For many Alaskans, subsistence is all about salmon. But in St. Paul, that isn’t the case. Fur seals and seabirds are primary subsistence food in the Pribilof Island community.
But the Aleut Community of St. Paul’s Tribal Council thinks increasing a small salmon run on the island could provide food, and a lot more.
76-year-old Gregory Fratis, Sr., isn’t a fan of salmon.
“Fresh cooked salmon, uh, uh, I don’t like it;” He says. “I could taste that fishy taste.”
Fratis thinks salmon aren’t worth the trouble. It takes too much time to catch and process each individual fish. To fill his freezer for the year, he’d rather catch seal, one of the Pribilof islands’ traditional foods.
“We are the people of the seal,” Fratis says. “That’s part of our diet. We are recognized through the fur seal. It’s our culture too. The seal has everything to do with us Aleuts as food. As arts and crafts as everything.”
But Fratis was also one of the first people on the island to go looking for salmon. Back in the early 1980s, someone told him about a salmon they discovered washed up on a local beach. Fratis quickly found a net and set out to see if he could catch some. After a bit of trial and error, he caught his first salmon.
“I took it home,” Fratis said. “Excited. Looked at it. Cooked it.”
All five salmon species have been found in the island’s salt lagoon. Now, the Aleut Community of St. Paul’s tribal council is hoping to get more residents interested in salmon fishing for two main reasons. First, salmon is a healthy food and second, it’s a great form of exercise.
.“Who can deny catching a salmon isn’t fun? And you know the reward of going home and baking a whole salmon,” Tribal council president Amos Phiemonoff said. “It’s wonderful.”
Currently, there are no regulations placed on salmon fishing. The community doesn’t keep a count on how many fish there are. But Philemonoff estimates there are several hundred in the lagoon. Not much for a community of 500.
For the most part, residents get their salmon fix by trading with people off-island.
Philemonoff said the community is looking into enhancing the run to increase the amount of healthy food available on the island.
“All of the junk food they got down at the store is pretty cheap,” Philemonoff said. “You can buy 5 or 6 pizzas for a box of ammunition to go get these sea ducks or reindeer or whatever. What are you going to do? You going to go get five pizzas feed your family or are you going to buy a box of shells?”
Still, Gregory Fratis isn’t ready to add salmon to his diet, but he fishes to stay active. It gets him out of the house. In the summers, he’ll spend 8 or 9 hours in the lagoon walking and catching up with other community members.
Even though he doesn’t enjoy the taste of salmon, Fratis is looking forward to developing the salmon resource, too.
“Imagine that, derby’s and everything. Recreation starts. See that gets you out of the house,” Fratis said. “I mean who knows, I may start eating salmon.”
Before that can happen, the community needs to establish if it’s even possible to enhance the resource and settle on the simplest way to increase the salmon in St. Paul.
Zoe Sobel is a reporter with Alaska's Energy Desk based in Unalaska. As a high schooler in Portland, Maine, Zoë Sobel got her first taste of public radio at NPR’s easternmost station. From there, she moved to Boston where she studied at Wellesley College and worked at WBUR, covering sports for Only A Game and the trial of convicted Boston Marathon bomber Dzhokhar Tsarnaev.
