The salmon run occurs every June. On their way back to the rivers where they were born—the Yukon and the Kuskokwim, streams whose names most Americans couldn’t find on a map—they push north through the chilly Pacific, navigating the slender passes between the Aleutian Islands. It is one of the more traditional rhythms in North American culture. Additionally, witnessing its breakdown in real time is something that is difficult for those who rely on it to translate into policy language or court filings.
Charlie Wright spent decades downstream in Tanana after growing up in the Yukon River village of Rampart. He recalls his grandmother’s fish camp in the same way that you recall something you thought would always exist: the abundance that felt structural and unchanging, the salmon jumping close enough to be seen from the bank. In comparison to the previous two decades, summer chum salmon on the Yukon have decreased by about 72% in the last five years. Wright is no longer a resident of the river. He relocated to Fairbanks, where he currently serves on eleven subsistence advocacy boards, attempting to maintain what he once merely lived through meetings and motions.
The battle over these salmon has been brewing for years, but it became public in February when the Alaska Board of Fisheries passed new regulations on the commercial fleet operating in Area M, a section of the Aleutians where commercial salmon boats intercept fish headed for Western Alaska rivers, following persistent pressure from tribal leaders and subsistence advocates. The rules would have increased net depth limitations, expanded the regulated area, and shortened fishing windows. It went 4-3. Then, in May, Cori Mills, Alaska’s acting attorney general, declared the vote to have been improperly conducted and declared the measures completely invalid. Three of the majority board members were accused of having conflicts of interest in ethics complaints filed by the commercial fleet and its allies. Mills took the commercial fishermen’s side. The Department of Law refused to provide an explanation to the public.
Through a last-ditch effort to intervene in the commercial fleet’s own lawsuit, the subsistence groups, represented by attorney Mike Kramer, attempted to maintain the regulations. In response, the judge typed just one word: “denied.” With evident frustration, Kramer stated that he had hoped for more—some written justification, some recognition of the stakes.
This asymmetry is difficult to ignore. Within weeks, the commercial fishermen’s ethics complaint was resolved. Before filing a lawsuit, the subsistence advocates waited 42 days for a response. It’s hard to say for sure whether that’s due to bureaucratic backlogs or institutional bias, but the communities at the bottom of the gap are primarily rural, Indigenous, and lack the kind of lobbying infrastructure that commercial fishing organizations have.
The mayor of Aleutians East Borough and longtime resident of Sand Point, Alvin Osterback, presents an alternative perspective on the same circumstance. He is also an Alaska Native, and during the 1970s and 1980s, he saw his small coastal town of about 300 residents grow into a town of more than a thousand as fishing infrastructure developed. When the salmon fleet arrived, the population increased by about three times every season. Due to declining fish prices, the Area M fleet’s adoption of stricter voluntary restrictions following a significant chum catch in 2021, and a decline in revenues from approximately $47 million in 2021 to $18 million in 2023, the economy is currently under pressure. Osterback does not downplay the upstream subsistence crisis. Given what scientists say about climate change causing the declines, he simply doesn’t think closing the commercial fishery will restore the salmon.
This conflict is genuinely painful because it involves two communities with legitimate losses and legitimate claims that are trapped in a management structure that doesn’t seem to be able to satisfy either. It is made worse by the larger context. Indigenous leaders have referred to the Trump administration’s advancement of deep-sea mining proposals in U.S. waters near Alaska and the Pacific territories as “resource colonialism”—extraction that concentrates environmental risk on the communities least able to absorb it while offering little local economic return. These priorities were not chosen by the fishing communities around the Aleutians. They did not request a regulatory framework that prioritizes corporate interests over subsistence rights.
According to Wright, he is not advocating for a permanent closure of the commercial fleet. To see if more spawning salmon might return to the rivers, he simply wants a few days off the water. “If we work together in unity,” he stated, “then I think it’ll be a better day for everybody.” He might be correct. It’s also possible that the existing legal, political, and ecological systems have gone too far in one direction for a few fishing days to bring about significant change. Two and a half years remain until the next Board of Fisheries meeting, when Area M will be on the agenda. That’s a long wait for the Yukon River.
