A half-century ago, Angoon’s harbor was packed with small, family-operated fishing vessels. Salmon and halibut fed mouths and bank accounts.
Peter Duncan, Mayor of Angoon, remembers those days. But it’s not the same anymore. Fisheries limitation regulations have caused “devastating changes,” he said. “You just don’t find a troller in our harbors anymore.” That’s caused his village to depend more on government assistance programs, including food stamps, he said.
Duncan grew up fishing on his father’s seiner in the small Lingít village on Admiralty Island. He graduated to his own troll boat and commercially fished until the early 1990s, when he said he couldn’t make a living that way anymore.
He said the opening date for the king salmon fishery was pushed later in the season, when most fish had already gone further into the inside waters and up rivers to spawn. Folks weren’t catching enough salmon to make money, so permits became more valuable to sell.
“A lot of boats, you know, they just sold out, and they, they couldn’t do it anymore, and they’ve tried,” he said.
Many of those fishing permits left the island, and with them went the means for the village to sustain itself.
“It’s sad to know that at one time, we used to be a strong fishing fleet that took pride in going out and going fishing and making something for ourselves,” Duncan said.
Duncan’s story isn’t unique. This reality has unfolded in most rural villages throughout the Gulf of Alaska, as first reported by Northern Journal. In part, it’s an unintended consequence of a state law that took effect in 1975, called the Limited Entry Act, which allowed the state to issue a set number of permits for each fishery. The goal was to address a sustainability problem. At the time, salmon populations were plummeting while commercial fishermen multiplied. The idea was simply to cap the number of people fishing, so there would be enough to go around.
But that’s not what happened in Native villages. Courtney Carothers, an environmental anthropologist at the University of Alaska Fairbanks, led a survey of 3,024 Sealaska Corporation shareholders and descendants about the community impacts of fisheries limitation policies.
She found that Sealaska villages owned half as many fishing vessels in 2019 as they owned in 1978, and held 38% fewer commercial salmon permits than they held in 1975.
“This is not good public policy if our communities in the Gulf of Alaska — surrounded by the ocean with thousands of years of fishing knowledge and history — within one generation, are cut out,” Carothers said. “I mean, this is an absolute crisis.”
Joe Nelson is interim President of Sealaska Corp., representing Lingít, Haida and Tsimshian interests in Southeast Alaska. His airy corner office in downtown Juneau looks out over Gastineau Channel. On a recent afternoon, clouds trundled into the snowy peaks of Douglas Island. Glossy magazine copies of Carothers’ study were spread out on a table.
The report points to a loss of fishing access as one of the main reasons people leave their rural villages. Nelson has watched this happen.
“It’s all been going one way, and that’s migration out of most of the fleet and most of the permits,” Nelson said.
That’s caused families to leave and village populations to dwindle, he said, which in turn leads to schools and other services closing down. And those who stay behind are aging out of the industry without enough young people to pick it up, he said.
“So the whole economy just shrinks. It’s much bigger than a single fisherman that decides not to show up anymore,” Nelson said.
He’s calling for the state to adjust the limited entry system so that Native communities can fish commercially “without going bankrupt.”
Today, a seine permit in Southeast is worth about $140,000 and a drift permit is worth about $44,000 for the salmon fisheries, according to Reid Johnson, the research and planning project leader at Alaska’s Commercial Fisheries Entry Commission. Those numbers vary, depending on how well a fishery is doing.
Johnson says that while the Limited Entry Act helped make Alaska’s fisheries more sustainable, it created this new problem for rural villages. Now, the Commission is talking internally about potential solutions.
“There have been ideas that have been floated, such as making it administratively easier to transfer a permit to another rural resident in the same area that you live in,” Johnson said.
Carothers suggests there could be room for creating a new class of permit, such as an entry-level or small-scale permit, to get people started. But any such changes would have to come through the state Legislature.
There’s also a potential federal pathway for guaranteeing Indigenous fishing access, which was not compensated for through the Alaska Native Claims Settlement Act that distributed roughly 45 million acres and $1 billion to tribes in 1971.
“That act preceded any limitation of fisheries, and there was compensation for land, but not for fish,” Carothers said. “So I personally think there should be a repatriation of rights, because they’ve been taken away, dispossessed, in ways that I don’t think were fair.”
Sealaska is not advocating for specific policy changes just yet. Nelson says there must be open, public discussions that look at a slew of ideas for how to restore fishing access to Native villages. But first, he wants state officials to recognize that there is a problem.
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