Desperate to stem the recent spate of youth suicides in their community, residents of South Dakota's Pine Ridge Indian Reservation have turned to an unlikely ally — crowdfunding.
In communities without running water and flush toilets, 11 times more children develop pneumonia than other Alaskans, and some develop complications that can lead to lifelong respiratory problems.
What if you didn’t have piped water and sewer, and the government wasn’t picking up the tab to extend such resources to you in rural Alaska? How would you go about finding a low-cost system that you could keep running through the winter?
Even rural Alaskan communities that have raised the money to build modern sanitation systems face the threat of their ultimate failure due to the lack of funding for operations and maintenance, wiping away whatever health gains were achieved.
In her Kick the Bucket series, Joaqlin Estus tells the stories of rural Alaskans who are just getting used to modern plumbing, as well as others who are still waiting for running water.
Every day, outreach workers try to lift homeless alcoholics from the streets of Anchorage, Alaska. In the past, a sober life has always been the goal. But a controversial approach called Housing First is challenging that thinking. Last story in a four-part series.
Being homeless isn't easy anywhere, but especially not in Anchorage, Alaska, where hundreds subsist at the confluence of chronic homelessness and addiction. These individuals are the most prolific consumers of public services, gripped by a lifestyle of compounding health problems and risk of death.
Jodi Mahle, who lives on the streets of Anchorage, Alaska, woke up one afternoon in November to find her boyfriend dead beside her. Other homeless watched as she pressed on his chest, she said, frantic to jumpstart his pulse outside a Midtown liquor store....
Homeless Alaskans are being found dead on the street with alarming regularity. During a one-year period beginning in spring 2009, so many bodies appeared that some residents in the state's largest city that spread rumors of a serial killer. What's being done to assuage their plight?
The Affordable Care Act is stirring up confusion and anger among the patients who visit a Los Angeles clinic dedicated to serving urban-based Native Americans. That's because President Barack Obama's reform has raised a painful question: which tribes get free health care and which have to pay?
