On a blazing hot Friday, dozens Fairbanksans gathered along the Chena River to offer a prayer. A prayer to the sacred rivers to bring back a missing and crucial piece of Alaska – salmon.
For almost twenty years, the decline of salmon across Alaska has devastated the life and traditions of Alaska Natives. Salmon, especially the king and chum salmon, have not hit the quota to sustain various villages along the Yukon and Tanana River. Various practices like ocean bycatch fishing and excessive commercial fishing are blamed for reduced numbers going up the rivers. The salmon population is coming back each summer in worrying numbers. It means a sacred and pivotal animal is missing from the lives of Alaska Natives.
Diloolah Erickson is the tribal resource Stewardship Department director at Tanana Chiefs Conference. Her team at TCC put together a protest and time for prayer to get the voices of Alaskan Natives heard.
“We run off of full board resolutions, that's how we get our directives as staff at TCC,” says Erickson. “Our tribes passed a resolution in March of this year, a full board resolution, meaning all 42 tribes of the Tanana Chiefs Conference region voted to support this effort. They directed us to support the villages, holding a day of peaceful protest for the salmon. The salmon crisis going on the Yukon and the impacts on our food security, it's been having for our people in the village. Not just our food security, but like our spiritual practices as well. So the idea behind the protest is to really gather and gain traction in the state lens, the national lens and the global lens. Really amplifying the crisis that's happening on the Yukon.”
She says people around the state don’t understand the depth of the crisis for river villagers who have been subject to state and federal fishing restrictions as the salmon runs decline.
“Then the Department of Fish and Game, their Fish and Game Commissioner, Doug Vincent Lang, without consultation, or informing the tribes, did kind of like a backdoor deal like a behind closed deal with Canada and they placed a seven-year moratorium on our tribes without any notice or consultation,” tells Erickson. “They just rolled it out and now we're looking at by the time the seven-year moratorium ends we will have been cut off from fishing for 12 years altogether.”
Erickson says subsistence users on the Yukon and Tanana River watersheds have borne 100% of the conservation burden despite making up only 1% of the salmon user group.
Michelle Quillin is an Indigenous knowledge advocate for Native Movement. The Alaskan Native activist group offered space for supporters to come and create signs and art a few days before the demonstration. Quillin hopes the protest will bring a unified stronger voice, not only in Fairbanks, but all across Alaska rivers.
“Our hopes are just going to the river here and making an offering like a prayer,” says Quillin. “I've been picking some bluebell flowers and drying them to, you know, offer into the river, and people are, you know, bringing like little moose Hide bits and Cottonwood bark and with, like, messages written on them and stuff that they'll toss into the river as well. And we'll just say a Prayer for our salmon relatives and then go back to the tribal hall. I think the important message is just that we're all stronger, unified together, all of the communities. In all of the tributaries from the Yukon River. That if we have a unified voice, it's much stronger.”
People all along the Yukon and Tanana Rivers gave prayer and spoke to the salmon. Those in Fairbanks gathered at the David Salmon Tribal Hall, then walked to the banks of the Chena River, a tributary in the Yukon watershed, to bless the river. Various signs are held high and voices loud as many sang out to the river.
Charlie Wright, Secretary on the Executive Board of Directors for TCC and Treasurer Tribal member from Rampart, says everyone is affected by the salmon crisis.
“The salmon had a lot of trouble from a lot of different directions: Climate, overfishing, mismanagement,” explains Wright. “It's been accumulating disease, ichthyophonus for kings especially, but it's intercept fisheries and trawling, climate… It's a little bit of everything. So we just got to start paying attention and doing a little better as humans, and I think those fish will come back.”
Despite the ongoing attempted efforts, the salmon are still disappearing. By using practices that have carried on for generations, by speaking to the river, many are praying and fighting for the return of the salmon. A return of a traditional lifestyle that has shaped Alaska and its Indigenous people to what it is today.