Just before 11 a.m. on Monday, Haines’ fire chief Brian Clay stood scanning the graves in the Jones Point Cemetery, many freshly decorated with American flags in honor of Memorial Day.

Clay, an Army veteran, weaved through the gravestones, stopping to point at Frank Wallace’s grave. “I knew him, he was the fire chief here.”

He stopped and pointed out a World War I veteran’s grave, then another from World War II, saying “his son…

Rashah McChesney is a multimedia journalist and editor who has reported and edited newsrooms from the Deep South to the Midwest to Alaska. For the past decade, she has worked in collaborative news as the...