October 7, 2026 — Evon Waska’s fish camp was too quiet this summer.
“Well, this is my smokehouse,” he said, opening the door to the plywood structure at the water’s edge in Bethel, where he says his parents settled when they gave up their nomadic ways.
It’s next to empty salmon-drying racks and fish-cutting tables that have seen too few fish for many years running.
A few smoked king fillets still hang. Waska caught about 40 at the start of summer. That was a relief. Some years subsistence fishermen on the Kuskokwim River weren’t allowed to harvest any, and it’s worse on the Yukon. But Waska said he got only half of what his household needs.
His fish racks should be filled with silver salmon now. But the silver return was too weak to fish. So instead of getting more salmon in late August, his family was already dipping into what they put up for winter.
Waska, like a lot of people along the Kuskokwim River, say the problem is in the Bering Sea, with the trawl fleet. The trawlers are after pollock, but they are allowed to waste thousands of king and chum salmon, some bound for Western Alaska rivers like the Kuskokwim.
“They don’t close the trawlers,” Waska said. “They close me and my people first.”
Waska is up against a giant. Trawlers in the federal waters of the Bering Sea and Gulf of Alaska catch nearly 3 billion pounds of Alaska pollock, the nation’s largest fishery by volume. They can tow nets as wide at the mouth as a football field and a quarter-mile in length.
It’s not just subsistence fishermen who are upset about bycatch — the other species those nets scoop up. Sport, charter and commercial fishermen are also boiling mad and demanding change. In Alaska’s tight U.S. Senate race, bycatch has become a flashpoint, and the race may turn on which candidate — Sen. Dan Sullivan or challenger Mary Peltola — is perceived as the most willing and able to rein in the the trawlers.