Sage Smiley
News DirectorSage Smiley is KYUK's news director. She’s worked with audio since she was a teenager at radio stations from Alaska to Amman and is passionate about sound-rich storytelling, rural radio and community-centered journalism. When not slinging a shotgun microphone around the Yukon-Kuskokwim Delta, she can likely be found in or around a body of water.
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High-speed fiber-optic internet is live in Bethel. It’s part of a years-long tribal broadband project – a partnership between telecommunications provider GCI and Bethel Native Corporation. -
Bethel’s Kuskokwim Ice Classic tripod tripped the clock at 4:10 p.m. on May 5, 2025, marking breakup in Bethel. That’s three days earlier than breakup at Bethel last year. -
Ice in front of the upper-river community of Nikolai broke during the 8 a.m. hour on Tuesday (April 22), according to community reports and confirmed by the Alaska-Pacific River Forecast Center. -
Each year, Elders, dancers, and Cama’i attendees line up on Saturday afternoon of the festival to load paper plates full of the bounty of food from the Yukon-Kuskokwim Delta. -
Miss Cama’i represents the Yup’ik, Cup’ik, and Athabaskan people of the Yukon-Kuskokwim Delta at events and pageants throughout her reign. This year’s winner ran on a platform of existing gracefully between the Native and western worlds so Yup’ik and Cup’ik people can thrive. -
The Alaska State House has passed an education bill that includes a $1,000 increase to its per-student funding formula. But many school districts throughout the Yukon-Kuskokwim Delta say even the proposed increase to the state’s per-student funding would leave them in the red. -
AVCP and Tanana Chiefs Conference, along with the City of Bethel, claimed that recent groundfish harvest management in the Bering Sea wasn’t properly taking into account major changes to the ocean ecosystem, including fisheries collapses on the Yukon and Kuskokwim rivers, and thus violated federal law. -
Bethel’s local sprint mushing club has hosted four races over the past week, and two familiar names came out on top. -
In Bethel, the 2024-2025 season has been the sixth mildest winter in 101 years of climate records, according to data from the National Weather Service. -
This week, KYUK will release the first part of an investigation with ProPublica that looks at infrastructure issues in rural Alaska schools.
