This story was produced as part of the Pulitzer Center’s StoryReach U.S. Fellowship and the Public Media Accountability Initiative, which supports investigative reporting at local media outlets around the country. It was reported and edited by Northern Journal and APM Reports, with support from Alaska Public Media.
For decades, an economic catastrophe has been unfolding in the Indigenous villages along the Gulf of Alaska, with lost jobs and the destruction of a traditional way of life: hauling fish from the sea.
That destruction is still playing out. More than 80% of people who responded to a recent survey sponsored by an economic development nonprofit said that Southeast Alaska and Kodiak Island villages are in a “crisis of sustainability” because of lost access to fisheries.
Indigenous leaders across the Gulf say it’s imperative that Alaska legislators pass reforms to the state law that they blame for the mess: a landmark 1973 statute that effectively prevents many residents of those coastal villages from earning a living by fishing for salmon.
New fishermen can only participate in the commercial harvest if they buy or inherit a state permit that, in some cases, can cost upward of $100,000 — putting it out of reach for young rural residents with no credit histories.
“We all have kids and grandkids that want to continue doing what their grandparents were doing a long time ago,” Joe Nelson, a top official with Southeast Alaska regional Native corporation Sealaska, said at a reception for lawmakers in Juneau last month.
But just up the street from Sealaska’s offices, at the Alaska Capitol, the issue barely registers.
Many lawmakers in Juneau represent urban districts or regional population centers and aren’t aware of the crisis playing out in the state’s rural, coastal communities; instead, they’re focused on state schools funding and a widening budget deficit.
Those who do represent coastal areas say they have to balance the interests of village constituents with the interests of another, politically connected group: existing fishermen in hub towns and urban areas who depend on their harvests to feed their families — and who could be negatively affected by legislative change.
There’s also still no consensus among advocates about how, precisely, the law should be adjusted.
The result is that despite growing discontent with the 1973 law, and a widening coalition of stakeholders who support changing it, the issue has gone nowhere in Juneau. Advocates hoped for a hearing on the subject during this year’s legislative session, but one never materialized, and lawmakers have proposed no bills to address the problem.
“We’re operating under a law that’s been in place for 52 years, and it’s broke — it’s not meeting the demands of today,” said Robin Samuelsen, a Native leader from the salmon-rich region of Bristol Bay. The system needs to be changed, he said, or rural Alaska communities “are not going to survive.”
“One by one, they’re going to disappear,” he said.
RELATED: The last skipper in Ouzinkie: How Gulf of Alaska villages lost their Native fishing fleets
The 1973 law, known as the Limited Entry Act, was designed to make commercial fishing more profitable and sustainable by limiting the number of boats on the water.
Skippers who had been operating at the time largely qualified for permits without having to buy them. But a provision called “free transferability” meant those permits could be sold on the open market.
Over the years, rural Native communities have lost hundreds to Alaska’s larger population centers and other states as owners sold out or took permits with them when they moved.
Earlier this year, Northern Journal sent a survey on limited entry and rural fisheries access to 16 state senators and representatives whose districts border the Gulf of Alaska; none completed it. Approached by a reporter at the Capitol, several lawmakers declined to discuss the issues; some pleaded ignorance.
“We’re going to work on it, and we’ll try to do all we can,” Senate President Gary Stevens said. “But I don’t see any reason I need to meet with you on this.”
Stevens for 25 years has represented Kodiak Island, whose Indigenous villages were once home to proud commercial fishing fleets and a multi-generation heritage of fish-related trade.
Those communities have seen some of the state’s steepest permit losses since lawmakers approved limited entry more than 50 years ago.
One village, Ouzinkie, has a single skipper left in its harbor.
’What’s the holdup?’
Butch Laiti started in the commercial fishing industry as a teenager in Juneau, where his family was part of a big Native fleet that harvested salmon from the Taku River outside of town.
At 76 years old, he’s watched for decades as members of his local tribe have sold off their boats and permits — making them largely bystanders as others harvest the salmon once claimed as tribal property.
Today, Laiti says he’s one of the few Native fishermen left in his area. And the Tlingit elder wants to pass his decades of maritime expertise and knowledge to a new generation.
Laiti is the president of a local tribal government, the Douglas Indian Association, and under his leadership, the tribe acquired a parcel of waterfront property in Juneau where it hopes to one day build a communally owned fish processing plant.
And, in 2022, the tribe spent $210,000 on a commercial fishing boat: a 42-foot gillnetter, which will double as a marine debris cleanup vessel.
Then, Laiti went to the state agency that oversees access to Alaska’s commercial fisheries to ask: Could the tribe also buy a permit to harvest salmon? That would give Laiti and other aging skippers the chance to take turns running the vessel and training aspiring young fishermen.
