<figure class="wp-block-image size-full"><figcaption class="wp-element-caption">John Wayne Howe at the 2024 Fisheries Debate in the Gerald C. Wilson Auditorium on Oct. 8, 2024. (Brian Venua/KMXT)</figcaption></figure>



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John Wayne Howe of the Alaskan Independence Party is one of four candidates running for Alaska’s sole U.S. House seat. Incumbent Democratic Rep. Mary Peltola is running for reelection against Howe and two other challengers: Republican Nick Begich III of Chugiak and Eric Hafner, a Democrat who is incarcerated in New York and has never lived in Alaska.

Peltola spoke with KYUK Saturday, but Begich has not responded to KYUK’s request for an interview. Howe sat down with KYUK to talk about what motivates him to run for Congress.

Read a transcript of the conversation below. It has been lightly edited for clarity and flow, but may contain transcription errors.

KYUK (Sage Smiley): Thank you so much for joining us today, John Wayne Howe. You’re running for Congress to represent the whole state of Alaska. Can you tell us a bit about yourself? Who are you?

John Wayne Howe: I am an Alaskan. I have been – but I got transplanted. I gotta say, you know, well, I view all Alaskans as Alaskans, those that want to be here. There is a group that I don’t really think of as Alaskans that are here, and there’s a lot of those that come up to work many jobs for 10 or 20 years so that they can have a retirement home somewhere down in the lower 48. And while they are temporarily Alaskans, they are part of our landscape. I don’t really consider them the main core of Alaska. I consider it the people that plan on dying here and being buried here, raising their kids whatever they can do here. I really consider those Alaskans. I came up in 1979 and it was because I was just not real happy with where I grew up, even though I don’t think it was that bad. And I am a person that tends to not move recently, I traveled to Kodiak for the Fisheries Debate, which opened up a whole bunch of new ideas to myself. And boy, if I would have traveled around some years ago, I don’t think Kodiak would be the place, even though the weather there was absolutely gorgeous for the two days I was there. People tell me of the rain, and rain was part of what I didn’t like where I grew up. So maybe I wouldn’t have gone there, but I would go somewhere else, probably rather than Fairbanks, if I really traveled around the state, it’s hard to say. I’m so settled in here, though, and have made so many friends. And like I say generally, I’m a stay put person, and I’m in Alaska. I am here. I got into the Alaskan Independence Party initially because I met Joe Vogler. He was the starter of the Alaskan Independence Party. I’m actually the chairman of it at this point too, which is part of why I ended up running for this particular office. And I could rattle on about a whole bunch of irrelevant stuff, but there’s only so much time, so we’ll get back to your next question.

KYUK: So I mean, with the Alaskan Independence Party, what’s motivating you to run for office?

Howe: What’s motivating me to run is I’d like to see more Alaskans be interested in building up this nation-state of Alaska. And you say that, ‘Oh, my God, how could you say that? Is that secession?’ You know, no, actually, there were 13 nation-states that pulled together to become the United States of America originally, and they have every right for each of them to call themselves nation-states. But we don’t usually do that. And I think by not doing that, we miss the fact that we have a lot of rights we just don’t take as Alaskans, whether we use the tool of a U.S. House of Representative[s seat], or a tool of a governor or whatever else. But these are peaceful tools, as opposed to people that would like to see the problems in society fall apart and go to anarchy and fighting against each other. And I’m very peaceful. In fact, I call myself a peacemonger. So it’s the fact that we can transform the nation-state of Alaska. And I’d like to go towards that concept and work forward with it, instead of going backwards into something that’s perverse.

KYUK: So what does that look like, then? What are the top issues that would move you toward your vision for Alaska, or in this case, representing Alaska in Congress?

Howe: In the U.S. Congress, one of the top things is banking. We need to be able to bank here in Alaska with real money, not some phony crypto, which is where the U.S. government is trying to head the money currently, beyond the inflation that they’ve got started. We need solid money that is available for individuals to start their own banks and have their own currency that is not authorized by the state or the nation of the U.S., necessarily, but not unauthorized, not illegal, to do so that you have the right to do whatever with money that you want to if you exchange with your neighbor. I am 100% anti-tax. Anything that funds the government should be voluntary. Otherwise it’s theft, and it’s not a matter of theft. And we encourage this many times. Unfortunately, we’re so used to this, we encourage the theft of our neighbors so that we steal things from our neighbor through using the government as the tool. And that’s just evil if the government is not doing something we want, right? Then we should have a way to stop that by just plain not funding them, which there’s nothing more peaceful than that, and everybody has a voice in it, instead of like voting, where 51% of the people can vote, that 49% pay for something that they don’t want to pay for. My ideal goal is not really available on a national scale, but I’ll go ahead and put it out there. It’s something that needs to be done. I believe, within the nation-state of Alaska, we need to take all of our royalty money that comes in, make it available to everybody 100%. But the way this would work is initially 50% of the money, you choose how much goes to which department of government, you choose how much goes to schools, how much goes to roads. If you want to dedicate it to a certain area of the roads, you dedicate it to that area. You choose where that 50% of the money goes, not just an arbitrary the government gets this to spend however they feel like you fund the part you want to. The other 50% is yours to either keep or add additionally. So you could put 100% of the money into the government if that is what you want, or you could keep 50% of it. The next year, there would be 40% of it that is guaranteed for the government and 60% for you, so that in a matter of five years, we would be transformed into a society that is used to understanding and funding the part of governments that we want. Now, to actually make this happen, we need a good governor that’s on board with that. We need some people in the legislature, in the Senate for the state, and most of all, we need the people of Alaska to care about their neighbors, to care about not forcing them into paying for things or being out of things that they should have. And I’m a little saddened over this election cycle of seeing less and less care in Alaska, of neighbors, for their neighbors. I’ve seen a decline in that, instead of a increase like I had hoped for.

KYUK: As you’ve been campaigning, obviously, KYUK covers the Yukon-Kuskokwim (Y-K) Delta – the lower part of the Yukon Delta, and a lot of the Kuskokwim. What have you heard about the biggest issues that constituents bring to you in the Y-K Delta, in terms of what can be done or should be done by a Congressional representative?

Howe: The biggest thing that I hear is about the subsistence issue. And subsistence is kind of a mixed bag. Well, it’s a very mixed bag. There’s some people that want subsistence based on race, and I really think we need to be Alaskans, you know? I think it’s great if a person is doing subsistence and they happen to have come from a family that’s done that for thousands of years. But what if your next generation moves into a big city, and then they’re going to have a preference given to them over someone that stayed in the village? That’s not right, you know, that doesn’t really do what we want to do as Alaskans. We have another big problem too, is there’s an idea of people that are in subsistence, but they’re in like a smaller method of fishing or getting crab, or smaller boats and such, that is sort of subsistence. It’s not the big commercial but it still is, that’s the way they subsist. That’s how they make their living, and that plays into the whole dynamic of things. I am more ba