the eagle The chief of the National Park Service in Alaska attended a meeting in the eastern Interior village of Eagle last week and apologized for the aggressive actions of two rangers on the Yukon River last summerBut it was not the highly publicized arrest and trial of Jim Wilde, a 71-year-old Central man, who Alaska park service director Sue Masica was talking about. Rather, she was apologizing about a run-in the same two rangers had a month earlier involving another man: Tim Henry of Eagle.The rangers handcuffed and detained Henry for about two hours for allegedly refusing to identify himself but did not arrest him.
“It was wrong. It shouldn’t have happened,” Masica told about 35 residents who attended the meeting in the gym at the Eagle school on June 2.
“It hurt this community, and we do apologize and we need to extend an apology to him personally.”
Her words drew a round of applause from the crowd, but it remains to be seen whether her visit to Eagle will be the first stitch in mending strained relations between the park service and some of the 125 residents in the eclectic village that borders the Yukon Charley Rivers National Preserve.
Masica went on to say the park service is committed to repairing relations with residents in the remote community at the end of the Taylor Highway, many of whom use the preserve for subsistence. The park service director said that mistakes were made last summer and that neither of the two rangers involved in the incidents will be back in the preserve.
“We know we’ve got relationships that need rebuilding,” Masica said by phone this week. “Things are pretty frayed over what happened last year. Our relationships with the community and the people who use and live in the area of the preserve are important to us and we need to rebuild them. This was an attempt to do that.”
Read more: Fairbanks Daily News-Miner - National Park Service tries to make amends for events arrests in Eagle
No comments:
Post a Comment