George Anderson

“Growing up, I spent summers in Chignik and winters in Kodiak. We’d cross Shelikof Strait, get the boats and gear ready, fish hard in the commercial season, and then catch and put away our subsistence harvest for the winter.

Chignik was the shining star of Alaska. This place had all the fisheries that the surrounding areas like South Peninsula and Kodiak still have; crab, halibut, herring, cod. The problem in our area is each of these stocks have been decimated. It appears our salmon stocks are on that route now, too.
We used to fish from Monday through Friday, 6 a.m. to 9 p.m., weekends closed. I believe that schedule allowed sufficient escapement to get through. Our ten year average was about a million and a half sockeye for our harvest, and pinks — every odd year is probably about a million and a half fish. We’re not talking about a huge fishery.

There are many tributaries in the two lakes that we have. Black Lake is early run sockeye, and Chignik Lake, which is just south of that, is late run salmon with small discrete stocks returning to different tributaries. After ADF&G moved away from that weekly schedule, there were times during the ‘90s when we would fish 21 days straight and our Elders were raising concerns about killing off the small runs to those tributaries. And over the years, there were less fish. I wish more policy makers would recognize traditional knowledge and listen to the Elders talk about how things used to be and why. I’m a huge advocate for data. I think the more we have, the better.”

—George Anderson, fisherman and president of the Chignik Intertribal Coalition

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