By Katharine Sandiford, Photographs by Natalie Fobes and Alaskastock -- Declining salmon stocks mean trouble for Yukon fishermen. The culprit, some say, is downstream.
Wearing filthy coveralls and stinking like fish, a group of men gather around their catch, guffawing. Heavy containers brimming with slippery chinook salmon are being loaded into a truck for transport to Dawson City, but the group pays little attention. The dozen or so fishermen at Forty Mile on the Yukon River are more interested in weighing their lunkers – the day’s largest catches. The stakes of this daily competition are high – the winner has to buy everyone’s beer for the night. The year is 1989, the river is red with fish, and the top chinook weighs in at more than 60 pounds.
“Nobody has caught a fish like that for at least 10 years,” says Gerry Couture, a commercial salmon fisherman who’s retiring this year after nearly 35 years on the Yukon River. At 70, Couture is fit and quick-witted with a still-sharp memory. He clearly recalls his biggest catch: a 73-pound chinook the size of a small wolf. “Those days,” he says, “are gone for good.”
In recent years, Couture hasn’t been netting any fish, let alone 73-pounders. The past few seasons, the Yukon’s commercial fishery has had to close because not enough chinook were making it across the Alaskan border on their annual spawning run from the Bering Sea. Meanwhile, ideally situated downstream – many at the mouth of the Yukon River – Alaskan fishers had already netted their fish, the bulk of which were spawned in the Yukon. “We make fish for the Americans,” says Couture. “But we get the short end of the stick because of where we live.” It’s a problem that’s becoming distressingly common, and one that may be putting the health of the stock in peril.
Each May as soon as the ice melts where the Yukon River fans into the Bering Sea, the chinook salmon begin their 3,000-kilometre upstream battle through Alaska and the Yukon. In one of the longest spawning runs on the planet, the fish that make it to the headwaters are true survivors, having escaped nets, fish-wheels, bears and eagles to dump their eggs in a patch of gravel and then die.
But every year since the mid-1990s, smaller and fewer fish have endured the journey, leaving Yukon fishers largely empty-netted. Stuck fishless at the top of the river, it’s easy for Canadians to blame their full-freezered neighbours, who net the chinooks before they can make their way into the Yukon.
Part of the problem is there are more Alaskans fishing. Of the 50 communities in the watershed, 36 are Alaskan, all of them remote, isolated villages dependent on fishing for food and income. With more American nets catching more big fish, not only are Yukon fishers getting a raw deal, but the prize fish – the big ones – don’t get to spawn, and so their genes get wiped out. Since the Yukon’s fishery has always been miniscule compared to its neighbour’s (an average of 14,000 salmon caught annually on the Yukon River, compared with Alaska’s 122,000), it seems inexcusable that the Alaskans continue to overfish.
Carl Sidney’s not surprised, though. “You know it’s because of money,” says the Teslin fisherman and member of the Yukon River Panel, a transboundary salmon-management board. “There’s such a big value on those fish at the mouth.”
Last summer, even after the run-size didn’t come in as large as expected, Alaskans kept their commercial fishery open. By the time the migration made it to the Yukon there were too few survivors to open even the domestic or sport fisheries, much less the commercial fishery. Indeed, there were barely enough fish for First Nations to harvest their supply. The brink of an all-out salmon war seemed nigh. Yukoners were furious, and, throughout August, filled the media with angry invectives.
This year, however, the white flag is flying. “The Alaskans know they messed up,” says Sidney. Partly, that’s because they’ve become aware of other looming threats to the harvest – industrial trawling on the high seas, as well as climate change. The fishery co-management meetings have settled down, and fishers and managers across the whole 840,000-square-kilometre watershed say they want the same thing: a future with fish.
Ragnar Alstrom is made of fish. He eats the stuff almost every day – dried, salted, smoked, canned, barbequed. Open his cupboard and that’s what you’ll find. A Yup’ik commercial and subsistence fisherman since 1969, Alstrom lives in the small Alaskan village of Alakanuk, 25 kilometres from the Bering Sea at the river mouth. In this marine horn of plenty, millions of salmon of many varieties, including some bound for Canada, pass his doorstep every year on their way upstream to spawn. “We get everything here at the mouth, so it’s hard to gauge if there’s been a change. Talk to the people here and no one’s really seen a decrease in either size or numbers.”
A few decades ago, people at the mouth believed nobody fished upstream. They thought salmon became inedible, even rotten, once they passed by. The story can be traced all the way upriver, each community believing it was the last in line to dine. Sure, the chinook in Teslin are thin and near-death – they’ve swum 3,000 kilometres and gone months without eating – but the meat is delicious, perfect for drying, and has sustained the Tlingit there for millennia.
