“And to have it taken away just like that - without warning, without mentally preparing yourself - is traumatizing.”Ī chum salmon caught in July on the Yukon River near Russian Mission, a small Yup’ik village in western Alaska. “We grew up with fishing, cutting fish, smoking fish all our lives,” Fitka said. For the better part of three fishing seasons, thousands of Yup’ik and Athabascan fishers have been banned from catching the fish that once kept their families fed. In 2021, for the first time in Fitka’s life, regulators prohibited all fishing for the river’s two main salmon species - king and chum - even for subsistence. State and federal fishery managers have resorted to drastic measures to save them. But as temperatures in western Alaska and the Bering Sea creep higher, the Yukon’s salmon populations have plunged. The river’s abundance helped Alaska earn its reputation as one of the last refuges for wild salmon, a place where they once came every year by the millions to spawn in pristine rivers and lakes after migrating thousands of miles. There have been salmon in the Yukon, the fourth-longest river in North America, for as long as there have been people on its banks. Serena Fitka sits in the cabin of an aluminum boat on the Yukon River in western Alaska. “I thought there would always be fish in the river.” “I thought this wouldn’t happen in my lifetime,” Fitka said. A bald eagle soared 10 feet above the river, scanning the water. Gray water, thick with glacial silt, lapped against the land’s muddy edge below a summer palette of green: dark spruce needles, light birch leaves, and willows a shade in between. The boat skirted the river bank as Fitka glanced out the window, her face shielded from the mid-July sun. “We’d get what we need, and be done,” Fitka said, raising her voice above the whir of the outboard motor and the waves beating against the hull. They’d catch enough salmon to last through winter, enough to share with cousins, aunts, uncles, and elders who couldn’t fish for themselves. Mary’s where Fitka grew up, she and her family fished for days on end. Each summer, in the Yup’ik village of St. Serena Fitka sat in the cabin of a flat-bottomed aluminum boat as it sped down the Yukon River in western Alaska, recalling how the river once ran thick with salmon.
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