Joel Jackson

Photo credit: Colin Arisman

“When I was a young kid —about 10 or 12 — me and my cousin, who’s the same age, we went fishing with our uncles. Where we went there’s two salt-water-fed lakes, as well as fresh water coming down from the hills. You’ve got to go in there at a certain tide in order to get up into the lakes. And what we were there for was chum salmon, dog salmon, in the fall time. Me and my cousin, we thought it was just the greatest thing to be with our uncles, going on an adventure. And once we got up to the second lake — you have to go through the first one, and there’s a short stretch of river to get up to the second one — and it’s rather tricky, because there’s big rocks along the way. Once we got up there to where we’re going to fish, my uncles got off and they told us to stay with one of our other uncles on the boat to let the seine out of it. So we’re busy letting the seine out, and we’ve got the boat turned around, and we start towing it. And we’re going toward the shore, and we’re quite a ways from the shore — and there must have been a sandbar there, because my uncle said ‘Oh, it’s getting too shallow, you guys need to jump out and pull the seine to the beach.’ We thought it was shallow because his engine was hitting the bottom. So we jumped off of the front of the boat with ropes to pull the seine in. And by God, it wasn’t all the way up to our chests when we jumped into that water. And back then we didn’t have any waders or anything. Just short boots. And my uncle just chuckled at us, and he said ‘Oh, you guys will be all right. Pull it in. Take it to the beach.’ So we did. And we’re standing there shivering, and our other uncles told us, ‘Oh, just keep busy. You’ll stay warm. Keep busy.’

We got busy pulling in the seine and taking the chum salmon out of the seine. And I think we made a couple more sets with our beach seine to get enough dog salmon. But that was one of my earliest memories of going out with my uncles. And I think it was kind of an initiation for us to go with them, and they wanted to see how we’d react to being in a cold, tough situation. I don’t know if they meant to do it that way, but that’s the way it turned out. The forest has to be pristine in order to have very pristine waters, and for the salmon to return to. When the salmon return to the streams that they were spawned in, that their eggs were laid – when they return, they provide not only food for us, but they provide food for the bears, the eagles, the ravens, the crows — everything. And if you look at the streams that have very good fish runs, you’ll see healthy, healthy forest around it. Because not only the bears get the fish and take it up into the forest and scatter it — other animals will scatter it further. That provides nutrition to the forest, and provides for a very healthy ecosystem in the forest and in the stream. And not only that — after the salmon have died and are decaying in the waters, that provides food for the ocean because the microorganisms that are being flushed into the stream, into the bay, it provides food for the bay, the grass, everything out there. It keeps everything in balance, and provides for our people. That’s why it’s so important that we fight to keep our remaining old growth timber in the Tongass.”

— Joel Dáxhajóon Jackson, former logger, President of the Organized Village of Kake

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