There isn’t a Yukon First Nations community that isn’t either right on the banks of the Yukon River or close to one of its salmon-bearing tributaries. From Old Crow to Teslin, settlements were built along the mighty watershed so that First Nations could continue their age-old annual salmon harvest. Not only a cheap and healthy food source, the fish also nourish spirituality and cultural identity. “It doesn’t make sense to deplete the resource upon which you depend so much,” says James McDonald, fish-and-wildlife director for the Tr’ondek Hwech’in in Dawson City. “The effects are being felt throughout the community. It’s not something we take lightly. It’s something Tr’ondek takes very seriously. And it’s really problematic as we don’t control our own destiny.”
Local elders remember a time before commercial fishing, when only First Nations were harvesting the “king fish” to feed their families. Back then, they say, the salmon-run was strong and healthy. Problems with the stocks arose with the advent of commercial fishing and, more recently, with Alaskan overfishing.
Some Alaskans agree. “I don’t see how the Canadians have let this happen,” says Stan Zuray, an Alaskan fisherman and researcher on the Upper Tanana who operates a videotaped fish-wheel to survey the run. “It’s just Americans being big bullies.” Zuray is from the upper reaches of the Alaskan waters, where a considerable decline in run-sizes has fostered a more conservative – you might say “Canadian-style” – attitude. Twenty-five years ago Zuray’s fish-buyer wouldn’t take any chinook under 14 pounds so as not to fill up his quota with smaller fish. As the stocks have decreased, the limit fell to 12 pounds, then 10, and today, nothing. “Now a 14-pound fish is a large fish,” Zuray says. Experts will concur: The disappearance of the big, genetically robust fish is a sure sign that Yukon River salmon stocks are in peril.
After years of a fishing free-for-all it was only in 2002 that Alaskans became legally bound to allow a percentage of the run onto the Canadian spawning grounds. The Yukon River Salmon Agreement meant that salmon management would be shared among Canada’s Department of Fisheries and Oceans, the Alaska Department of Fish and Game and the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service. Twice a year a joint committee of U.S. and Canadian scientists meets with members of the Yukon River Panel – a board made up of fishermen from all over the watershed – to look at the numbers, share ideas and make recommendations. Some numbers were set in stone by the treaty, the most important being the “escapement targets,” which require Alaskans to allow 33,000 to 43,000 salmon into Canadian waters each season. In recent years, however, this goal has not been met – hence last summer’s Yukon-fishery shutdown.
Part of the problem is figuring out the size of the run. At the kilometres-wide river mouth, it’s a needle-in-a-haystack scenario to track the various pulses moving from salt- to freshwater. New genetic sampling proves a majority of Canadian-origin fish swim through in the first pulses. Ten years ago, the Alaskan fishery would open at the quarter point – when a quarter of the estimated run had already passed the mouth. Last year, Yukoners complained that it should have opened at the half-point. And this year, Alaskan officials promise this will happen. But, of course, this doesn’t please everyone. “Once the fish come in, it’s quick, they pass and they’re gone,” complains Alaska’s Ragnar Alstrom. “I might miss out on the run completely.”
Although it’s not officially called compensation, the 2002 salmon agreement mandates that the Americans fork over $1.2-million annually to a restoration-and-enhancement fund, half of which must be spent on Canadian projects, the other half for either country. Some call it a polite way of paying Yukoners to breed Alaska’s catch.
Gerry Couture sits at a white-clothed conference table and stares speechless into the microphone, the glass of ice-water in his right hand trembling. It’s the 2008 spring Yukon River Panel meeting and he’s surrounded by the dozen other panel members and a hotel ballroom full of fish folk. After 35 years on the river he’s finally retiring. For nearly two decades Couture and his wife homesteaded 160 kilometres upstream from Dawson City. They raised children, grew gardens, hunted moose and most importantly, caught salmon. While Jan tended the family nets that bobbed in front of their house, Couture fished for profit at Forty Mile to pay for toilet paper and ketchup. He even raised pigs on the stuff.
Tonight, half a dozen colleagues have just tag-teamed him with tear-jerking farewell speeches. “Gerry once said, ‘Managing salmon is like shovelling smoke with a pitchfork,’” cajoles Teslin’s Carl Sidney. Tears well up in Couture’s deep brown eyes. Finally he speaks: “It’s a new world we’re entering into. If we want to conserve the salmon, it’s going to involve sacrifice on the users part. Human harvest is the only tool we have, so I suggest we have really difficult decisions to make.”
Katherine Sandiford is Up Here’s Whitehorse-based associate editor . She’s not much of a fisherwoman, but loves dried Yukon River salmon.