But the answer from the agency’s chairman was a hard no: The limited entry law only allows ownership by individuals, not by collectives such as companies or tribes. The lawmakers who designed the system in the 1970s wanted to keep fishing from being taken over by corporate interests.
If the members of Laiti’s tribe want to own a permit and operate their boat collectively, they would have to change the law — a daunting proposition for an organization with no lobbyist and little muscle in Alaska’s Capitol.
But a broader network of advocates has also been readying an organized push for legislative reform. It includes the Indigenous-owned regional corporations for Southeast Alaska, Bristol Bay and Kodiak, along with The Nature Conservancy.
Those groups haven’t decided on specific legislative changes to push. But Laiti says that tribal ownership would be one straightforward fix to the limited entry law.
“This is ours. It always has been ours, and because we joined the United States of America, somehow we have lost control of everything that has belonged to us,” Laiti said. “If we’ve got to buy back our heritage, then so be it.”
He added a question for lawmakers: “What’s the holdup?”
‘Fiercely’ opposed
One reason for the holdup: the thousands of commercial fishermen who already own permits entitling them to chase a share of the harvest.
One group of such fishermen — a trade organization representing Southeast Alaska’s fleet of salmon gillnetters — ”fiercely” opposed a previous legislative proposal to allow community trusts to own permits, according to one of its leaders.
In an email, Max Worhatch, executive director of the United Southeast Alaska Gillnetters Association, rejected the idea that lawmakers should change the permit system to boost rural fishermen.
Native corporations and a regional fisheries nonprofit in Bristol Bay have plenty of capital, Worhatch said, and both can “easily afford” to support rural residents seeking state loans that are available to all Alaskans.
In fact, that regional fisheries nonprofit, Bristol Bay Economic Development Corp., already has a program that subsidizes local permit ownership. But it hasn’t stopped permits from leaving the region, and in fact, the losses have still accelerated in recent years, according to state data.
“We don’t have enough candidates from our communities stepping forward,” said Samuelsen, who served as the nonprofit’s board chair for three decades. “A lot of them say, ‘We don’t have the capital or the money to get involved.’”
Defenders of the current system say that the decline of the commercial fishing industry in remote villages is less about the limited supply of permits and more about the lack of demand for them.
“There are not tons of folks breaking down the doors to get into fishing,” Jerry McCune, a longtime Cordova-based fisherman and trade group lobbyist, wrote in a response to a Northern Journal survey of industry players.
McCune and some other industry veterans argue that factors outside the state’s control are at play: closures of processing plants in remote areas, shifts in salmon runs and reduced competition among the seafood companies vying to buy each vessel’s catch.
They also worry that even small changes to the permit regime risk upending the whole limited entry system — and, potentially, invite legal challenges.
“Limited entry is a very complicated document,” McCune said. “Change one thing and limited entry could collapse.”
Attorneys for the state have raised questions about the constitutionality of ideas like permit trusts.
But Jim Brennan, a longtime Alaska attorney who provided legal support to the attempt to create those trusts a decade ago, dismissed McCune’s concerns. The overall permit system, he said, has survived previous court challenges.
“I think that’s kind of a scare tactic,” he said. “It’s not a house of cards.”
‘Does it force the other side down?’
Lawmakers say they need to approach the issue of permit access deliberately — balancing the needs of rural communities with those of existing fishermen.
Kodiak Rep. Louise Stutes, who chairs the House Fisheries Committee, said in a statement that any legislative proposals would have to accommodate different constituencies.
“I certainly support reducing barriers to accessing fisheries for Alaskans and keeping permits in rural communities,” she said. “However, I also believe that any potential change to limited entry needs to be the result of a stakeholder-driven process with existing permit holders, rural constituents, affected communities and the Department of Fish and Game.”
The Alaska fishing industry’s own broader economic crisis is making the policy discussion even more sensitive. Oversupply, flagging demand and growing global competition have depressed prices paid to fishermen in recent years — putting many skippers in the red.
Sitka Rep. Rebecca Himschoot, who represents multiple Southeast Alaska fishing hub towns, as well as small Native communities that have seen sharp losses in permit ownership, said that the increasingly tough outlook for the industry has complicated the task for lawmakers.
“It’s really hard to say we’re going to come in and fix this problem that’s been cooking since 1970 — when people in the fishery now can’t even make their living,” she said.
Nonetheless, Himschoot added, she’s alarmed by permit losses in villages in her district and wants to explore ways to restore them without harming current permit owners.
But she acknowledged that the issue is politically delicate.
“When we lift up one side, does it force the other side down?” she asked.