Lifeblood.

For millennia salmon has been our lifeblood, touching every community with it’s nutrition.  This has been a hard summer.  The fish have been scarce all over Alaska with the exception of Bristol Bay.  We hope that our salmon are not disappearing and that this summer was just an off year.  Our salmon have to contend with many obstacles to make it home to our streams:  warming waters, hazardous wastes, plastics, pollution, and becoming by-catch of fishermen fishing for other species.  Once they get here,  we make sure the escapement for spawning is sufficient for future years.  Our subsistence foods feed our physical nutritional needs, but also fill our cultural needs; one is just as important as the other.  (Turn the sound down…that is just our constant wind drowning out the sound of splashing salmon.)

2 thoughts on “Lifeblood.

  1. Hopefully your words will echo true and it was just a bad year.

    However now residing outside in civilization I am painfully aware of the number of people our food resource has to feed….

    and their encroachment on the Alaskan Salmon
    may be more a major factor than pollution or climate change.

    1. You just won’t give me an inch, will you, Pete? It is all connected. Much of our fish is scooped up in those enormous nets as by-catch. But science also points out the hazards of pollution and warming ocean. Glad you’re up and about. Is the weather cooling down enough to take your daily walks again?

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