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For thousands of years, Alaska Native people have depended on strong salmon runs to sustain their diets and their culture.

But that reliable source of protein is in jeopardy.

This rack would be full, you know, from front to back.

How are river communities coping with a multi-year lack of salmon, especially given the escalating costs for other food and fuel.

We'll discuss it right now on Alaska Insight.

Good evening and thank you for joining us tonight for the start of season six of Alaska Insight.

Tonight, we'll hear about Yukon River families longing for the strong harvest routines that stretch back thousands of years but are now dwindling.

Before we hear from some of those families, we're going to start tonight's program with a recap of the top stories from Alaska Public Media's collaborative statewide news network.

Alaskans made history twice in August, conducting the state's first ever ranked choice election and in the process, electing the first Alaska native and woman to serve in Congress.

Mary Peltola is Yup'ik and served in the Alaska legislature for a decade.

She is now officially Alaska's congresswoman elect.

Beating out two Republicans, former Governor Sarah Palin and Nick Begich, the third who split the Republican vote, handing the win to Peltola.

Palin and Begich have said they won't drop out, each calling for the other to do so.

Setting up a tough race for both for the general election in November.

Alaska mushing icon Lance Mackey has died at the age of 52 after a long battle with cancer.

Mackey won the Yukon Quest four years in a row, starting in 2005.

He is also the only musher to win the Iditarod four straight years The 1000 mile races are held just a month apart.

He became the only musher to win both races in the same year in 2007, a feat many thought impossible And then he did it again the next year.

Mackey is survived by his two young children and an adult daughter.

Updated COVID booster shots are now being distributed.

State physician Dr. Lisa Rabinowitz says the boosters will be widely available across the state and health care centers, public health clinics, pharmacies and pop up clinics in some communities.

Rabinowitz also said the state is working with tribal partners to distribute boosters in rural communities.

And companies like Fairweather will set up clinics in urban areas.

You can find clinic locations at vaccines dot gov.

Tonight's program is about Alaska's iconic fish species salmon.

It's the second year in a row of a severe and sudden salmon collapse that's affecting indigenous residents on the Yukon River.

Subsistence fishing for the two main salmon species, king and chum, has been closed for two summers due to record low runs.

Residents of traditional villages are now facing food insecurity because of the collapse.

The indigenous communities on the river, whose ways of life have revolved around the fish for thousands of years, are also now facing a devastating loss of culture.

From Emmonak, Olivia Ebert's reports.

Any monarch near the mouth of the Yukon River, Yupik elder James Kameroff is bringing home a box of frozen, donated chum salmon.

Chum salmon was one of the most abundant types of salmon on the Yukon until its numbers unexpectedly crashed last summer.

This time is likely the only time his family will eat this year.

All right.

Well, pretty well.

They're all for neglect here, like some salmon.

And so it's going to help us taste salmon in the winter months.

We prefer to get our own salmon put away for ourselves.

But since we don't have it, you know, I'm happy for days.

Normally in summer, you pick families like Kameroff smoke dry and put away hundreds of these fish for the winter.

But now that's not allowed due to the collapse.

State scientists have attributed the crash to marine heat waves caused by climate change.

Now, most lower river residents will only get one or two state donated salmon the whole summer.

And no donation can replace the loss of a way of life.

More than 15,000 Alaska Native people are experiencing this loss.

Culture wise, it's not going to be the same anymore.

Because all the work I have to do in subsistence, helping my parents, my kids or my grandchildren are not able to do that now.

They've they've seen us work gone.

But, you know, it's not like how we did together when there was plenty of salmon.

The many Yupiit who used to work in the Yukon River's fish industry are now taking whatever summer jobs they can get.

Captain Darren Jennings and first mate Justin Kameroff used to work as drivers for the fish processor, hauling fresh catches downriver to the plant.

Now they're taking donated frozen fish upriver to deliver to lower Yukon tribes.

On the way upriver, Jennings stops off at a fish camp where some friends are staying for the summer.

We'll knock on their door.

Allen, Afghan, like most Lower River Yupiit grew up spending summers at fish camp, but most of the nearby camps are empty.

His neighbors would rather stay in the village now that they're no chums and kings to process.

This rack would be full.

You know, from front to back, and we'd get all our subsistence done in no time.

This year they can only use a handful of their nets.

The smaller ones geared towards whitefish and a species of salmon called humpies.

Neither species is as nutritious or tasty.

As Chum and Chinook after him spends time that would otherwise be used for fishing, repairing his nets Afghan has barely seen Chum and Chinook this summer.

Last summer, the chum run dropped to a 10th of its average size.

This year at the King Run dropped to about 20% of its ten year average size.

There's no quick solution for a climate change caused issue like this one, but many river residents are calling for an end to regulations that allow Bering Sea commercial fishermen to scoop up salmon bound for the Yukon River in a process known as bycatch.

