Featured SalmonState Column
Bringing the sockeye home
In the early 1990s, when Quinn Aboudara was about 12, he and his father went hunting out a logging road that had just been punched into the old growth forest of Prince of Wales Island. Enormous spruce, hemlock and cedar trees towered all around them, their branches laden with pale green lichen. All around him, he knew, were deer, bears, birds, and berry bushes. The creeks were full of salmon. As they walked, his father stopped him. “Look around,” he said. “This is the last time you’ll ever see this forest.”
Listen, then support — a new approach in Southeast Alaska is a long time in the works
The U.S. Department of Agriculture has a new approach in Southeast Alaska: first listening to locals about what their community needs, then working to support those ideas. So when the department asked what investments the USDA should make as part of its sustainability strategy, announced in 2020, it heard lots.
From Kootznoowoo, the Native corporation of the village of Angoon, on Admiralty Island: the development of a new bear-viewing area nearer to Angoon, and additional opportunities for Angoon-led storytelling and economic development.
From the Southeast Alaska Watershed Coalition: restoring, in collaboration with Tribes and communities, streams and watersheds damaged by historic logging practices.
A Tale of Two Salmon
Bristol Bay’s sockeye run began breaking records in 2018. The same year, Chignik, which is on the other side of the Alaska Peninsula, failed to meet its minimum escapements for the first time in recent memory. Now, Chignik’s residents and fishermen are working to address and bring attention to these unprecedented declines, and to save their way of life.
A downriver homecoming
The Taku Khwáan Dancers have been traveling from Atlin, British Columbia to Juneau’s biennial Celebration for years. This year, for the first time, seven of them did it the traditional way: paddling a canoe down the Taku River.