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.

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Here is a meal we shared with his family:

Here is how the story begins:

Gambell, Alaska — Before his story made the Anchorage paper, before the first death threat arrived from across the world, before his elders began to worry and his mother cried over the things she read on Facebook, Chris Apassingok, age 16, caught a whale.

It happened at the end of April, which for generations has been whaling season in the Siberian Yupik village of Gambell on St. Lawrence Island on the northwest edge of Alaska. More than 30 crews from the community of 700 were trawling the sea for bowhead whales, cetaceans that can grow over 50 feet long, weigh over 50 tons and live more than 100 years. A few animals taken each year bring thousands of pounds of meat to the village, offsetting the impossibly high cost of imported store-bought food.

A hundred years ago — even 20 years ago, when Gambell was an isolated point on the map, protected part of the year by a wall of sea ice — catching the whale would have been a dream accomplishment for a teenage hunter, a sign of Chris’ passage into adulthood and a story that people would tell until he was old. But today, in a world shrunk by social media, where fragments of stories travel like light and there is no protection from anonymous outrage, his achievement has been eclipsed by an endless wave of online harassment. Six weeks after his epic hunt, his mood was dark. He’d quit going to school. His parents, his siblings, everybody worried about him.

Read the rest here. 

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Julia O’Malley, a third-generation Alaskan, is a freelance journalist, teacher, editor and cook who lives in Anchorage. Her work in newsrooms, classrooms and kitchens explores Alaska’s cultures, politics, climate and food.

She is currently a Writer-in-Residence at Anchorage Museum, researching Alaskans’ relationship to salmon at a time of historic, climate-related volatility. She teaches culinary arts and journalism at University of Alaska, Anchorage. She also develops recipes and writes a newsletter about Alaska food. 

Her book about Alaska’s foodways, “The Whale and The Cupcake: Stories of Subsistence, Longing, and Community in Alaska,” created in collaboration with the Anchorage Museum and published by University of Washington Press, came out in December 2019. (Order it here!) (Listen to it on Audible here!) Her work has been anthologized in “Made of Salmon,” “America’s Best Food Writing 2018,” “Writing on the Edge,” and “How to Survive.” 

Julia received a James Beard Award in 2024 for a story about the cultural implications of the climate-related crash of snow crab on Saint Paul Island, a place where Russian colonists and the federal government coerced Indigenous people into hunting seal for furs well into the 20th Century. She also received a James Beard Award in 2018 for a story about a young whale hunter, Chris Apassingok, who was cyber-bullied by environmentalists after he took a whale in the village of Gambell.

Julia has worked as an editor at Alaska Public Media and as a reporter, columnist and editor at the Anchorage Daily News. She’s written for The New York Times, The Washington Post, High Country News, The Nation, The Guardian, National Geographic News and Eater,  among other publications. (Find her all her latest work here.) She writes recipes for the Anchorage Daily News and Edible Alaska. She also teaches and organizes independent workshops around Alaska on memoir and food journalism. She is board president of the Alaska Press Club.

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Other publications and experience:

Julia was the visiting Atwood Chair of Journalism at the University of Alaska Anchorage from 2015-2017, where she taught food writing, social media, community reporting and digital journalism.

Julia wrote a twice-weekly metro column about Alaska life and politics for the Anchorage Daily News from 2009 to 2014. Her work has been recognized with some of country’s most prestigious feature-writing prizes.

In 2014, she won a Berger Award from Columbia Journalism School for a series of stories, “The things that happen: two boys and cancer” about the spiritual worlds of two teenage boys, best friends, one of them Lao and one of them Hmong, who were diagnosed with cancer at the same time. (Click here for her Journalism Day speech at Columbia). 

In 2011, her series on opiate addiction in Anchorage, “Hooked: One Addict’s Story,” which she worked on with photographer Marc Lester, won the Darrell Sifford Memorial Prize from the Missouri School of Journalism, a Blethen Award, first place in the Society of Professional Journalists Pacific Northwest Excellence in Journalism contest for social issues reporting. That same year, her columns won first place for general commentary from the Society for Features Journalists.

In 2008, a body of her work won the Scripps-Howard Foundation’s Ernie Pyle award for the best human-interest writing in America.

She is a graduate of Smith College and the mother of two boys.

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