Rich Freireich, Jr.
While Yukon River peoples forgo traditional ways of life to conserve wild salmon, trawlers continue with business as usual — bycatching a documented 141 million pounds of marine life on average each year. This bycatch includes king salmon, chum salmon, halibut, herring, squid, crab, whales and more.
Trawlers trail nets the size of football fields to catch everything in the water column. When they drag the bottom, they rip up seafloor habitat and crush bottom-dwelling species in a way that never comes up to the surface to be counted. And “midwater” trawlers, which are allowed to trawl in protected areas, drag the bottom up to 100% of the time.
Yukon River Drainage Fisheries Association and SalmonState collaborated on sharing Rich Freireich, Jr.’s stories.
Photos by Jacki Cleveland
“My first memory of salmon was of my grandma, Belle Deacon, cutting fish. It was the way we grew up—her cutting fish, even at a very old age. She taught us a lot.
Learning how to drift with my uncle, how to pick the nets and stuff like that probably stands out the most because he was pretty stern and had a way of letting us know when we weren't doing something right
Salmon's an integral part of our lifestyle. The last few years, we've been hit pretty hard with no salmon fishing. With high prices and inflation and gas and everything, it's hard for a lot of the folks in our village to make ends meet.
Back in the nineties, it wasn't uncommon to ride up and down the river and see fish wheels in camps. A lot of these camps have grown over. They've not been inhabited for at least two decades and it's sad to see that—it’s a loss of culture and identity.”
—Rich Freireich, Jr., of Grayling, Alaska
Photo by Jacki Cleveland
“It's really hard to see my elders not having any fish. A lot of our elders are dependent on the younger generations.
In wintertime, we find ourselves without salmon strips or salmon in the freezer. It's pretty much a one-dimensional diet—like moose meat—because you can't afford what's in the stores. Besides just being deprived of eating your traditional foods. That's really hard.”
—Rich Freireich, Jr., of Grayling, Alaska
Photo by Jacki Cleveland
“Trawling is a multimillion dollar industry, maybe more than that, out there on the oceans. So they are allowed to run roughshod and basically police their own selves. Yet they're up here in these small villages and these, a lot of these villages maybe have 200 to 300.
So the take is so small. Yet we're policed heavily and they're allowed to run roughshod out there on the oceans and basically manage themselves. That's not very conducive to good management practice in general.
They failed on so many levels. Not only are you dealing with the lack of salmon but you're also going to these (North Pacific Fishery Management Council) meetings and it feels like they're preordained. They're already written in stone.
You're fighting it, you're really, really, really trying hard to get some level of stability and something back, but it's really hard to really put into context of what they've done. Because I truly believe that they have failed in my humble opinion. And that's kind of unforgivable. To kill off one ecosystem so another one can thrive.”
—Rich Freireich, Jr., of Grayling, Alaska
Photo by Jacki Cleveland
“I think us as a Native people are the best stewards of our land. We were living pretty much a subsistence lifestyle and it was admittedly pretty good. We were allowed to fish and everything. But as of late, it's been pretty much non-existent. I think that the State has failed to meet its obligations to our subsistence way of life.
We know when the salmon are out there, yet it feels like we're being micromanaged. You get an area biologist that’s freshly out of school and knows nothing of the culture or people and it takes a year and a half just to meet them. And when they move on, you’re starting over again. We have tributaries and important spawning grounds that haven't been staffed for years. We can staff these with our own people working in conjunction with the State.
I'd like to get to where we can have our own Native biologists trained so that, when the state comes with its data, we can say that we were there, that we have the data right here in front of us.”
—Rich Freireich, Jr., of Grayling, Alaska