The Stikine River Flats area in the Tongass National Forest is viewed from a helicopter on July 19, 2021. The Stikine River flows from British Columbia to Southeast Alaska. It is one of the major transboundary rivers impacted by mines in British Columbia. Alaska tribes and communities are seeking some new protection to avoid downstream impacts. (Photo by Alicia Stearns/U.S. Forest Service)
In a hospital room a year ago, Tlingit elder, water protector, and artist John Morris Sr. and I made a special discovery. Even though we’d talked many times about our connections to the Taku River, I’d forgotten to tell him about the woman’s decorative hair comb I’d uncovered in the dirt near the mouth of the Taku years earlier. I finally asked John if he recognized the name neatly etched on the back of this comb.
“Ah, that’s my grandmother! She must’ve lost it 70 years ago,” said John, tearing up. “She would load up the family into boats at our Douglas Island village, Akáx Yaa Andagán, so we all could go pick berries in August, before the coho started to swim upriver.”
John closed his eyes and cradled his grandmother’s comb, and asked me to tell him another Taku story.
I recounted a recent swim at Taku Harbor, where I’ve spent virtually every summer of my life. Wearing a wetsuit and goggles, I had slipped into the frigid, forest-ringed ocean, only about 100 feet from where I found the comb. I swam farther than normal that day and stopped, stunned, when the salty water suddenly turned sweet. It smelled and tasted of Sitka spruce needles, wild carrot blossoms, and watermelon berries. With a flash of excitement and recognition, I realized I was smelling the glacial stream that has raised generations of wild salmon flooding into the bay.
John opened his eyes and beamed. “I’ll be darned. Yes, I know just that sweet smell. Keep sharing your love of your home, of salmon rivers, Heather. You’ll remind others to speak of their love, too.”
John died three months later. His last words to me continue to reverberate in my mind and heart.
The big, braided T’aakū (Taku), Shtax’heen (Stikine), Joonáx̱ (Unuk), and Salmon Rivers, some of the last largely intact salmon rivers left on the planet, flow from British Columbia, Canada, across the border, and into Southeast Alaska and the Tongass National Forest. Indigenous nations like the Tlingit and the Tahltan have stewarded these wild, glaciated river valleys — collectively the size of Portugal — since time immemorial.
And here, in an ironic and miraculous piece of good climate news, scientists predict thousands of miles of new cold, clear water for salmon will emerge as vast glaciers melt — unless Canada permits mining companies to dig them up first.
Mining companies, rebranding this region as the “The Golden Triangle,” are working hand-in-glove with the Canadian government to industrialize shared river valleys and build roads atop glaciers to extract tiny specks of gold and copper. Canada’s polluting gold mining boom upstream has largely escaped the world’s wider notice. Today more than 100 Canadian gold mine projects, most with massive earthen mine waste dams, are being explored or are operating here.
The Canadian government is incentivizing and fast-tracking this mining boom without the consent of all who are deeply connected to this place. A couple of years ago, I asked a CEO who will benefit from his proposed gold mine located just upstream of a vast emerald green wetland and refuge for salmon fry. He paused, laughed nervously, and replied, “Our investors.”
The “sweet water” smells John and I know well call the salmon home. Newly-hatched, inch-long salmon fry imprint the smells of the stream where they’re born in their olfactory systems before migrating to sea. Years later, this deep memory and the earth’s magnetic field guide salmon thousands of miles from the open ocean back to their birth streams to lay their eggs, but only as long as contaminants haven’t polluted this freshwater.
Unfortunately, these waterways, and salmon’s ability to navigate through them, are threatened with permanent mine contamination like acid rock drainage.
For decades, people have called for slowing Canada’s gold fever in this region. Many Alaskans and Alaska tribes have called for a pause in upstream Canadian mining until Indigenous peoples and communities on both sides of the border develop binding protections for shared rivers.
Native and local people sustained by salmon rivers like the Taku, Stikine, Unuk, and Salmon Rivers should determine their future — not the distant corporations, hedge funds, and billionaire financiers behind today’s modern-day gold rush.
Amidst the current loud, constant push for power and profits, wild salmon quietly fill us with awe and are reminders of true wealth. As my friend John urged me, I will be speaking up for wild salmon rivers even more passionately than before.
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