Some scientists say with a crash, this drastic getting every spawn or back into the river matters a whole lot.

In St Mary's, the Long Thompson family receive a box of several frozen chum and sockeye salmon donated from the state of Alaska.

Oh it's cut already.

Like this...since they already headed and gutted it, we'd go down this way and then take the guts out, cut the head off, open it this way and clean that blood out.

It's been two years since Jolene's 11 year old daughter, Nicole has had the opportunity to cut fish, so she's a little out of practice.

Her dad, Troy, says when her mom was her age, she already knew how to cut.

Pretty sad, though.

We have to wait for fish to come one or two at a time.

If we had a lot more.

I'm pretty sure she'd have it down a little quicker.

I really do miss fish camp.

This is hardly enough fish to last the family through the winter.

They plan to eat it the very next day.

For Alaska Insight, I'm Olivia Ebertz on the lower Yukon River.

Joining me to help us better understand the factors that are contributing to these troubling declines and what's being done to try to address it are Shannon Erhart.

Shannon is the deputy director of tribal development for the Tanana Chiefs conference.

Katie Howard is a fisheries scientist with Alaska Fishing Game.

And Holly Carroll is with the U.S.

Fish and Wildlife Service.

Welcome, all of you.

Thank you.

Thanks so much for being here.

Holly, start us off.

As we say, our families are grateful for donated fish.

But of course, they want to catch their own.

Describe where there's been no up, why there's been no opportunity for them this past two years.

Well, like the video showed with that really illustrative graph, we had a big crash in arms and it started in 20, 21 and we weren't able to predict it very well.

And so that first year, those closures were were pretty hard.

With the Chinook, we've been struggling with low population sizes for a while.

So most of you are used to the fact that we may get the fish a little.

We may have to restrict or we may get to fish a little more.

But losing all of those charms and having no opportunity to fish on them has been a real hardship.

Basically, the we we try to get enough fish to the spawning grounds.

But these chum runs, you saw the graph, they went through the bottom.

They were the lowest we've ever seen.

And so not only was there not enough to get to the spawning grounds, there certainly wasn't enough or any surplus for harvest.

Sticking with you for a moment, Holly, in an earlier interview, you said that between the sonar counter at pilot station and the one at Eagle, half of the fish disappear.

How long has that been the case?

And what do you suspect may be happening?

So that's a particular problem we're having with Chinook particular to the Yukon.

And we have various stocks that come in.

Some are headed to the coyote cook.

Some are headed to Canada.

They're going to go 2000 miles and spawn there.

And what we've seen with the Canadian origin stock is that what we count in river, what arrives from the ocean is a certain size.

And then what we see at the border where they're escaping into Canada is about half what we expect.

And that's been happening for four years now.

And it makes management hard.

But worse than that.

It it may indicate they might be dying on the way.

We call that en route mortality and specific to the Yukon.

We have a problem where we have a parasite known as Theophanous and it affects the Chinook.

Sometimes that infection isn't a problem for the species.

You know, we've had it off and on for years where the the amount in the population is really low and it may not be having an effect.

What we saw is a huge increase in the prevalence of that disease starting maybe in 20, 20.

We've started taking samples and we're seeing that that disease is pretty prevalent and very severe.

And so we really need to study that disease and see if that's the cause of seeing far less fish at the border than we should be.

And those studies have been ongoing for quite some time, have they not?

They were done pretty regular in the past.

And then we took a hiatus on studying them because the prevalence was really low in the population.

It didn't affect the run size.

But now there's pretty clear indications, especially when we have run sizes this low, every fish counts.

And so seeing that that disease is is much more prevalent in the fish, more of the fish have it and maybe even a higher severity in each fish that does have it could imply that they're getting sick enough that they won't make it to their spawning grounds.

So we're studying now and for the next two years just to make sure that we can potentially quantify that loss of fish and manage properly for it.

All right.

Thank you so much for starting us off.

Shannon, I want to turn to you now.

You mentioned that you've been working with Senator Murkowski on funding for another sonar station for the Mid River area.

Are you hopeful that this may point to what's happening, trouble with habitat or or what is it that you're hoping to learn with this mid river count?

All of the above.

Our our our tribal delegations, our folks on the river.

You know, just as Holly mentioned, there's been those big loss account numbers from pilot station The Eagle and why, you know, nobody can account for the real why, you know, besides the disease and when they're making management decisions that the long time to wait, even if the fish count before they can turn it off or on if there is a good run coming in or not.

So for our folks in the interior, we hope that if we can put what we're calling a bit reverse sonar in place halfway in between there, if there is a good run coming in, they might be able to make decisions sooner and that we can help quantify it.

