OUTLOOK

Yukon salmon populations

are falling. The cultural
damage is vast.
Indigenous communities in the Yukon are struggling to survive in a changing
climate. Their stories provides an important warning, no matter where you live.
Perspective by Bathsheba Demuth and Olivia Ebertz
September 15, 2022 at 4:30 p.m. EDT

I
n summer, the Yukon River teems with life. Ducks and geese raise their young in quiet
sloughs. Moose graze amid shoreline willows. Beavers splash along the muddy banks.
Concealed by waters milky with glacial silt, hundreds of thousands of salmon surge upstream
from the Bering Sea toward the river’s origins in northwestern Canada, bound for the streams
where they were born, will lay their own eggs and will die.

Where there are salmon in the far north, there are people. A century ago, even a decade ago,
families from the Indigenous communities along the river regularly spent weeks each summer at
fish camp, the cabins and canvas tents that dot the riverbank near eddies where Chinook salmon
congregate. Dog mushers set fish wheels — like windmills with mesh baskets that scoop up chum
salmon — to feed their teams.

But this year, the fish camps are empty. The wheels sit on shore.

There are two primary salmon species in the Yukon: Chinook and chum. A good fall chum run
might see 1.8 million fish reach the lower river, fresh from the Bering Sea. Fewer than 300,000 are
expected in 2022. The Alaska Department of Fish and Game estimates that this year’s Chinook run
is the lowest on record: Sonar logged only 44,581 fish entering the river. From the headwaters to
the mouth, no one is fishing.

It’s not just because of prohibitions in Alaska and resolutions to keep nets dry by Indigenous
governments in Canada’s Yukon territory. “There is no salmon to fish anyways,” says Georgette
McLeod, who teaches the Han language for the Tr’ondek Hwech’in government in Dawson City,
Canada. “We have no salmon passing through.” Speaking from 100 miles downriver in Eagle
Village, Alaska, where she is chief, Karma Ulvi calls the salmon situation “an emergency at this
point. Something has to change. Otherwise, we’re facing an extinction.”
The Yukon salmon crisis might seem remote, a problem for small communities scattered along a
distant, subarctic river. But from the causes to the impacts, the fate of these fish has resonances
both local and global. It is a story of how climate change and biodiversity loss intertwine — and
what it means to survive and imagine the future amid rapid ecological flux. The transformation of
lands, suddenly and without easy recourse, in ways that alter what they mean and how we dwell
within them, is not restricted to the Yukon. It could come soon to your garden or favorite orchard,
to the place where you live and its capacity to nourish, both in caloric and cultural terms.
Understanding such change in one place — along a river where shifts in the populations of just two
fish species have sweeping effects across societies and ecosystems — is important, and provides a
warning, no matter where you live.

S
almon are critical to people along the Yukon in part because of how they bring the wealth of
the Bering Sea — one of the most productive ecosystems in the world — into the continental
interior. In late winter, chinook and chum eggs hatch in the riverbed gravel nests dug by
their mothers. By early spring, the fry wriggle free; chum swim directly for the ocean, while
chinook spend a year in freshwater before migrating to the Bering Sea. Once in saltwater, both
species transform: doubling size in a single summer, putting on enough muscle and fat over two or
three or sometimes even five years to power themselves back upriver.

It is that sea-raised protein and lipid that has long nourished Yukon communities, from Yup’ik at
the mouth, to middle- and upper-river Koyukon, Gwich’in, Han and Tutchone, to headwater
Tlingit villages. In the 1800s, salmon fed the colonial fur-trading outposts of the British and
Russian empires, then Klondike gold prospectors. For much of the 20th century, salmon powered
people and dog teams.

Today salmon remain critical. “They’re important to our health,” Ulvi says. “They give healthy food
that sustains us through the winter.”

In communities like Eagle Village, where road access is seasonal or nonexistent, groceries are
expensive. Fishing, as with subsistence hunting and berry-picking, is not a hobby; it is a necessity.
“You can’t sustain life without the salmon,” McLeod says.

