Good morning. I'm Rhonda Pitka. I'm the chief of the village of Beaver. I've been the chief of the village since about 2011. Beaver is a small, remote, fly-in community.
I'm also the chairwoman of the Council of Athabascan Tribal Governments, which is a consortium of nine tribal governments in the Yukon Flats area of Alaska, I sit on the Yukon River Panel and I am a federal subsistence board member.
Our people have relied on chinook salmon for millennia. We've had difficulty finding food before, but it's never been to this degree. Our food security has become so imperiled. We live in an area where the moose density is much lower, and our people have traditionally relied on moose and salmon for the majority of their diets.
I can't even begin to tell you the pain that the people on the river have felt for the last five years, as the salmon stocks have dwindled lower and lower.
Our conservation of the salmon has cost us thousands of dollars and thousands of hours in time, advocacy, man hours and policy. We've learned so many things about ocean science that I never thought I would need to know as a fisherwoman on the Yukon River.
The vast majority of our people depend so heavily on the Yukon River salmon—not only as a source of food, but as a source of culture—that the crashes have devastated our communities in a lot of different ways.
I've testified before that we've seen incredible rises in the rates of prediabetes to the point that when they started to do regular testing in our clinics, the number of those tests coming back as prediabetic was upward of 70%.
As our people are no longer allowed their traditional and cultural use of salmon and access to things that have provided health and wellness for them, we've seen so many different social effects happening with the dwindling of resources.
It's been so difficult to see the rise in domestic violence. You can see from the data yourself, when you look at it, that with the rise of domestic violence, prediabetes and all of these numerous effects, not only nutrition-wise but spiritually, people have suffered.
The backbone of our communities is often the traditional salmon fishery. We've always felt like we never had to voice these ideas in this particular way before in our advocacy, and it's been really difficult for our people on the ground to sit back and not fish for the last five years.
Right now, we're going into this seven-year moratorium. On top of the five years already, that will be a total of 12 years of not fishing for chinook on the Yukon River. It's already been devastating for our people, and it's going to continue to devastate our people.
I think that in my last testimony, I spoke briefly about the effects of the trawl fishery on the ecosystem for our people, and the fact that conservation has always been balanced on the backs of the people on the upper Yukon River and Canada. We have so much empathy for our relatives on the Canadian side of the border. They've faced much longer declines in the salmon than we have, and it's devastating to watch them also struggle through that.
Many of our children have not fished in their lifetime. I'm concerned now that some of our elders won't be able to fish within the rest of their lifetime either. The devastation of the Yukon River salmon fishery has been so detrimental to the health and wellness of our people.
At the same time, we can watch our governments do things like subsidize the commercial salmon fishery by buying commercial salmon under food programs, instead of finding more sustainable ways to fish for salmon themselves. Instead, they place the onus and the burden of conservation on the backs of the indigenous people of the Yukon River.
I'd like to thank you all for inviting me again. I was so worried that in my last testimony I probably offended most of the Canadian House of Commons and I would never be invited back.
I thank you all so much for your time today. I appreciate it.