Aucha Kameroff is on a mission.
This year, the 65-year-old Yup’ik grandmother traveled hundreds of miles by snowmachine and boat, all to remind people in some of Alaska’s most remote communities that their votes matter.
In early February, the Mobilization Center, an Anchorage political consulting firm, asked Kameroff to take on the voter education work. The firm’s nonprofit clients wanted to raise turnout.
Kameroff had conditions. She wanted to travel from village to village by snowmachine and boat, the way many rural Alaskans do.
She said she tries to show people how voting shapes daily life in the village, from subsistence rules to the food on their tables.
According to Get Out the Native Vote, a nonprofit working to increase voting in Alaska Native communities, turnout in the Northwest Arctic peaked near 80% in 1982, the year subsistence was on the statewide ballot. In 2024, the borough’s turnout was less than half that.
“I said, ‘The way you vote affects what type of food you eat at your table.’ And they say, ‘How?’ Well, the governor appoints the Board of Fish and the Board of Game. What they decide regulates the fish and the game, and it goes to my table,” Kameroff said.
A journey through dozens of villages
Kameroff’s first trip this year began in February. She planned to travel more than 600 miles on winter trails from Kotzebue to the Yukon-Kuskokwim Delta, but storms and a broken snowmachine turned the crew back after about 80 miles. So Kameroff flew to Emmonak, the Lower Yukon village where she grew up, and fixed her machines.
She set out again with her 15-year-old grandson, Arvid, Arthur Richards Sr. and Raymond Brown Jr. They visited seven communities in the region, then nine in the Northwest Arctic.
Kameroff said her age hasn’t slowed her down.
“I just turned 65 in May, and people can’t believe I’m 65. But I tell everybody I’m 25, because when I was a little girl, I used to think adult age is 25,” she said.
Kameroff set off again in June, this time by boat, with Richards and longtime river traveler Corky Dimick. They traveled down the Yukon River from Tanana to Emmonak.
In all, Kameroff said she visited more than 25 communities this year.
“We went village to village, the least expensive way, and we were with the people, for the people, because of the people. And that’s the way to do it,” she said.
What happens in Juneau and Washington reaches the villages
At each village she visits, Kameroff shares the community’s voting numbers: its population, how many residents were registered and how many voted in 2024. She said the turnout numbers could be eye-opening.
“People could see, you know, hey, my brother might not be voting, or my mother, sister, niece, whatever,” she said.
Kameroff said she talks the way she would to a neighbor, often teasing friends and family in the audience, Yup’ik style. After one presentation on the Lower Yukon, a woman approached her with a compliment.
“One lady said, ‘I’ve never been to a meeting where I understood everything from the beginning to the end,’” Kameroff said.
She said that traveling on the Yukon brought home the election’s stakes for voters in the region. King salmon fishing on the Yukon has been mostly closed since 2021, and in 2024, Alaska and Canada agreed to a seven-year moratorium. Even this year, when the run came in stronger than expected, fishing stayed closed.
Kameroff said she saw only one active fish camp on the whole trip downriver, and it was run by the state.
“Everything was dilapidated. The smokehouses were down,” she said.
Kameroff said Juneau and Washington can feel a world away from the village, but what happens there still reaches rural Alaska.
“Whatever decision they make in Washington, D.C., it’s going to affect the people in Emmonak or Alakanuk or Noatak or Noorvik or Deering. It might not happen today, but it’ll happen tomorrow,” she said.
Kameroff said she’s tired after all the travel, but she calls it the best job she’s ever had, and a way to fulfill a childhood dream.
“When I was a little girl, I used to say, ‘I’m going to every village there is in Alaska,’” she said.
She said she still has plenty of villages to go.
