Our families and our community are in what I call a collective trauma state. It's a heart wound. It's a soul wound. It's affecting everything that we are. We are Little Salmon Carmacks people. Without salmon, where are we going to go? We've been infiltrated by the gold rush and residential schools, and we have a lot of things that have already been taken from us and lost. At this point, the culture, which is the epitome of our whole nation, is also being lost, and that's the salmon.
There are so many things that play into the fish camp, and at this point our fish camps are left empty—and you can see it all down the Yukon River. This has been happening for very many years, and it's absolutely devastating to our people. Our children, at Christmastime, made a Santa Claus, and they were asked to ask Santa what they would like. In that Santa Claus's arms was a huge Chinook salmon, so all of those children are so feeling that devastation that they wrote Santa and asked for the salmon to come back. Our elders, who are used to the vitamin D and all these wonderful omegas that come from it, they're feeling it in their bones. They just want to have the salmon so badly. Everybody is trying to respect that we can't do this right now, and we're taught to leave it alone. It's “dooli” for us, so it's heartbreaking to see our community and our people in such a devastating loss.