As Holly mentioned, maybe that helps our better here and then something is happening farther up the river.

So that's one of the reasons we're just hoping to help contribute to the data collections working with the state agencies, federal agencies.

We want to do this as a partnership to help contribute.

So having the Chiefs worked with the appropriation through Congress, and we're hoping that it gets approved and we will be working to do that.

All right.

Thank you.

Katie, I want to turn to you now.

We heard in the story that people think pollock fishery bycatch is a big culprit in the low returns.

But do studies support that?

What tell us what the research says?

You know, all of the indications we have right now for Chinook, and that's one of the species that is caught in the bycatch is Chinook is that whatever's causing the decline is occurring very early, either in freshwater or the first couple of months in the ocean.

So before they'd be even exposed to any other fisheries.

So and then some some work that the North Pacific Fishery Management Council has done has has also supported the idea that there is an impact.

But the impacts pretty small they've started looking at the the same kinds of information for chum salmon.

And again what their research is showing is that there is an impact, but the impact is pretty small.

Some of the other data we have suggests that as you saw in the video, that chum salmon may be being impacted by these really big marine heatwaves that we've seen in the Bering Sea in the Gulf of Alaska over a number of years.

They're bigger and more intense than than any previous Marine heatwaves that we've seen in the area.

Katie it can be confusing for people to hear that in Bristol Bay, there are record high returns, but on the Yukon, record low returns, what's known about why there is abundance in some runs and a severe lack of it in others?

Yeah, well, it's important to understand that these different species of salmon have really different lives So sockeye in Bristol Bay, they're spending quite a bit longer in freshwater when as young fish.

So they're they're a little bit more protected in these lakes from from big temperature extremes, chum salmon, they migrate out as soon as they hatch.

And so they're they're hitting the ocean very, very small.

And, and, and they're experiencing things differently than than what sockeye are experiencing.

The other thing that's really unique to jump salmon is that they are able to eat gelatinous animals like jellyfish and other salmon don't do that.

Those are just what we've seen in these marine heatwave years, is that they're eating more of those jellyfish and and that those don't have much nutritional value.

They're just kind of junk food.

Yeah.

Yeah.

It's kind of like eating celery.

Yeah.

It can be as a decent snack once in a while, but if that's all you eat, there's it can't give you the energy you need to keep going.

So.

So we think something's going on with in this story with these marine heat waves and the switch in food for some salmon.

Holly, you mentioned there for us earlier, is salmon.

Are salmon the only fish that get this or is this a widespread concern?

No other fish do get this.

But as far as, you know, Alaska and in the food that we're, you know, are people are relying on, you know, it is it seems to be mainly a problem for Chinook and mainly on the Yukon River.

And that may have to do with the fact that a lot of fish have this parasite, but it doesn't necessarily make them sick or kill them.

When you add that 2000 mile migration, you start to add a lot more stress to that fish.

And so any illness that they have might make them sicker.

I mean, that could be one of the reasons that it is affecting the Chinook on the Yukon specifically because we haven't really seen this problem elsewhere.

Do they not eat for that whole journey?

Correct.

They're not salmon aren't feeding once they come into the river on their way to spawn.

So they've got to be healthy when they get there.

They won't make it.

Shannon, turning back to you.

You mentioned the resilience of Alaska Native people in an earlier interview and and adapting by using other types of protein that were harvested in the past.

Is this happening now?

And what does it mean for families who have to hunt or fish for different species?

Well, before I answer that, I want to kind of respond a little bit to the bycatch that Katie said.

And while we support what Katie is saying as Native people and in Alaska, you know, we have 118 tribes in the UK, the Arctic Yukon Delta that we're representing.

And as we spoke to the governor a week or so ago, we have over 100,000 people that are being affected.

And when we aren't allowed to fish or any salmon whatsoever, and when we see bycatch in waste, it's really hard for us to see that, you know.

So even though they're saying there's maybe not that much influence by science as a people, we just have a really hard time seeing that there's waste.

I just wanted to point that out, that even though we are working on it, we would prefer zero bycatch would we're having a zero tolerance in the rivers, that it's hard for us to see bycatch happening.

So I just have to say that now, going back to our adaptability and as Native people, you know, when you talk to our elders, we travel by the seasons and we moved winter camps, spring camps, summer camps.

And the summer was for fishing.

And so we did that.

And it was a hard way of life.

But we tended to survive and we would catch the foods that we had available to us.

And so, yes, summers are meant to go to the rivers to get the salmon And last year, our traditional Trimble Gilbert was telling us a story at one of our meetings, and he said it was August.

And he said, our bodies are craving salmon right now because this is the time that we would be having it.

Even for me, coming from Arctic Village, I normally don't feed it, but we would be trading for it.

And another elder told the story.

When we eat our traditional foods, you know, that's our spirit.

