Elsa Sebastian
"I am so grateful for the way I was raised— we were completely off grid. We didn’t have TV, didn’t have internet, and the bears would chew through the phone cables, so sometimes we didn’t even have a phone.
I think it’s really special to grow up in a wild place and have the sense of being surrounded by forest and lands that feel intact. As a child, I had the sense that the whole world was like this— just full of beauty and wildness and thousands of years of undisturbed evolution. It was a very privileged and fortunate way to grow up.
When I started running my own power troller in my twenties, I realized how impressive it was that my parents were able to commercial fish three months a year with a couple kids onboard. The fishing side of things is enough to pull off, and yet they somehow had enough bandwidth to also be amazing parents.
Those long summers on the fishing boat were really challenging as a child, but I always was grateful for a sense of connection to the ocean and all the animals that live in the ocean —the whales, the seabirds, the salmon. Through a childhood of living between the forest and ocean, and realizing how salmon tie the coastal ecosystem together, I learned to appreciate at an early age how the natural world is held in balance."
—Elsa Sebastian, 2nd generation commercial fisherman and lifelong SE Alaskan
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