One day last fall, Deenaalee Chase Hodgdon returned to Anvik, a Yukon River village of less than 100 people, home to the Deg Xitʼan Athabascan people. Anvik is quieter now than Hodgdon remembers from visits as a kid, but that day there was a commotion.
“I heard this banging coming from down the road and I was like, ‘What the heck, I wonder what that is?’” they said. “And one of my aunts, she had two men from our village, she was sitting out in her yard and they were taking down her smokehouse.”
While Bristol Bay has enjoyed a massive sockeye run in recent years, Yukon villages are facing another summer without a subsistence salmon harvest, as chum and chinook returns on the river continue to dwindle.
Hodgdon is a commercial fisherman who spent time in both watersheds growing up. They’re part of a drift boat crew that fishes out of Dillingham.
On that trip last year, Hodgdon had come home with donated fish from Bristol Bay with plans to distribute it to the community in Anvik.
“We’re bringing in fish. There’s fish on the way,” Hodgdon told their aunt. “She’s like, ‘Oh, well, we’re taking down our smokehouse right now, we don’t really need it.’ And it just absolutely broke my heart.”
Hodgdon is on a mission to reconnect Yukon villages with salmon, starting with Anvik, where their mother is from. Their vision is to support Indigenous communities’ access to their traditional foods through their traditional economy of gifting and trading.
For more than a decade, Yukon salmon, a critical source of food on the river, have been disappearing. The chinook — or king — salmon run crashed in 2019, followed shortly after by the chum run. This is the fourth year subsistence salmon fishing has been closed or severely restricted.
It’s a threat to food security, especially in rural villages where grocery store prices can be more than twice what they are in Anchorage. For now, Hodgdon, along with organizations like the Alaska Longline Fishermen’s Association and Tanana Chiefs Conference, are trying to fill that gap with salmon from healthier runs elsewhere in the state.
But for Indigenous people along the river, losing access to salmon fishing means losing a way of life.
“It’s still sad for people to see empty smokehouses, the empty fish camps, because those have so much meaning to our people,” said Amber Vaska, executive director of tribal government and client services at Tanana Chiefs Conference. “It wasn’t only food security, it wasn’t only as a way to pass down culture, it’s also a way to maintain our health and our mental health.”
As a commercial fisherman in Bristol Bay, Hodgdon thinks a lot about how to return Alaska’s resources — especially its salmon — to Indigenous people. They partnered with fellow climate justice advocate Ruth Miller to work on Native food sovereignty issues. In June, they named their collaboration the Smokehouse Collective. Their goals include supporting food security, health and cultural connection for Indigenous people, particularly along the Yukon.
Miller, a member of the Curyung Tribe of Dillingham with roots in the Lake Clark region of the Alaska Peninsula, said the name is a symbol of community.
“The smokehouse is a fundamental, central part of so many of our cultures that brings people together — the smell of the smoke, the image of your bright red fish hanging,” she said. “The way that we rely on community to take shifts to make sure that the fire is tended and does not go out.”
Last year, partnering with the Alaska Longline Fishermen’s Association, they delivered 1,000 pounds of Bristol Bay salmon to Anvik.
Ken Chase, an elder from Anvik and Hodgdon’s great-uncle, said last year’s fish delivery was a big deal to the community.
“People are still talking about it. I had some, it’s not the fish that we have, the summer chum, but it was fish. It was something that we could put in our freezers,” Chase said.
It’s not a perfect replacement. Chase said there’s something lost in not being able to pull fish out of the water and process it yourself, but the ability to share resources across the state is valuable.
“That’s the Native way,” he said. “If you can’t catch it, somebody else catches it and gives it to you and your family or friends, your relatives.”
This year, Hodgdon said complications with the low fish prices set by Bristol Bay processors — which fishermen have been protesting this summer — made it hard to secure sockeye to bring north. Cohos are expected to run soon, and Hodgdon is hopeful there will be an opportunity to set aside some of those fish to donate.
Still, Hodgdon and Miller are playing the long game. They set up a GoFundMe to purchase their own drift net permit next year to guarantee a supply of fish and buy freezer and processing space to increase their donation capacity. They have plans to bring people from Yukon villages to a Bristol Bay fish camp to reconnect with the core cultural experience of harvesting and preparing salmon.
Hodgdon said, in the face of massive environmental uncertainty on the Yukon, and concerns about overfishing and bycatch in the commercial fishing industry, their goal is to build sustainable, resilient food systems for Native people.
“This project is a climate adaptation strategy, because we are beginning to tangibly rebuild the relationships between regions and reinvigorate a network — whether it is gifting or trade — that will help us to face the coming storm,” Hodgdon said.
Today their focus is the Yukon, but Hodgdon hopes resource sharing networks will benefit all of Alaska as climate change continues to threaten food systems.
Kavitha George worked at Alaska Public Media from 2021 to 2024. Her coverage areas included statewide politics and climate change.
