Wild Goose Days
Along Alaska’s roadless Kuskokwim River, a Yup’ik radio station keeps dozens of villages gossiping, praying, and reporting what’s in their nets, even as two advancing corporate powers — a colossal gold mine pushing to break ground upriver and industrial trawlers stripping the sea below — close in. A station manager and an Yup’ik elder fight to keep the signal, and their people, from going silent.
In Bethel, “Wild Goose Days” means a return to a different time, before screens and algorithm-driven feeds. KYUK, the town’s public radio station, is still living in them, carrying emergency alerts and Yup’ik-language programming across hundreds of miles of roadless tundra to villages where the signal is sometimes the only daily link to the wider world.
When federal public media funding ended in October 2025, KYUK lost roughly 70 percent of its budget and most of its staff. The station manager, who arrived as a volunteer DJ fifteen years ago, fights to keep programs on the air, while a Yup’ik elder and on-air host keeps the river’s news and stories moving between villages. Upriver, a gold mine advances toward construction. Downriver, industrial fishing in the Bering Sea reshapes the salmon runs the villages depend on. Wild Goose Days is an observational portrait of a community working to keep its voice.
Film Topics Include:
Andrew H. Brown
Director & ProducerKatie Basile
ProducerMike Morrisroe
ProducerMia Vyzis
ProducerDonate to this Fiscally Sponsored Project
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