Fishery Board Hears Sitka Natives' Ideas

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Created on Tuesday, 04 February 2025 15:18

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By ANNA LAFFREY
Ketchikan Daily News
Three Southeast Alaskans on Monday gave the first ever “Traditional Knowledge reports” that the Alaska Board of Fisheries has heard in Southeast.
The three, 10-minute reports from Indigenous people representing a federally recognized tribal government and other community organizations came on the seventh day of the Board’s 13-day Southeast Alaska/Yakutat finfish and shellfish regulatory meeting in Ketchikan, as the Board is preparing to hold public negotiations over state regulations for all harvest of herring, and salmon and trout species, in Southeast.
Board Chair Märit Carlson-Van Dort opened the TK report session Monday by introducing the new Board procedure of inviting traditional and cultural knowledge bearers to register to give a TK report on proposals and subjects before the Board.
Board members had welcomed the first-ever TK reports during a finfish regulatory meeting in Kodiak in January of 2024. In March of 2024, the Board adopted a formal TK report policy.
Carlson-Van Dort said Monday that the relatively new Board policy “recognizes local and traditional knowledge as an important aspect of best available science.
“As such, access to these knowledge systems should be an important part of informing Board decisions through their close proximity and intimate, often longstanding relationship with fish resources, the environment and ecological systems that are critical to fishery sustainability,” Carlson-Van Dort said, before inviting forward the three TK report registrants for the Southeast meeting. 
Charlie Skultka Jr. of Sitka presented first, sharing from his 60-some years of experience traditionally harvesting herring eggs and 30 years of past participation in commercial herring fisheries, as well as the knowledge he’s learned from family and friends.
Skultka Jr. spoke on behalf of the Herring Protectors, a nonprofit organization based in Sitka.
Skultka began Monday by discussing how a Sitka-based commercial fishery for wild-gathered herring spawn-on-kelp in the 1960s preceded the commercial Sitka Sound sac roe herring fishery, which launched in the early 1970s to harvest herring in Southeast for their full skeins of mature herring roe.
Skultka also spoke about fishing in the purse seine fishery for herring sac roe near Juneau in the early 1980s, before commercial fishing pressure “eradicated the Juneau herring stock.”
Following herring reduction fisheries in the early 1900s, ADF&G conducted purse seine or gillnet herring fisheries for “sac roe” in Lynn Canal, Seymour Canal, Kah Shakes/Cat Island and West Behm Canal. Those herring populations have since declined to biomass levels that are too low to support commercial sac roe fishing.
ADF&G continues to hold a large sac roe herring seine fishery in Sitka Sound before herring spawn along shorelines near Sitka each spring.
While speaking to the Board on Monday, Skultka Jr. discussed how he worked with a group of traditional herring harvesters in Sitka this year to craft proposals to the Board that would change commercial herring fishery regulations throughout Southeast.
One of the regionwide herring proposals that Skultka crafted would decrease the legal size of purse seine nets used to catch herring (189); the other would require the state to co-manage herring fisheries with tribal governments throughout Southeast Alaska (190).
Skultka noted that the Sitka Advisory Committee to the Alaska Department of Fish and Game this fall voted to support Proposal 190 that would require co-management of Southeast herring fisheries. The vote was 10-1, with one member abstaining, per Sitka AC meeting minutes.
Of the proposal, Skultka said that “in order to keep all herring going, we need to find a way to work together.”  He pointed to the “Boldt Decision” that resulted from the 1974 fishing rights case United States v. Washington as a “good example” of how co-management can succeed. 
Rob Sanderson Jr. of Hydaburg spoke after Skultka, representing the Central Council of Tlingit and Haida Indian Tribes of Alaska Executive Council.
Sanderson shared an overview of the long history of connectivity with, and harvest of salmon by, the Tlingit and Haida people of Southeast Alaska, a region that encompasses “43,000 square miles and 19 federally recognized tribes” whose history in the region “extends back 12,000 years,” Sanderson said.
“Especially in the smaller communities” throughout Southeast, tribal citizens rely on commercial, sport, personal use and subsistence fisheries for salmon as the “foundation of Alaska Native culture, commerce and biodiversity,” Sanderson said.
“Salmon are of crucial importance to Indigenous people throughout Southeast” for food as well as “artwork and dance” and other cultural aspects, Sanderson said.
Sanderson, who lives in Ketchikan, also discussed traditional fishery management and “salmon enhancement” techniques that Tlingit and Haida people employed to “sustain the highly productive (salmon) system for thousands of years.”
Paulette Moreno was the third and final speaker during the TK report section. Moreno is Tlingit of the Juneau-area Aak’w Kwáan, and lives and harvests herring eggs in Sitka.
Six of Moreno’s loved ones accompanied her to the stand as she testified for 10 minutes on behalf of CCTHITA’s Sitka Community Council, as well as the Alaska Native Sisterhood Grand Camp.
Standing beside Moreno, Kai Monture of Yakutat held a traditional herring egg “set,” or a hemlock bough attached to an anchor, a shot of line and a buoy.
Traditional herring egg harvesters place weighted hemlock boughs in the water column just before herring spawn, and wait for the herring to lay and fertilize eggs on the branches before pulling up herring eggs.
Once herring have spawned on those branches, harvesters pull up the eggs, which are a traditional food that people have eaten and cherished along the Pacific coast for millennia.
While giving a TK report on Monday, Moreno spoke about the traditional harvest, and how “generations of knowledge have sustained herring and we (have) always had an abundance in many locations.
“We have traditional corridors that were undisturbed when the herring would come into these corridors,” Moreno said. “The herring are heading towards (Sitka) Sound, one of the few places left where they will come and spawn.”
“It is no longer peaceful in the corridors in the past recent decades, because now they are disturbed and they are interrupted in that flow,” Moreno said, discussing how commercial boats “come in and disturb the (spawning) process.”
“We gather herring eggs so that we can feed our families,” Moreno. “We are taught that this is an interconnected being that feeds, and that is very important to the world. We are taught to treat it with respect, and never to harm it.”
“We are very concerned about the welfare of the harvest,” Moreno said. “We have the right, not only to hunt, to fish and provide, but to carry on our culture and our way of life to teach others.”

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