Biohazard and Crime Scene Remediation in Kiana, AK

Kiana is an incorporated city in Northwest Arctic Borough, at the meeting of the Squirrel and Kobuk Rivers, 30 miles north of the Arctic Circle and 57 air miles east of Kotzebue.

The 2020 census counted 447 residents in 108 households in Kiana, up from 361 in 2010, with a median age of 24.9 years.

Its Inupiaq name is Katyaaq, meaning "where three rivers meet," and about 89 percent of residents in 2020 were American Indian and Alaska Native.

Kiana was founded centuries ago as a central village of the Kobuk River for Kowagmiut Inupiaq people, who traditionally hunted and fished along the river and lived in sod houses.

Archaeologists studied the nearby pre-contact site Igliqtiqsiugvigruaq, or Swift Water Place, inhabited by ancestors of today's residents from 1790 to 1810, where homes were connected by tunnels.

The first white settlers arrived by boat in 1898, and Kiana became a key supply town for coal and gold miners along the Squirrel River.

The Blankenship Trading Post, managed by Walter Blankenship and later by Robinson Blankenship and Ruth Blankenship Sandvik, was the only store stocking flour, salt, coffee, tea, sugar, and canned and dried fruit.

Kiana first appeared on the 1920 census as an unincorporated native village and formally incorporated on June 30, 1964, the same year its United States post office was founded.

Before the post office, mail arrived only once a month, carried mainly by dogsled or on foot from village to village.

A weak tornado briefly touched down in Kiana on August 26, 1976, making it the site of the northernmost recorded tornado.