to the Alaska Travel Industry Association, visitors directly spent nearly $4 billion in Alaska between 2022 and 2023. The industry’s total economic impact hit $5.6 billion during that same period and employed roughly 48,000 people.
With visitor spending on the rise and much of rural Alaska lacking jobs, it’s little wonder Native companies are tapping into tourism’s potential.
This year, Old Harbor Native Corporation created a subsidiary, Alaska Nuna Adventures, a partnership with cruise lines to offer Indigenous-guided tourism experiences. These include a walking tour of Old Harbor, one of Alaska’s oldest continuously inhabited communities, with stops at a historic Russian Orthodox church, the town’s cultural center, and spots for glacier and wildlife viewing. During visits, ship passengers also catch glimpses of nearby Sitkalidak Island, where Old Harbor maintains a herd of 320 bison as food security for the village.
While Old Harbor also invests in oyster and kelp farming, which visitors learn about, the Native corporation sees cultural tourism as the town’s future economic driver.
“The people of Old Harbor are industrious. They’re very hard workers. They want to be active and to stay in their community. And we think this may be a way to make that possible for them,” Woolston said.
A Living Museum in Anchorage
Old Harbor is the latest example of Alaska’s growing investments in cultural tourism. The first big splash was the Alaska Native Heritage Center, which opened twenty-seven years ago in Anchorage. The Heritage Center resulted from a 1987 resolution calling for development of a statewide cultural center by the Alaska Federation of Natives (AFN), the largest statewide advocacy organization for Alaska’s tribal citizens.
“Before the Heritage Center, there was no single place that represented all Alaska Native cultures. And the goal was really to bring together the diversity of Alaska’s Native peoples while honoring each culture’s very unique traditions, languages, and histories,” said Kelsey Ciugun Wallace, president and chief executive.
A living museum, the Heritage Center is the state’s premier destination for Native art, languages, dance, artisanship, and history. The Heritage Center also features Alaska Native games like the seal hop, high kick, and ear pull. It has a gallery, art exhibits, and outdoor tours of replica village sites. The dwellings tell the story of the Dena’ina, Yup’ik, Inupiaq, Sugpiaq, Unangax, Eyak, Tlingit, Haida, and Tsimshian Tribes of Alaska.
It employs Alaska Natives in a variety of positions, including youth who lead cultural tours and dance performances. Indigenous workers also build leadership and public speaking skills through internship and apprenticeship programs.
Wallace is a prime example. After growing up in the western Alaska town of Bethel and earning her degree at the University of Alaska Fairbanks, she launched her career as a public relations intern at the Heritage Center ten years ago. Wallace worked through the ranks of management to the top spot.
The Heritage Center isn’t just about job creation for young people. It offers intergenerational skill and knowledge transfer. “Our elders are equally important. They bring wisdom, language, lived experience, and cultural knowledge that people can’t learn from a book. Their presence really grounds everything we do,” Wallace said.
Expanding Jobs, Sharing Culture
Around the time the Alaska Native Heritage Center opened, Huna Totem Corporation was also moving into Indigenous-led tourism. As the village corporation for Hoonah—Alaska’s largest Tlingit community, located in the southeast panhandle—Huna Totem had invested heavily in logging for many years. It clear-cut most of the 23,000 acres the company received under the land claims settlement brokered with Congress.
Years of industrial-scale clear-cutting had left visual scars on the mountains around Hoonah, as well as emotional baggage within the community, often pitting shareholders, families, and neighbors against each other. Some worried that logging was hurting deer and salmon populations, important for culture and food security, while others supported resource extraction for the jobs and cash it injected into the economy.
Ultimately, with a growing awareness of environmental damage caused by clear-cut logging, lack of available forest to cut, and downturn in the timber industry, Huna Totem traded forest products for visitor services and opened its own cruise ship destination a mile outside of Hoonah called Icy Strait Point in 2004. On Chichagof Island inside Tongass National Forest, Icy Strait Point grew into a full-service cruise ship port with more than thirty different tours. Passengers can choose among backcountry Jeep rides on former logging roads, kayaking excursions, bird-watching, wilderness hikes, zip-lining, salmon filleting, and cooking lessons.
Some activities take place inside an old salmon cannery that Huna Totem refurbished, a nod to Alaska’s fishing history. Like Anchorage’s Heritage Center, Icy Strait Point employs hundreds of tribal shareholders.
