Author: alaskaadmin

When 26-year-old Tirzah Bryant was a kid, she knew how to watch the cottonwood trees along the Yukon River for the sign that it was time to fish for salmon.

“We know that the fish are coming when the cotton’s flying from the cottonwood,” she said. 

But run collapses and successive fishing closures along the river have rendered the cottonwood signal meaningless.

“I remember that first summer that we couldn’t fish, watching the cotton flying and being like …what it felt like, I was drifting. I’m like, ‘What am I doing?’” she said. That drifting feeling includes interactions with members of her extended family who had moved to cities but used to gather in Galena during fishing season. “They don’t have a reason to come home now,” she said.

Bryant described that odd feeling during a presentation in March at an Anchorage tribal environmental conference. A 2025 graduate of the University of Alaska Fairbanks’ Center for One Health Research master’s degree program, which focuses on the human-animal-environmental health connections in Alaska and the Arctic, she described the One Health concept as fitting perfectly with her family’s traditions.

“Everything is related. So a healthy environment equals healthy animals, which equals healthy humans,” said Bryant, who also holds a biology degree from UAF and is now the environmental and education coordinator for the Louden Tribe, the Galena-based tribal government.

That makes the collapse of runs in the Yukon River — where Indigenous residents’ culture is tied to communal salmon harvesting, preparation and eating — “very detrimental to our people,” she said.

On the Yukon River, salmon runs that used to support a thriving and lucrative commercial harvest have collapsed. The runs of Chinook, also called king salmon, that have been in steady decline since the early 2000s, took a nosedive in recent years; by 2022, Chinook abundance was down 81% below its long-term average, according to fishery biologists. Harvest closures that began in 2020 were extended, and in 2024 an Alaska-Canada agreement established a seven-year moratorium on Chinook salmon fishing in the river to preserve Canadian-origin stocks.

Runs of chum salmon, a species that is generally more abundant in the river, suffered a similar but more sudden crash. A series of chum-harvest closures, even for subsistence purposes, started in 2020, and by 2022 abundance had fallen 92% below the long-term average.

Several factors, working in combination, are blamed for the declines. Scientists cite multiple climate change effects in both the ocean and freshwater bodies used by salmon. Those changes have not only affected the raw numbers of fish but also contributed to the shrinking size of salmon, resulting in smaller egg loads carried to spawning grounds by females.

Other factors cited are interceptions at sea by trawlers targeting groundfish species like pollock, changes forced by increasing loads of Asian hatchery fish in the ocean, past fishery management practices and the parasite Icthyophonus, which thrives in warmer conditions and has a more detrimental effect on Yukon Chinook than on any other type of salmon.

Salmon-protection activists say there is not much that can be done in the short term in Alaska to address those factors, other than to adjust fishery management to cut down on at-sea interception, also known as bycatch.

‘We are truly fish people’

Tribal representatives have made that argument repeatedly to fishery managers. Among them was Brian Ridley, chairman  of the Tanana Chiefs Conference, a consortium of Interior Alaska tribal governments.

Ridley, in testimony to the North Pacific Fishery Management Council at its February meeting in Anchorage, spoke about salmon-related health issues in terms similar to those Bryant used. He discussed Athabascan salmon traditions that go back millennia — as far back as 10,500 years ago, according to archaeologists’ discoveries of Yukon River fish camps.

“So we are truly fish people,” he said. The approximately 20,000 people who live in the Texas-sized area covered by the Tanana Chiefs Conference need more protections to repair the Yukon River’s weak salmon runs, he said. “I’ve got to do the best I can for them, and that’s why we’re fighting so hard to try to get our fish back,” he told the council.

A dietary staple, salmon had — until recently — been the main source of protein for Indigenous people who live along the Interior Alaska river systems. Traditionally, salmon has made up about a third of the wild food that rural Alaskans eat, according to the state Department of Fish and Game, and along the Yukon River basin, the percentage was much higher, at least in the past.

Store-bought substitutes, in addition to being expensive and of limited availability in rural Alaska villages that lack any outside road access, do not provide the same quality proteins and vitamins, minerals and omega-3 fatty acids, tribal organizations say.

The Tanana Chiefs Conference says effects of salmon shortages are seen in medical records. In October 2024, it said there had been a 24.6% increase in diabetes and a staggering 70% increase in prediabetes among tribal members since 2019.

Concerns in Alaska about adverse health impacts from reduced salmon consumption fit into a larger pattern of problems around the circumpolar North as wild and nutrient-rich foods traditional in Indigenous diets have been gradually replaced by less-healthful store-bought foods.

In Western Siberia, for example, climate change has shortened the seasons in which the Indigenous Nenets people harvest fish and reindeer, resulting in less overall consumption of those dietary staples and higher rates of hypertension, according to a 2021 study by researchers from Russian and Chinese institutions.

In Arctic Canada, a long-term transition away from what in local vernacular is called “country food” — wild foods such as fish, marine mammal meat and berries — has coincided in Inuit populations with rising obesity and related chronic conditions like cardiovascular disease, high cholesterol, high blood pressure and diabetes, according to a Canadian report published online in 2020 that summarized the findings of 162 studies.

A 2024 Canadian study calculated the expected increases in heart attack risks over the coming decades for First Nations members in British Columbia.

A traditional foods comeback

Despite challenges around the Arctic, there have been successes in resurrecting traditional diets, which experts say are important for both physical and mental health.

At the Alaska Native Medical Center in Anchorage, for example, traditional Native foods are served regularly, with supplies donated by community members. Traditional foods are “healing, nourishing medicine for our people,” says the hospital’s website. Donated traditional foods are served at other tribal health care facilities, too, such as the Maniilaq long-term care center in Kotzebue.

Count last summer’s culture camp organized by Eva Burk and other tribal leaders in the Interior Alaska community of Nenana as part of the healing process. Burk is a scientist, local food activist and Indigenous representative on the North Pacific Fishery Management Council’s advisory panel. Nenana is located on the Tanana River, a Yukon River tributary.

Burk and other members of the Nenana Native Association gathered local kids to teach them how to harvest and prepare salmon in the traditional Tanana Athabascan ways, along with other Indigenous skills.

For their activities, they used a smattering of locally caught chum salmon, also known as dog salmon because it was traditionally fed to sled dogs, that was available through a very limited harvest opened last summer specifically for cultural camp purposes. In all, they used 25 locally caught chum and 25 locally caught coho salmon for the camp, Burk said.

Camp activities relied mostly on sockeye salmon sent from the Bristol Bay region, where runs remain abundant. The Bristol Bay fish are not as much to Burk’s liking as the fish that used to be plentiful in the Nenana River and other Yukon tributaries. Bristol Bay salmon tastes a bit different, and the traditional smoking techniques she learned from her family don’t work quite as well, she said.

While they were grateful for the donations, they were especially grateful for the ability to harvest salmon from their own river, Burk said.

As she described it, catching, preparing and eating the local salmon was something of a healing process. Special care was taken to serve some of it to appreciative elders, she added.

“We scored them and smoked them for a day and cooked them over a fire and served them at a potlatch,” she said. “Fish that we would have normally cut for dog fish we were treating with the utmost care and respect, and savoring every last bit.”

The Nenana Native Association has scheduled another culture camp this summer to start in late July, and there is another special allowance for culture camp harvesting this year, Burk said.

This article was produced as a project for USC Annenberg’s Center for Health Journalism and Center for Climate Journalism and Communication 2025 Health and Climate Change Reporting Fellowship.

SUPPORT: YOU MAKE OUR WORK POSSIBLE