On a gray July morning in the Bering Sea, aboard the F/V Progress, a crew member stands at the edge of a sorting table and sweeps a tangled heap of life into an open hatch: pollock, a chum salmon, jellyfish, basket stars. The photograph catches a routine instant in industrial fishing, but for those of us who live along the Yukon and Kuskokwim Rivers, that chum salmon is not just bycatch. It is a returning relative. It is a fish that should have escaped the net, found its way past the trawlers, and carried its body upstream to a village, a smokehouse, and a table where children learn how to slice, salt, and hang every piece for the winter. In recent months, a series of opinion pieces defending Alaska’s trawl fisheries have tried to turn the salmon bycatch debate into a sharply binary story: either you support the trawl industry, or you support salmon—and if you support salmon, you are supposedly working to dismantle Alaska’s fishing economy. This is a false choice, and it is a dangerous one. It ignores the fact that Alaska’s fisheries and fishery-based economy do not exist only because of pollock and its associated industries. It ignores the fact that salmon have sustained Alaska’s people long before there were trawlers, and that they will be needed long after the politics of this season are forgotten. We write not from boardrooms or factory decks but from the riverbanks where the real economy of Alaska has always lived. From where we stand, the debate is not theoretical. It is about whether our children will inherit a world with fish in the water and purpose in their hands.
Recently, Alaska Department of Commerce Commissioner Julie Sande wrote, “Before we reduce a fishery to a slogan, we should remember what an industry looks like from inside a community.” We agree that the inside matters. We agree that slogans are poor substitutes for reality. But we know what a fishery looks like from inside an Alaska community because we are the community. Along the Yukon and Kuskokwim Rivers, our fishery is not a distant processing plant or a company town built around a trawl fleet. It is a family fish camp on the riverbank, inherited and tended like a garden. It looks like nets hung on driftwood stands, like children carrying buckets of river water, like aunties bent over cutting tables with uluaqs, working together in rhythm. It smells like alder smoke curling from smokehouses, like salt and curing meat, like the rich oil of salmon drying in the September wind. It sounds like elders teaching grandchildren the exact angle of a cut, the proper spacing of strips, the prayers said before the first fish of the season is taken. This is not a hobby. It is a sociocultural economy that has functioned for thousands of years, feeding families, forging kin relationships, and passing knowledge from generation to generation. And now, after all that time, our communities are deafeningly quiet. Federal and state agencies have issued decree after decree telling us to stop fishing because there are not enough salmon returning to the rivers. Our nets hang empty. Our smokehouses are cold. The silence is heavy. Meanwhile, boards and councils with lopsided representation continue to allow marine commercial industries to catch the very same salmon as bycatch while chasing pollock. The people who live here are asked to sacrifice everything, while the people who profit are asked to change almost nothing. That is not conservation; that is gutting a community from the inside out.
There are those, like Sam Murphy of the Alaska Pollock Fishery Alliance, who argue in a Sept. 6 opinion and elsewhere that the presence of pollock harvesting and processing activity in Alaska means the pollock trawl industry fuels Alaska’s economy. In July, writing in National Fisherman, he argued that investment in CDQ communities only “exists because the (pollock trawl) fishery exists.” There may indeed be economic benefits generated by pollock, but the question is: for whom, and at what expense? The industry likes to count the dollars it produces, the jobs it supports, and the tax revenue it contributes. But it never seems to count what is lost when a salmon is scooped out of the sea alongside pollock and thrown into a hatch. Salmon are also an economic resource. They support local, mixed subsistence-cash economies, feeding families and sustaining cultures. In our villages, a single fish is not simply a meal. It is a gift to an elder, a lesson for a child, a way of maintaining a relationship with the world. When a salmon returns to the river and feeds a family all winter, that value is real. When a grandmother teaches her granddaughter how to fillet, that value is real. When a community remains a viable place where people want to live, work, and raise families, that value is real. But none of that appears in the pollock industry’s economic calculus. The industry treats bycatch as an unfortunate externality, not as the stealing of our future. We are tired of an accounting that measures only what can be seen on a spread sheet and ignores what can be felt in a hungry community.
Maybe that is why a pollock trawl trade organization recently posted on social media: “It’s time to stop the bycatch BS.” From a corporate perspective, bycatch is a nuisance, an obstacle to efficiency, an annoying regulatory problem. But for communities that have been asked to restrict their harvests, bear the full burden of conservation, forgo passing on our traditional ways of life, and slash our local economies, there is nothing BS about bycatch. The absurdity is not our concern; it is the setup. It is the system that tells our fishermen to stay home while trawlers continue to sweep through the ocean. It is the message that our culture must absorb the pain of a salmon crisis while the industry spends its time attacking anyone who objects. BS is what a parent says to a child when there is no fish to put away for winter. BS is the silence in a village when the boats are tied up and the smokehouses remain cold. BS is the feeling of watching our elders lose the chance to teach, and our young people lose the chance to learn. Opposing trawl bycatch is not an abstract political talking point aimed at “filleting Alaska’s economy.” It is direct advocacy for the salmon that never got the chance to return home. It is a plea for the key part of our communities’ economic engines to continue. It is an act of love for a way of life that has endured through ice ages, epidemics, and economic upheaval—but may not endure if we allow the ocean’s bounty to be treated as garbage.
We must, at last, move beyond the idea that stronger marine protections for salmon mean the collapse of Alaska’s economy. That is a scare tactic, and we know it all too well from pro-trawl politicians and their allies. The truth is that salmon are the core of our state’s economy, cultures, and ways of life, and they have been so for thousands of years. Alaska’s economy was built on salmon before it was built on pollock, before it was built on oil, before the term “bycatch” ever entered the language. Salmon are not separate from the economy; they are its foundation. Every fisherman, no matter what they fish for, depends on a healthy ocean and healthy rivers. It is in the best interest of all fishermen that salmon return to our rivers to ensure this livelihood continues for another 10,000 years. A single chum salmon saved from a net in the Bering Sea does not destroy the pollock industry. It reinforces the health of a system that ultimately sustains all of us. Protecting subsistence ways of life is not an act of hostility against commercial fishing. It is an act of stewardship. It is an investment in a future where there are enough fish for everyone, where rivers and oceans are not treated as enemies but as partners. The economy we seek is not one that picks winners and losers; it is one that understands that when the fish disappear, the accounting is not merely financial. It is human. And when the fish return, everyone benefits.
Charlie Wright Sr. is from Tanana and Rampart and serves as chair of the Yukon River Inter-Tribal Fish Commission. Kevin Whitworth, from McGrath, is executive director of the Kuskokwim River Inter-Tribal Fish Commission. Vivian Anginran Korthuis, of Emmonak and Bethel, is the CEO of the Association of Village Council Presidents. Together, our organizations represent dozens of tribal governments and thousands of people whose lives depend on salmon. We are not asking for special treatment. We are asking for balance, for recognition, for a seat at the table. We are asking that the same regulatory system that tells our communities to sacrifice also asks the trawl industry to sacrifice a little of its catch and a little of its certainty. It is in the best interest of Alaska to choose to protect salmon and subsistence ways of life—parts of our state’s economy and identity that are as essential as anything any other fishery can offer. We invite everyone to learn more about the collective work of our organizations at www.SalmonPeople.org. There is still time to hear the smokehouses again, to fill the nets, to teach the children. But that time depends on the decisions we make right now. Let us make sure that when a chum salmon returns from the sea, it is welcomed home and not swept into a hatch. Let us be the generation that chose wisdom over waste, and community over comfort. The rivers have given us everything; now they need us to answer.