“For us at Icy Strait Point, we have 350 local employees out of a town of 900. Basically, everyone that wants to work there can,” said Howard Sherman, president of Huna Totem Tourism Group.
Prior to Icy Strait Point, Hoonah was losing population as residents scattered to find jobs elsewhere. Since the port opened and created employment, Hoonah’s population has recovered, according to Sherman.
The jobs at Icy Strait Point are not limited to cultural tour guides. Some Huna Totem shareholders have earned Coast Guard licenses to operate corporation-owned boats and other vessels. Others perform facilities maintenance, operations, and management duties. Huna Totem has also expanded beyond the rainforest to other parts of Alaska. In Whittier, an hour’s drive south of Anchorage, the company has built an $80 million, 30,000-square-foot cruise terminal in partnership with the City of Whittier and the Alaska Railroad.
Huna Totem also formed Na-Dena, a joint venture with Doyon, Limited—the regional Native corporation for Fairbanks and the Interior. The company operates fleets of motor coaches in Juneau, Ketchikan, Skagway, and Sitka that offer tours and transportation to cruise lines.
Na-Dena partnered with Klawock Heenya, the village corporation for Klawock, a primarily Tlingit community on Prince of Wales Island. Klawock is a three-hour ferry ride from Ketchikan, a Southeast Alaska hub city. The partnership brings small cruise ships to Klawock, a town with little prior tourism experience and an economic history tied to subsistence hunting and fishing, commercial fishing, and logging.
Passengers disembark at a former industrial logging site, shielded by tents from the island’s frequent showers as they embark on tours of a totem pole park and carving shed, visits with a master carver, and marine wildlife or kayak excursions.
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Similar to Old Harbor Native Corporation, the joint venture is only bringing smaller-sized vessels to Klawock—not the massive ones that dock at Juneau, Ketchikan, Skagway, and other major ports—and is taking it slow to see how residents react to the new industry.
“We’re very sensitive because we want to balance economic opportunity with what it is they actually want to see for their community going forward,” Sherman said.
Huna Totem contributes significantly to parts of the state: $15.8 million to Hoonah, $869,000 to Klawock and Craig, and $750,000 to Southcentral Alaska last year through payroll, taxes, services, and other means, according to Sherman.
Complaints of Overtourism
As the tourism economy expands in Alaska, with visitor spending mushrooming 40 percent between 2016 and 2022, growing pains have proved inevitable. Some Southeast Alaska port residents say their communities in summer have become unrecognizable: They see them as overwhelmed with multiple large cruise ships tying up on the same day, disembarking thousands of passengers and crew onto the small-town streets. Some of the largest ships can carry nearly five thousand passengers, according to Cruise Lines International Association.
Backlash against the cruise industry in Juneau has raged since the 1990s. The town of 32,000 hosts nearly 2 million cruise ship passengers a year. As the industry’s footprint has grown, so have local complaints and lawsuits.
While some support the industry for economic reasons, others vent about air and water pollution from the ships, streets and trails clogged with rain poncho–wearing cruise passengers, swarms of helicopter traffic, souvenir shop proliferation, and overall diminished quality of life.
Juneau and the cruise lines reached a voluntary agreement in 2024 that limits the number of ships that can dock to five per day, and it caps the total number of passengers at 16,000 from Sunday through Friday, and 12,000 on Saturdays.
For many Juneau residents, it’s not enough. The community lies along Gastineau Channel, with steep, glacially carved mountains that rise from the sea on either side of the skinny passageway. When four or five colossal ships drop anchor and offload, the tight channel morphs into a buzzing marine terminal, its streets congested with tourist foot traffic. A sense of weariness and resentment of overtourism have characterized many public meetings and op-eds over the years.
Against that backdrop, Huna Totem plans to build a new cruise ship dock in downtown Juneau, slated to open in 2028. Norwegian Cruise Line bought the property in 2019, but gave it to Huna Totem in 2022.
Goldbelt, Inc., Juneau’s Native corporation, also plans to build a $500 million cruise ship dock on Douglas Island, a five-minute drive across a bridge from Juneau. That project, in partnership with Royal Caribbean Group, would be Juneau’s sixth cruise ship dock to date.
