Thank you for the invitation to appear before this committee to assist in building greater understanding of the crisis involving Yukon River chinook salmon and the impacts this crisis has had on indigenous peoples in Alaska as well as Canada.
I am Chief Rhonda Pitka of Beaver, Alaska. Beaver is a small fly-in-only community on the Yukon River, just south of the Arctic Circle, and the first community downriver of all the confluences of the Porcupine River and the Yukon River. I am chairwoman of the Council of Athabascan Tribal Governments, a consortium that serves nine tribes in the Yukon Flats of Alaska. I am also a public member of the federal subsistence board and a member of the Yukon River Panel.
Our people have historically relied on chinook and chum as our main food sources and as a central part of our culture and way of life. Our people are “salmon people”. Our health and the health of the salmon are inextricably linked. What befalls the salmon befalls our people. Over the past 20 years we have seen stocks of Yukon River chinook and chum salmon obliterated by numerous challenges, all of human origin, all originating from outside our small communities along the Yukon River.
As the stocks of salmon have dwindled, our food security has become imperiled. The smokehouses that used to be filled with a winter's supply of salmon sit empty. Our children's critical link to our food culture and way of life has been severed. We have not had salmon for funeral potlatches for our people. In the last four years of no harvest, this crucial religious and cultural ceremony need has not been met. There are not enough salmon to feed my community or the communities of the Upper Yukon River in Alaska that I represent or our relatives in Canada along the Yukon River and Porcupine River. That much is clear.
We have not fished in the last four years. We have not had a subsistence harvest that has met our needs. We've been told that our subsistence harvest is the reason we have not had returns of salmon. That is simply not true. Subsistence accounts for less than 1% of the total take of statewide harvesting of fish and other resources.
The subsistence fishers of Alaska have generously given their traditional knowledge to the State of Alaska and the U.S. Fish & Wildlife Service. Without this traditional knowledge, it is difficult for managers to have a clear idea as to whether their models of the run are correct. The managers use the number of salmon coming in at Pilot Station to estimate the run size and abundance of Canadian-origin chinook salmon. There is currently no mid-river sonar to “ground truth” that estimate.
The subsistence harvest helps management by giving in-season information on the timing of the run and the size of the run and on whether the estimates at the mouth of the Yukon River are accurate. The accuracy of the run size and timing are dependent on the knowledge of those fishermen along the Yukon River.
The chinook salmon fishery disaster hinders the customary and traditional selling, bartering and trading economy of the fishery. This is absolutely the case along the Yukon River, where depleted salmon runs have prevented our people from fishing and from participating in traditional economic practices of selling, bartering and trading Yukon River salmon. We used to have extensive traditional bartering networks and community relations, which have been strained because we have not had enough salmon to trade. The backbone of our livelihood is the traditional salmon fishery. The subsistence fishery is the primary economy in our region. Where I'm from, in the Village of Beaver, we do not have grocery stores. We don't have access to regular fresh food that people have, so we have to fly in food if we don't have it on the ground.
Furthermore, totally unaddressed through existing federal processes is the loss of tribal food sovereignty and food security and the loss of the ability to teach our children and transmit indigenous knowledge related to salmon stewardship, including providing for healthy salmon and salmon populations, processing, preparation and storing. Entire social networks, health and well-being have been devastated. Our children have never handled salmon. Our fishermen slump into depression, while domestic violence incidents and suicide increase along with increases in substance abuse, because our people are not fishing.
The loss of the Yukon River salmon and the cultural activities and spiritual values associated with salmon fishing are devastating our communities and villages.
Our tribes are not sitting idle. While the state and federal governments have continued conducting studies on the impacts of climate change, debating the impacts of bycatch in intercept fisheries and subsidizing commercial fisheries, here is what our tribes have been doing.
We have not fished. We implemented a self-imposed moratorium in 2014 in order to allow salmon to make the spawning grounds. This resulted in meeting the border passage goals into Canada in 2014. We have left our fish camps empty. Many of our children have not fished in their lifetimes.
We were told to buy seven-and-a-half inch nets as one of the management ways to change the numbers of salmon that we were getting, so we did that. We changed our net sizes to six-inch nets. When that didn't work, we bought four-inch nets for our people.
We've educated ourselves on ocean fishery science. As a fisherwoman along the Yukon River, the ocean is not where I'm from, but I've had to educate myself on things that are way outside of my purview.
We have spent thousands of hours and dollars on advocacy and legal action around the fisheries in our region—