Beyond calories, salmon make community. In camp, Ulvi explains, “the elders are cutting fish,
telling stories, teaching kids — practicing traditional ways that make everyone really happy.” For
communities dealing with more than a century of colonial pressures, from introduced epidemics to
forced education in residential schools, fish camps help transmit culture between generations —
like the rich linguistic specificity for salmon. Along the river, species are met with precise names,
rather than the blanket term “salmon”: Chum are “noolaaghe” in Koyukon; Chinook are “t’a” in
Tlingit, “luk cho” in Han, “kiagtaq,” or “summer fish,” in Yup’ik. When translator Amuqan Julia
Jimmie must render the general term “salmon” in Yup’ik, she says “neqet kiagmi kuigmin itetulit”
— “the fish that enter the river in the summer.”

People along the river, like St. Mary’s Yup’ik Elder George Beans, worry that chances to pass
knowledge down are growing rarer — that things they know could end with them. Beans says the
thought fills him with emptiness. He fears that his own skills will atrophy. “The more you sit on
something or you don’t do anything for a while, you tend to lose some of that yourself,” he says.

Language around salmon has already changed For Beans’s two granddaughters the word
Language around salmon has already changed. For Beans s two granddaughters, the word
“fishing” conjures separate images. The older girl remembers when she could target kiagtaq with a
wide net, pulling in many at once while learning how to provide for her family and her elders. But
the younger granddaughter has been alive only during a time of low kiagtaq runs. When she hears
“fishing” she thinks first of manaq’ing, or ice fishing. It’s more of a pastime than a means of
sustenance.

The disappearance of fish makes living along the river harder — more expensive, with less
connection to the land. “We have to think about what we can do to keep people from leaving rural
communities,” says Sonja Sager, a subsistence fisher in Eagle, Alaska. “This truly is more than
food to us. There’s a very deep emotional connection. When we’d pull in a fish, we’d say ‘Mahsi’
cho,’ which is a Han way of saying thank you.” Sager grew up fishing chum for her dog team. Now
it costs $400 per year to feed each dog kibble. “I feel like I’m watching the way of life I follow
fading away,” she says.

On the lower river, Beans’s family buys more of what they eat. All along the river, Alaska Natives
and First Nations peoples who have lived on the Yukon for generations are leaving — trading
traditional villages for cities where it’s harder to live off the land but easier to afford life.

“I
f you want to put an umbrella over all of it, that’s the changing climate,” Alaska
Department of Fish and Game biologist Katie Howard says. In the Bering Sea, warming
waters are radically altering the ecosystem where salmon mature. New species compete
with salmon for food, or prey on immature chum and Chinook. Chum are eating more squid,
which are newly plentiful but not nutritious. Chinook might also be underfed and suffer more from
ichthyophonus, a parasite that infects the heart and other organs and could become more acute
when fish are stressed by heat. Near Tanana, Alaska, fisherman and dog musher Stan Zuray
estimated in July that 30 percent of the Chinook he had seen this summer were riddled with the
disease.

Meanwhile, “Western Alaska sockeye and pink salmon abundance has been the exact opposite, at
record or near-record levels,” says Department of Fish and Game regional manager John
Linderman. University of Alaska Fairbanks biologist Peter Westley says the sockeye’s food grows
more abundantly in the warmer lakes where they spawn. Readily available food “turbocharges” the
young fish, fattening them quickly, so they go to sea hardier and faster. It’s been a boon to the
Bristol Bay salmon fishery. But Westley warns that the sockeye’s fate could change too.

Such uncertainty — year-to-year shifts in populations of not only salmon but caribou and
migratory birds — is a constant theme of conversations along the Yukon. In the Gwich’in
community of Fort Yukon, Alaska, people report seeing fewer ducks and porcupines. This summer
saw early, massive wildfires all along the river — historically large ones in the lower river’s tundra.
In Marshall, Alaska, near the Yukon’s mouth, Elder Nick P. Andrew Jr. says he has seen the moose
population explode over his lifetime, as a warming climate has allowed the bushy willows that they
eat to grow on what was open tundra.

