Natalie Dawson was born and raised in a suburb of Detroit. She first started coming to the Chilkat Valley more than two decades ago doing fieldwork as a wildlife biologist.
She spent some time in the Tatshenshini-Alsek Provincial Park and trapping along the Chilkat corridor while also studying essentially the retreat of ice sheets and what happens with mammal populations along the edges of the continent.
The field work kept bringing her back and then she’d come to Haines for events like the Kluane-Chilkat International Bike Relay – or to dry out after a busy field season in some of the wettest parts of Southeast Alaska.
After living and working in Montana and Anchorage, she and partner Eben Sargent bought land in Haines in 2018, though they didn’t move to town full time until about 2021.
While she has a PhD in biology and has worked as a teacher and project manager in other parts of the country, Dawson said she works a combination of jobs now. That includes working as the director of strategic partnerships for the Alaska Venture Fund. She also picks up a class here and there, teaching at the Tidelines Institute out of Gustavus and for a field school in Montana.
Dawson said she loves living in a place like the Chilkat Valley with its diverse ecosystems and dynamic weather systems.
“You’re along a trans-boundary river system with access to a completely different ecosystem, just like 40 miles upriver,” she said. This area has just got a combination of beautiful access to mountains, to different environments. So, if it’s rainy here, you can go upriver and go skiing in the snow.”
While Dawson has experience on nonprofit boards interacting with community councils and local governments, last year’s successful assembly run is her first experience with serving in an elected public office in local government. And, it wasn’t something she saw herself doing.
“It’s not my happy place, for sure, in terms of comfort. I’m a bit of a hermit,” she said.
That’s tough in a place where things become personal quickly.
“I was happy to just be under the radar here, if at all possible,” she said.
But then she was watching planning commission meetings a little over a year ago and saw several members of the public weigh in on a heliport permit near Klukwan, only to have their concerns ignored by the planning commission.
“What I noticed in those meetings was there was a deference to the administration’s recommendations on the issues in a way that I hadn’t really seen unfold in local government meetings I had been in,” she said.
Then, she said she approached the administration as the board chair of Haines Huts and Trails asking for a general letter of support for a workforce development grant. She said the borough dismissed the idea without wanting to hear any more of the grant details.
“I was like, look we’re a small community and we should be able to figure out how to do this stuff together, so maybe there’s a way to get involved and help that move forward,” she said.
So, she launched an ultimately successful campaign for assembly but has since become something of a lightning rod for controversy among certain circles – especially over her questioning and scrutiny of the process of getting the Lutak Dock rebuilt.
But, despite the rhetoric, Dawson said she has not really experienced any of that vitriol offline and in person with people.
“I have no beef with any of them and I’ve walked past many of them in public spaces and, in some cases, have had conversations and I don’t think they know who I am. It’s really weird. Most of the folks that have been on Facebook and stuff from what I heard – because I’m not on most channels in town – are people that don’t even know me and obviously can’t pick me out of a crowd.”
Dawson said she was really taken aback at first, crying after assembly meetings and considering dropping off of the assembly.
But then she realized, “Wow, the people who are throwing the biggest stones at me don’t even know who I am,” she said. “That was hard at first and now I’m kind of like – you know – I’m one of those people who just puts their head down and works.”
Still, Dawson said she was on the fence about running again. But she feels like the job is half done at this point.
“I’m taking a lot of the blame in the community for shooting down the Lutak Dock project which I didn’t do,” she said. “I felt like I had to run again just so I could do the work of helping to create a path forward.”
One issue she’d like to tackle if elected again is finding additional revenue streams for the borough.
“One of the reasons I was really excited to get on the assembly was to help on finance and the budget. And so in the finance committee in the spring when we started talking about the annual budget, I had asked the manager for kind of her best take on how to help bring up staff salaries in the borough,” Dawson said. “So she came up with a plan that was going to take more money than we had budgeted .. so we did that. So we’re going to have to figure out a way to increase the budget.”
Right now, one of the only tools the borough has to raise money is to increase property taxes. Dawson said she’d like to change that.
“This community has a lot of wants and not a lot of ways to get those in terms of funding outside of grants,” she said.
“So grants are obviously a huge thing, like trying to go for outside funding when we can, but it’s hard to get grants for things like routine maintenance costs and staff salary increases,” she said.
She pointed toward a cruise ship head tax which could help alleviate some pressure on the borough’s budget as well.
She’s also interested in pursuing a more formal government-to-government relationship with the two tribal nations in the Chilkat Valley if elected to another term. During a recent assembly meeting, she introduced the idea to the rest of the assembly and pointed toward a recent resolution the Anchorage Assembly passed with the Native Village of Eklutna.
“So, it looks similar to me here. Like, start the conversation with approaching the governments with the idea that they may want to do this and, if they do, then work together for a year to come up with consultation guidelines,” she said. “It doesn’t mean that the borough can just say ‘Oh, we consulted with the tribes, and we’re going to do this anyway.’ It could mean that, you know, for any large project, it requires the tribes to have special input with the government.”
It could also help communities in the valley present a unified voice on federal issues that come forward.
“I think it would create a more robust form of conversation and acknowledgement that these are tribal nations. You’re not sitting down with just a stakeholder group. The tribal nations have more clout than the local government does because their relationship is with the feds and they’re sovereign.”