{"id":6630,"date":"2015-12-06T09:04:10","date_gmt":"2015-12-06T17:04:10","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/spijue.wpengine.com\/news\/alaskan-helps-shape-obamas-native-agenda\/"},"modified":"2015-12-06T09:04:10","modified_gmt":"2015-12-06T17:04:10","slug":"alaskan-helps-shape-obamas-native-agenda","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.juneauempire.com\/news\/alaskan-helps-shape-obamas-native-agenda\/","title":{"rendered":"Alaskan helps shape Obama’s Native agenda"},"content":{"rendered":"

ANCHORAGE \u2014<\/strong> The state\u2019s senior senator has called her Alaska\u2019s \u201csecret agent\u201d in the White House.<\/p>\n

Indeed, Raina Thiele, an Alaska Native with roots in Bristol Bay and the Cook Inlet region, worked with President Barack Obama to organize his historic trip to Alaska and increase Alaskans\u2019 access to the administration.<\/p>\n

But Thiele, 32, is quick to say she\u2019s not the reason for the president\u2019s interest in the state.<\/p>\n

Instead, it stems from Obama\u2019s efforts to reach out to American Indians and Alaska Natives nationwide, his attention to climate change and its big impact in Alaska, and the nation\u2019s current role as chair of the eight-nation Arctic Council.<\/p>\n

\u201cI think that\u2019s really helped to highlight Alaska voices in a very big way,\u201d she said.<\/p>\n

Others are quick to praise Thiele. They say she put together the president\u2019s private round table with tribal leaders, Obama\u2019s first meeting during his three-day stop in Alaska. She also helped arrange his tightly choreographed visits to the predominantly Alaska Native towns of Dillingham in Bristol Bay, and Kotzebue, above the Arctic Circle.<\/p>\n

Officially, Thiele is the White House\u2019s associate director of Intergovernmental Affairs and Public Engagement. But Sen. Lisa Murkowksi, R-Alaska, speaking to thousands at the annual Alaska Federation of Natives last month, called her the state\u2019s \u201csecret agent.\u201d<\/p>\n

\u201cShe is President Obama\u2019s top Native liaison, and she is one of ours – enrolled to Pedro Bay,\u201d said Murkowski, referring to the Bristol Bay region village where Thiele spent summers smoking fish with family.<\/p>\n

Reggie Joule, the former Northwest Arctic Borough mayor, said Thiele was his conduit to the Obama administration when he wanted to discuss regional issues.<\/p>\n

\u201cI think by her nature she\u2019d help anyone, but especially Alaskans and Alaska Natives,\u201d said Joule, who worked with Thiele to bring the president to Kotzebue.<\/p>\n

On one trip to the White House, Thiele escorted Joule through the West Wing, introducing her colleagues. It was \u201ccool\u201d watching an Alaskan move through the White House with confidence, Joule said.<\/p>\n

So how did Thiele, whom many Alaskans have never heard of, get where she is?<\/p>\n

Ask her mom, a teacher\u2019s aide at Goose Bay Elementary School in Wasilla, and she\u2019ll say it was partly her family\u2019s emphasis on education – and Thiele\u2019s drive to overachieve.<\/p>\n

Raina was in second grade when she announced she would attend Yale or Harvard.<\/p>\n

\u201cI was like what? I don\u2019t think I\u2019d even heard of those colleges,\u201d said Sarah Thiele, whose own mother, the late Mary Jensen of the Bristol Bay region, never attended school at all.<\/p>\n

As it turned out, Raina, who graduated from Houston High School in Wasilla in 2001, attended both.<\/p>\n

It\u2019s an especially important achievement considering the low high school graduation rates for Alaska Natives. A 2014 White House report, noting the social and economic challenges faced by Native youth, reported Alaska Natives and American Indians had a 67 percent graduation rate in 2012, the lowest in the nation among ethnic and racial groups. The numbers are even lower for Alaska Natives when looked at separately in 2014: 55 percent, according to the Alaska Department of Education and Early Development.<\/p>\n

Thiele said adjusting to college on the East Coast was tough, but she graduated from Yale and later attended graduate school at the John F. Kennedy School of Government at Harvard, where an internship led to a job at the Office of Management and Budget in the president\u2019s Executive Office.<\/p>\n

There, Thiele worked with others helping compile the president\u2019s budget request to Congress, and she got to know the White House\u2019s tribal affairs team. That provided a springboard to her current position, and her role in the president\u2019s effort to improve opportunities for Alaska Natives and American Indians.<\/p>\n

In summer 2014, for example, Thiele helped organize a presidential trip to the Standing Rock Sioux Nation in North Dakota, where the president and first lady Michelle Obama were moved by the challenges facing Native youth. It was Obama\u2019s first presidential visit to Indian Country.<\/p>\n

After the trip, the president called Thiele and others into a meeting where he laid out a vision for a new Native youth effort.<\/p>\n

With that, Thiele helped organize the Generation Indigenous initiative, or Gen-I. The program connects Native youth across the country and challenges them to launch community projects that might be eligible for federal funding.<\/p>\n

The initiative led to the First White House Tribal Youth Gathering this summer, attended by some 1,000 young leaders, including many from Alaska.<\/p>\n

\u201cIt was very moving to see all these youth from all over Alaska and all over the country have their voices elevated,\u201d said Thiele.<\/p>\n

Thiele, who comes from Yup\u2019ik, Athabascan and European stock, credited her parents for fostering a \u201creach-for-the-stars\u201d mindset. She called it critical to the first big step in her journey to the White House: attending college outside Alaska.<\/p>\n

Beyond emphasizing education, the Thieles made sure Raina knew her culture.<\/p>\n

The commercial fishing family had their own small planes and flew each summer to Pedro Bay, population 47 today, where Thiele and her siblings helped relatives put away salmon for the winter.<\/p>\n

Though the Thieles moved to Big Lake when Raina was young, the family often returned to Alexander Creek, a small community cut off from the road system by the Susitna River, where Raina spent some of the first years of her life, attending home school taught by residents from up the creek in kindergarten and first grade.<\/p>\n

\u201cI made it a point to expose them to Native culture and I think that\u2019s where she gets her connection to help Native people,\u201d said Sarah.<\/p>\n

As a kid, Thiele said, she wanted to be the nation\u2019s first woman president. Though she\u2019s tamped down that expectation, it\u2019s something her mom isn\u2019t ruling out.<\/p>\n

As for Thiele, she\u2019s focused on continuing to promote opportunities for young Natives, and advancing the president\u2019s goal of ensuring \u201cNative youth across the country have the resources they need to succeed and prosper,\u201d she said in an email.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

ANCHORAGE \u2014 The state\u2019s senior senator has called her Alaska\u2019s \u201csecret agent\u201d in the White House. Indeed, Raina Thiele, an Alaska Native with roots in Bristol Bay and the Cook Inlet region, worked with President Barack Obama to organize his historic trip to Alaska and increase Alaskans\u2019 access to the administration. But Thiele, 32, is […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":107,"featured_media":6631,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_stopmodifiedupdate":false,"_modified_date":"","wds_primary_category":4,"footnotes":""},"categories":[4],"tags":[230],"yst_prominent_words":[],"class_list":["post-6630","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-news","tag-state-news"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.juneauempire.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/6630","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.juneauempire.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.juneauempire.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.juneauempire.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/107"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.juneauempire.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=6630"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.juneauempire.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/6630\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.juneauempire.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/6631"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.juneauempire.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=6630"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.juneauempire.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=6630"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.juneauempire.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=6630"},{"taxonomy":"yst_prominent_words","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.juneauempire.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/yst_prominent_words?post=6630"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}