We're eating these traditional foods.

But in this junk food, in the last 50 years, we've relied pretty heavily on make two main protein salmon and big game meat.

Terrible moves.

You hear about our hunting season that most people go and provide for their freezers.

And in our more traditional ways, you know, we'd also be relying on the non salmon species of fish.

So the white fish pike she fish.

We'd also been hunting for beaver meat, muskrats, ducks, waterfowl, birds, you know, there'd be these other animals that we relied upon to help fill our stomachs and our food.

We didn't use a lot of our freezers.

We'd be drawing a lot.

So in some ways we need to go back to that to rely upon to fill our freezers and our reeds.

And also a lot of our people in the villages right now are really getting into gardening and looking at things like that, and even considering farming in some ways to help fill this need that we're having in Alaska.

So, you know, those are some of the things that we're trying to actively support.

Well, and quickly following up there, rural prices, as we know, are always very high.

But now with the spike that we've seen with inflation, fuel and food costs so much more expensive.

What are you hearing from tribal members about how well prepared they are to head into fall and winter now?

It's a concern we're trying to be.

You know, gas prices are outrageous.

So people that are more well off can go hunting out longer.

You know, if they do fall for two weeks off from job, you people have to be more conservative four times, both warming, whether the moose are moving around, as we say, like it's post hunting season right now.

It's September nine and a lot of moose are moving.

People saying it's too warm.

So they're going to wait till it's taller.

The end of the hunting season to go out so that they're not wasting the gas.

Some people are lucky to be going out looking around.

Otherwise, they wait for the cow.

It's cooler out, you know, so.

So they're not using up gas for those, you know, things that are high cost of living to help be successful when they are going out.

Know, and so they are being very cognizant of their expenses.

Yeah.

Having to there are concerns for the fuel prices.

So, yeah, I need to be very frugal I'm sure that's been the way of living for many, many years, but even been exacerbated now and even a harder economic situation as we've seen.

Katie, you're engaged with Noah and studying young salmon during their first few months in the ocean.

Talk a little bit about what you're finding out there.

Well, that project that we have been doing with Noah for for several years has really transformed how we understand where the critical times are for Yukon Salmon, where the points are in their lives when they're most vulnerable.

As I mentioned before, for Chinook salmon, it appears to be pretty early in their life for Shawn Salmon.

You know, we're getting indications that this recent downturn in abundance is is something that's associated with these Marine heatwaves we're seeing fish with empty stomachs.

We're seeing fish really change their diet quite a bit.

And they just aren't packing in on the fat and energy reserves that they need to help them survive their first winter at sea.

The other thing that this research is helping us with is to forecast what's going to return in future years.

So for Chinook, for example, we with the juvenile information, we can look ahead and tell you how big the runs will be three years from now.

And that's something we share with the people on the river, with the managers, so that they can help them make decisions and look ahead and plan.

Sometimes we hear that people say hatchery fish might be part of the problem because they're competing for food.

What are your thoughts, either one of you about that?

Well, 11 of the things that's important to know for these salmon is they're in the they're entering the ocean in the Bering Sea, and there really aren't hatcheries in the Bering Sea.

So there's one hatchery.

It's a very small hatchery in Whitehorse in Canada, but otherwise they're really aren't hatcheries in the Bering Sea.

And so some of the pressures that might be occurring in other parts of the ocean are different in the Bering Sea.

And and the evidence we have right now is is that that's not really where the problem is for these particular fish.

All right.

We're almost out of time.

The time goes by so fast.

And in about 20 seconds or so, Shannon, what do you want state and federal managers to do going forward?

Oh, we're trying to challenge we want to be good partners and stewards and look for some innovative ideas for new testing underlies.

Our people are asking.

So we haven't been able to fish for two years.

So what's the data?

How are we contributing to the fish coming back?

And I don't think we have those answers to provide our people yet.

So we are asking for new, innovative ways, asking our scientists to start thinking outside the box on what we can do to start getting some of those answers or how we can start preserving them.

All right.

All right.

Thank you so much.

Thank you.

Thank you to all three of you for being here this evening.

Alaska salmon is such a big part of the food supply and culture of Alaska families.

Continued cooperation between tribes and state and federal managers on research and adaptation will be critical, as we heard this evening, for finding solutions for future generations.

That's it for this edition of Alaska Insight.

Be sure to tune in daily to your local public radio station for Alaska Morning News and Alaska News Nightly every weeknight.

Be part of important conversations happening on Talk of Alaska every Tuesday morning.

And visit our website alaskapublic.org for Breaking News and reports from across the state.

While you're there, Sign up for our Free Daily Digest so you won't miss any of Alaska's top stories of the day.

Thanks for joining us this evening.

I'm Lori Townsend.

Good night.