For years, longtime Juneau resident Karla Hart has fought to contain the industry’s explosive growth. In her view, major cruise companies look to partner with Alaska Native corporations to push their expansive business agendas under the guise of cultural tourism.
“The cruise lines see the opportunities of using Native corporations to further their development objectives throughout Alaska,” said Hart, a non-Native who sees it as another form of colonization.
“Colonialism relies on collaborators from within the colonized community. What we see with the Native corporations partnering with the cruise ship companies is, in my observations, what I call cruise ship ‘colonization,’” Hart said.
Community Collaboration
Juneau’s experience with overtourism is something Old Harbor Native Corporation wants to avoid.
Old Harbor only invites smaller ships, like the MS Roald Amundsen from expedition travel company HX. Compared to world’s largest cruise ships that operate in some places with passenger capacities up to 7,600 people, the hybrid Amundsen is far smaller (maximum capacity 490 people) and less polluting.
Ultimately, Old Harbor will take the direction of the consensus among the corporation, tribe, and city.
“We’re still waiting to determine the scope and size of what our operations will look like in the future because we want to be collaborative with the community,” said Woolston, Old Harbor Native Corporation’s chief executive.
While this summer’s first experiment with cruise tourism seems to have gone well, the corporation spent the rest of August surveying residents on what they want going forward. It plans to meet with the city and tribe in September to plan for next summer, Woolston said.
The corporation, through Alaska Nuna Adventures, is developing tours beyond Old Harbor in nearby Kodiak, a commercial fishing port that handles more than thirty port calls from cruise ships between April and October.
One of the tours, called “An Intimate Conversation with an Alutiiq Elder,” offers visitors the chance to share coffee and tea with a tribal elder “in a peaceful waterfront setting” to hear “firsthand perspectives on subsistence living.” Another tour involves tasting Kodiak’s seafood, other local delicacies, Indigenous food traditions, and Alaska-roasted coffee.
“In Kodiak, each of these tours has an Indigenous component to it,” Woolston said.
Lessons Learned
Peterson, Old Harbor’s mayor, tribal chief, and corporate board member, said this summer’s experiment with cruise ship tourism was a learning experience, if nothing else. He noted that the town’s lone dock is also used by the state ferry and fuel barge, essential lifelines for the community.
He had worried about possible damage to the dock, which didn’t happen. If cruise ships return next summer, the dock will require modification, because the MS Roald Amundsen’s size exceeds the structure’s length, he said.
“Colonialism relies on collaborators from within the colonized community. What we see with the Native corporations partnering with the cruise ship companies is, in my observations, what I call cruise ship ‘colonization’.”
Karla Hart
Peterson had also stressed over the cruise ship’s draft.
A marine pilot on the ship had called him early that morning to ask the ocean’s depth at the dock.
“I went out and did a ‘sounding’ in front of the dock, and it was thirty-one feet on the north end and thirty-five feet on the south end. They needed twenty-seven feet, so we just squeaked by on the depth requirement,” Peterson said.
Beyond the dock, Old Harbor’s dirt roads may need to be paved and sidewalks installed so visitors have a safer, less gritty walking experience.
Additional thought might also be needed for onshore sales. Daily revenue at the local store actually dropped off the day the ship was in town, Peterson said, because locals avoided shopping there to avoid the tourists.
Arts and crafts sales were disappointing because passengers weren’t buying much, the mayor and tribal chief said. “The local Fourth of July celebration, according to the vendors, generated more revenue than 350 passengers,” Peterson said. That said, the city collected $6,700 in docking fees from the ship.
Woolston agrees that more groundwork and community consultation are needed before more ships sail into Old Harbor.
But she’s hopeful that a few more shore excursions and retail options can be developed by next summer and that a handful of other small cruise ships can visit, gradually building up to ten per season. They would not visit during major community events like Fourth of July or the youth culture camp.
“There are some things we would want to avoid,” Woolston said.
From feedback she’s heard, Woolston said the cruise passengers really enjoyed learning from local guides about Old Harbor’s experience with the Russian Orthodox church, the fur trade, and Alutiiq culture. The impact of the local commercial fishing collapse was also a big takeaway.
“They got to see our small boats in the harbor and talk about the fisheries that are in decline,” Woolston said. “One of the reasons we’re welcoming outsiders to the community for tourism is we have an economy that is diminishing, and we need to do something about it so that our communities stay healthy and whole, and people have jobs and an economy to look forward to.”