As the salmon have failed to return, hungry bears are overcoming their fear of villages to fill their
bellies at dumps. Andrew has seen them in Marshall. During blueberry season, word of a black
bear near a patch in St. Mary’s spread fast at the grocery store. “The bears, like we humans, rely on
salmon,” says Andrew. Now they must find alternative ways to fatten up before hibernation.
Howard echoes Andrew’s observation. “Salmon are food for a lot of other animals, and they
decompose, and that feeds into the terrestrial system,” she says. What is at stake as salmon decline
are diverse human ways of life — and also how bears, eagles and even trees nourish themselves.

T
he relationships among rising atmospheric carbon, the changing Bering Sea and the long
chain of ecological transformations now spreading upriver implicate people who will never
set foot near the Yukon. Small communities like St. Mary’s, or Eagle Village, or Teslin,
Canada, are not drivers of climate change but instead suffer the consequences of carbon, most of it
burned in wealthy regions far to the south.

Then there’s the word heard everywhere on the river: “bycatch.” Yukon Chinook and chum are not
major commercial species, but in the ocean, both end up in pollock trawl nets. Alaskan pollock is
one of the most widely consumed fish in the United States. If you’ve eaten artificial crab or
McDonald’s filet-o-fish sandwiches, it probably started as a pollock in the Bering Sea.

The pollock fishery prides itself on sustainable management, and official estimates put the Yukon
salmon bycatch at only 1 percent of the more than 30,000 Chinook and 300,000 chum caught in
pollock nets each year. Yet the North Pacific Fishery Management Council has not restricted chum
bycatch, even as the run enters a third historically low year. As Ulvi and Sager both point out, this
means subsistence fishers who need the salmon the most must stop fishing first.

It’s a politically salient issue in Alaska. On Aug. 31, Mary Peltola became the first Alaska Native
representative in Congress, with an explicitly “pro-fish” platform. Peltola, who is Yup’ik and has
fished since childhood, wants more action in the face of “total ecosystem collapse” at sea. Her
concerns echo those of people along the Yukon and in the 19,000-member Facebook group “STOP
Alaskan Trawler Bycatch,” who discuss salmon and many other species — including king crab,
orcas and bearded seals — troubled by industrial fishing.

Scientists Howard and Westley say the Yukon River could reach a point where assuring that each
and every chum and Chinook can return to its spawning grounds will matter for the species’
survival — if the fishery isn’t already there.

“Climate change is going to take a long time to fix, if we can fix it,” Ulvi says. “But trawling and
bycatch is something we can fix now.”

W
hat might it take to help every noolaaghe and kiagtaq return? Howard hopes more
research will make a difference. Sager wants people to remember that the mining boom
for metals used in green tech could affect salmon. “Every stream in these hills is a
salmon stream. Every mine is a stroke against that,” she says. Ulvi recommends talking to your
senator about sound environmental and climate policy — and “asking Indigenous people along the
Yukon and letting our voices be heard more.”

For people along the Yukon, one answer is in finding ways to maintain relationships with the
salmon, the river and the land. Stanley Njootli, a Gwich’in elder living on a tributary of the Yukon,
observes that in the past there was more fishing of pike and other species that eat immature
salmon. “Maybe we need to get people back out on the land as part of the solution,” he says.
Down at the mouth of the river, George Beans said his elders taught him to diversify their catches.
“They always said if you want the fish, game and the birds, not only that, but the plants, if you
want them to be around, you can’t just concentrate in one area and/or one species for a long time.
Otherwise they won’t reproduce. Conservation was one of their teachings,” he said.

Ulvi is getting ready for a culture camp, where she will teach children to cut salmon — sockeye sent
north from Bristol Bay, for this year at least. Part of what she hopes to impart is the value of
salmon beyond economic measures.

Sager and her children are going out to fish for pike.

“These are big things we’re confronting,” McLeod says, “from climate change to disease to loss of
habitat. What do we do to flip that? One of the small ways we can do that is to celebrate the
salmon.” McLeod is teaching people in her community a Han song with the chorus “luk cho anay”
— “Chinook salmon come.”

“I feel that we need to take this song and sing it more often and more intensely,” McLeod says,
“and make sure that people know the salmon are important to us. We just hope that one day that
we’ll hear good news about the salmon returning.”