Charlie Wright
"I was born in Fairbanks, and at a very young age, maybe 4 or 5, I moved out to Rampart, where my mom was born. We call it the canyon area — it’s the mountainous area of the Yukon River. Sixty miles right above Rampart is the Dalton Highway. To get to Rampart in the summertime, we drive our trucks out and boat down the river. In the wintertime, we make an ice road 25 miles out to the Elliot Highway near Manley Hot Springs. When the ice road is closed, I’ll drive my snowmachine 25 miles to the Elliot Highway where my truck is parked. That takes all day.
The Yukon River is one of the largest rivers in America. It stretches almost 2,000 miles through the State of Alaska, from the ocean on up into Canada. It goes through many different landscapes – the Yukon Delta which is grass, lakes and sloughs, then it comes up into the mountains, then through the Yukon flats where there are millions of lakes and sloughs again. Different fish spawn in different areas, and it is a vast waterway feeding multiple contributaries coming into the Yukon. The Canada River, the Androwski, the Porcupine, the Charlie River– so many tributaries that all have fish in them and depend on the fish coming back.
My mom raised us kids out here, and it was our lifestyle. When I was a kid, there were about 150 people, and back then there were more sled dogs than people. Everybody had a dog team. That was how we got around, and it was a favorite pastime sport. Now, the community is small – there are only 65 people in the town. We all know each other and try to take care of each other. It’s totally different from the city. Out here on the river, it’s a salmon culture. But it’s really hard to see it going away. All of the fish camps are empty. Beautiful camps where people taught their families how to be good stewards of the river, to preserve and live a rich healthy culture, to keep the tradition going. Family culture along the river is going away and shrinking."
–Charles Wright: fisherman, hunter, trapper, Fish Commissioner on the Yukon River Intertribal Fish Commission and lifelong advocate for salmon
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