Thank you, Mr. Chair.
It's an honour to speak with you today. I'd like to start my brief remarks by framing who I am. I'm an environmental historian currently writing a book about the relationship between people and ecology along the Yukon watershed over the past two centuries, so salmon and the way salmon stocks have been managed clearly have a lot to do with this story.
As part of this work, I've been travelling the river, particularly, up to this point, on the Alaska side, by boat and by dog team, as well as working with archival sources and scientific research.
What is clear from this at a very general but, I think, critical point is that salmon are an integral part of Alaska native and first nations communities' lives as well as those of other subsistence users along the Yukon River and its tributaries. This has been true for as long as there have been people along this river.
Today, fish camps are places of cultural sharing, language learning and social revitalization, so being able to fish is an issue of food security and environmental justice. I know that members of this committee are travelling to Yukon to speak with first nations and people on the ground, so I will focus briefly on three points that have emerged from my interviews and general research around settlement, mineral extraction and the regulatory challenge that climate change poses for the Yukon River treaty.
First, with respect to settlement, I'm going to generalize here substantially, because the Yukon is very long, but a key historical adaptation to living in the Yukon's Arctic and subarctic ecologies has been for societies to move, to be fully or partly nomadic, so that when, say, a caribou migration pattern changed, people could adjust where they lived and hunted to be able to intersect with both caribou and salmon.
Since the acts of colonization by the United States and Canada, particularly through compulsory education, first nations and Alaska native peoples have become far less mobile, because you can't move a village like Old Crow just because the caribou are in a different place, but you can build communities near good salmon fishing. So the colonial expectation of permanence has made salmon a particularly critical resource for indigenous communities, both culturally and economically. I wish to underscore the critical need for salmon in communities along the Yukon that are at the end of the global supply chain so that food is expensive and sometimes simply unreliable. This fact makes salmon a critical food security issue.
Second, I'll discuss the history of mineral extraction and salmon. In some ways, this is a familiar history that starts with the Yukon gold rush near the Klondike River, intersects with salmon and their need for spawning streams, and continues through the Faro mine and other large-scale mineral projects. Residents along the river have emphasized to me over the last several years how concerned they are that this history is not over due to potential land withdrawals by the Bureau of Land Management in the United States on the d-1 lands, which would be familiar to Alaskans, as well as the Manh Choh mine and the proposed Ambler Road, all of which would impact Yukon River tributaries.
Historically the wealth that has been generated from mining projects has not stayed in local communities, while the harms have. All along the river, I've heard concern that this history of environmental injustice is likely to be repeated, in part because the discussion of salmon futures is so often separated from that of mining and economic development writ large.
Third and finally, the Yukon salmon treaty and the Yukon River Panel, as my fellow panellists here all know, are charged with setting annual goals to ensure that enough spawning salmon are able to meet the minimum sustainable escapement numbers by regulating the quantity of fishing that happens in the Yukon River. When the treaty was signed in 2001, I believed that this was a sensible move based on the history of commercial and subsistence fishing for Yukon salmon, both of which occurred primarily in rivers, but of course, Yukon salmon spend most of their lives not in the Yukon but in the Bering Sea, which is an ecosystem that is experiencing such a rapid degree of change that I'm basically out of superlatives, as the climate warms and where there are additional ecological pressures from the pollock fishery, which removes some three billion pounds of biomass from the Bering Sea basin every year.
Every person I have spoken to on the Yukon River Panel is deeply dedicated to having generations of salmon, but in this contemporary environment they do not necessarily have the levers to pull to address either bycatch or the changing climate.
Essentially, the Yukon River Salmon Agreement lays out 20th-century tools for what are becoming very 21st-century problems—climate change and ecosystem change due to intensive harvesting.
I want to leave my remarks here by noting that people do have tens of thousands of years of experience in living well with salmon, and, in fact, this is the normal historical experience for salmon and people, so it is a thing that can be done.
Thank you.