I wrote a long story for High Country News looking at the cultural impact and science related to the a major king and chum salmon crash on the Yukon River related to climate change. (Images by Jenny Irene Miller)
Here’s how the story begins:
Katie Kangas’ salmon memories live in her body. They are the ache of the knife in her hand after hours of cutting fish in summertime. The heft of a wooden pole loaded with scored fillets. The smell of cottonwood smoldering in her corrugated metal smokehouse.
Kangas is a grandmother now. Her ancestors, Koyukon Athabascans, harvested fish for thousands of years on this stretch of the Yukon River, 200 miles west of Fairbanks, Alaska, by small plane.
Here, in the village of Ruby, children have always learned how to handle fish by watching and repeating. Teaching them kept elders vital. To her children and grandchildren, Kangas passed on bits of language and details about the natural world, like the way the cottonwood trees tell you the chinook salmon are coming by letting their downy seeds float on the wind. Knowing how to catch, cut, dry, smoke and can salmon is how a person knows they are from here. The chew of a half-dry salmon morsel, oil and phenols lingering, tastes like this place. Or at least this is how it was.
Chinook are better known in Alaska as king salmon. The massive, fat-rich fish that people in this predominantly Indigenous village always relied on to fill their freezers and caches for winter have dwindled alarmingly over the past two decades. Scientists link the decline to water temperature increases related to human-caused climate change, and there are also concerns about salmon incidentally caught in the ocean by large operations trawling for bottom fish. In the late 1990s, chinook numbers became so paltry that managers began restricting fishing, including subsistence — fishing by locals for their food supplies. A major crash in 2008 nearly curtailed the commercial fishery, and it never recovered. Managers closed the river to almost all fishing in 2021. Still, there has been little improvement.
People adapted. Ruby, a village of 150 that’s only accessible by boat or plane, kept up the rhythm of summer processing, working with smaller, leaner chum salmon, which they had previously caught and dried mostly to feed their sled dogs. But those chum runs, once relatively reliable pulses in the spring and fall, began failing in 2020, taking scientists and residents by surprise. In response, the Alaska Department of Fish and Game limited and then closed both the Yukon chinook and chum fisheries. For the last few summers, for maybe the first time in more than 10,000 years, there was almost no fishing for either species allowed on the Yukon River at all. Without fishing, the practice of going to fish camp with family, an essential Alaska Native tradition that brings relatives from urban centers to the villages and enables the passage of knowledge about culture and the land from one generation to the next, couldn’t happen. Its absence left a hollowed-out, idle anxiety, Kangas said.
“What am I going to do?” she asked in July, looking out her kitchen window toward the river. “There’s a big empty river out there.”
Read the rest.