Crew members adjust the net as it releases fish aboard a factory trawler in the Bering Sea, August 2023.
Imagine hearing and reading versions of McGinty’s story dozens of times, told by Indigenous people who live along the Yukon and another iconic subsistence river in Southwest Alaska, the Kuskokwim.Maurice McGinty speaks at a public meeting in Anchorage.
But as this week’s council meeting begins, the debate has taken on increasing urgency for participants, as subsistence harvesting bans persist and the responses under consideration by the council threaten to impose steep costs on industry, according to a federal analysis. While Western Alaska king populations had been declining over that time, regulation of chum bycatch has been less strict, without a hard cap. Instead, the pollock industry manages chum avoidance through voluntary legal contracts agreed to by fishing companies and approved by federal regulators.Those contracts call for data sharing, rolling closures of areas where there’s high bycatch and special area limits on boats that catch salmon at higher rates.
“The salmon crisis is decades in the making, and a lower limit for a sustained period of time is necessary to be effective,” Karma Ulvi, the chair of a Yukon River tribal fishery commission, wrote in herTrawl representatives say that their voluntary legal contracts have helped reduce both king and chum salmon bycatch, and that they’re more adaptable and effective than the options pushed by tribal leaders.
“They’re talking moratorium, seven years, Yukon River. Well, what about the high seas?” McGinty, the tribal leader from Nulato, asked at a public meeting Wednesday hosted by the Alaska Department of Fish and Game. “What kind of punishment are they getting for making all the money and starving us?”The conflict playing out over chum bycatch, however, is not black and white, with tribal subsistence fishermen on one side and pollock industry executives on the other., or CDQ.
“It’s hard to fight against your own people,” said Rob Sanderson Jr., a tribal leader from Southeast Alaska and veteran of the council process. “We’re pitted against each other.”