Saving Seafood

Alaska’s Sitka Tribe sues state, claims mismanagement of herring fishery

December 19, 2018 — A tribal government is filing suit against the State of Alaska, alleging mismanagement of the Sitka sac roe herring fishery. The Sitka Tribe of Alaska has retained a major Anchorage law firm that specializes in tribal advocacy and subsistence issues. KCAW’s Katherine Rose reports on the build-up to this moment over the future of Sitka’s sac roe herring fishery.

For 20 years, tribal leaders have been worried about the health of Sitka’s herring. The silvery fish return every spring to spawn and are pursued by commercial fisherman, subsistence harvesters, and marine mammals alike. As a forage fish, they’re a cornerstone of the ecosystem.

Herring rock is blessed with water to mark this seasonal moment.

Audio: “This is spring. We are getting ready for our season. This is our time for work. Gunalchéesh.”    

Jessie Johnnie told the story of herring rock to the Board of Fish in 1997 — one of a young Tlingit woman sitting on the rock and lowering her hair into the ocean for the herring to lay their eggs. “All the herring would come to the rock and swim around,” she said, “and she would sing lullabies to them.”

Herring have cultural, ecological, and economic significance for Sitka. But the message to the Board of Fish back then was that the herring weren’t spawning the same way in the same places, and subsistence harvesters were struggling to gather enough roe.

Herman Kitka, testifying at that 1997 meeting, feared for the worst. “If nothing is done,” he said, “we will lose the herring stock that is left in Sitka Sound.”

In 2018, his son Harvey Kitka went before the Board of Fish to say the same thing: Act now, or potentially lose our herring. Sitka Tribe proposed capping the commercial harvest of herring at 10-percent. But the Board took no action, maintaining a formula that calculates a sliding scale of 12- to 20-percent depending on the size of the biomass.

Read the full story at KCAW

Alaska: Fish Board cuts king salmon fishing

January 24, 2018 — The Alaska Board of Fisheries has passed an “action plan” to help conserve struggling king salmon stocks on Southeast rivers during their last day of deliberations Tuesday in Sitka.

The plan will keep troll, sport and gillnet fishermen on the docks for significant parts of the fishing season. Commercial trollers, who made about half of their money fishing Chinook, had their pocketbooks significantly affected.

It was the best and most equitable solution the board and the Alaska Department of Fish and Game could come up with under dire circumstances for Chinook stocks on the Unuk, Chilkat, Taku and King Salmon rivers.

All six of the voting board members voted for the plan.

“Nobody is going to be happy with the end results, I am not happy with it. Everyone is feeling the crunch and the pain,” board member Israel Payton said.

The board heard three days of public testimony on finfish proposals. A majority of that testimony was heard on controversial herring proposals, but salmon came in close second.

Public testimony prompted changes to the action plan and the board held the vote until the last day of the meeting to allow public review of those changes.

The action plan combines ideas in several other proposals aimed at conserving Chinook stocks.

Troll fishermen will have their fishing areas and dates significantly cut back and won’t be allowed to fish the last six weeks of winter king salmon fishing.

Read the full story at the Juneau Empire

 

Sitka Tribe of Alaska’s Traditional Foods Program nourishes families

August 18, 2017 — It’s a cloudy Tuesday in July. At 4 a.m., it’s already light out, and Jeff Feldpausch and Mike Smith are preparing for a trip up to Sitkoh Bay to harvest sockeye salmon and halibut. It’s just another day in the office for them: a boat trip to a remote area of Southeast Alaska to harvest food for the Sitka Tribe of Alaska’s (STA) Traditional Foods Program.

Every year, about 300 households receive food provided by their work, with food being distributed first to elders and then the rest of the community. In order to be eligible to receive food, one must be a resident of Sitka, Alaska, and a citizen of the Sitka Tribe of Alaska.

The program

Feldpausch, the Resource Protection Department Director, and Smith, the Traditional Foods Specialist, work together throughout the year to ensure that tribal members who may not have the resources to gather, hunt, or fish themselves have freezers and pantries stocked. While it varies per year, Feldpausch said that, on average, STA distributes between 12,000 and 20,000 pounds of food per year to the community.

The season starts off with a big herring egg harvest and then moves to salmon, with sockeye being the primary goal. There are sockeye salmon runs in several places on Baranof and Chichagof islands and STA makes it a priority to harvest sockeye sustainably by harvesting in multiple locations.

“You name it, we go there,” Feldpausch said. “We go as far north as Klag [Bay] for sockeye, as far south as Redfish for sockeye…if we’re out and about, we always try to throw a skate into the water to make the program as efficient as possible. We try to harvest away from town. A lot of folks who are private citizens who have boats may not have as big of boats so they harvest closer to town, so we try to harvest away from town. We try to stay further away from town so that we don’t impact those subsistence users.”

Read the full story at the Juneau Empire