Our salmon are vanishing — and the State of Alaska is letting it happen

Migrating summer chum and Chinook salmon are seen on July 7, 2007, in the Tozitna River, a Yukon River tributary. (Jason Post/U.S. Bureau of Land Management)

By Brooke Woods

I live along the Yukon River, where my family has harvested salmon for countless generations. Every summer used to bring the same reassuring sight: Busy fish camps. Full smokehouses. Families coming together to pass down traditions that have thrived for thousands of years. Happy kids, curious babies, loving grandparents, moms, dads, aunties, uncles and cousins. Each is an intrinsic part of a beautiful summer day at the smokehouse. 

Today, summers mean less time on the river, empty smokehouses and fish camps, and no intergenerational learning. The State of Alaska tells my community and over 50 other Indigenous communities in Alaska and Canada that we are the ones who must stop fishing, we are the ones who must sacrifice, we are the ones who must somehow bear the burden of a crisis we did not create. 

Salmon were the living thread binding generations. Now, they’re a precious memory, one my youngest child has yet to experience. How can this be?

Over the past three decades, by NOAA’s own data, more than one million Chinook and many millions of chum salmon have been killed and discarded as bycatch in the pollock trawl fishery. According to the best available genetic information, at least 114,000 Chinook salmon and 615,000 chum salmon from Western and Interior Alaska rivers – including the Yukon – were part of this bycatch in the past 15 years alone. 

At the same time, runs of Chinook and chum in the Yukon, Kuskokwim, Norton Sound and even historically abundant Bristol Bay tributaries have collapsed. Early numbers from 2025 show no meaningful recovery: Yukon Chinook remain at record lows, chum returns again failed to meet escapement goals and food insecurity is rising sharply.

Our true wealth and health is a freezer of dry fish, half dry, whole fish. Every single part of the salmon holds value and meets the traditional dietary needs of thousands of families and Elders. From the tail to the head, every part is carefully taken care of, eaten, shared, and put away for the harshest and most extreme temperatures. 

Decades of unmanaged and discarded salmon have impacted so many families. People in my region now rely on food aid in places where salmon once filled every smokehouse. Elders can no longer teach their grandchildren what was taught to them. Families are forced to choose between buying expensive store food — if they can afford it — or leaving the region entirely. 

This is an ecological crisis, a cultural trauma, an economic emergency and a public-health disaster. Entire communities — especially Alaska Native villages whose identities are inseparable from salmon — are being pushed to the brink of extinction right alongside the fish.

Yet the State of Alaska and the North Pacific Fishery Management Council act as if nothing is wrong. They hide behind bureaucratic language and point to other agencies or factors as the problem, avoiding responsibility and accountability. They talk about draggers’ bycatch as a percentage of the total of millions of tons of catch, echoing trawl industry talking points that minimize the fact that a small percentage of an enormous number is, cumulatively, an enormous number. 

They ignore what Indigenous people have been saying for decades: when runs are this low, every salmon matters. Beyond that, every egg matters. When escapements fail year after year, entire age classes disappear, and the very survival of a species hangs in the balance, bycatch could be the difference between recovery and collapse.

The State controls most in-river management through the Alaska Department of Fish and Game. Alaska’s Governor controls the majority of appointments to the Council — the very body shaping offshore rules. This is not a divided system. It is the choice of the State Administration to, with one hand, give trawlers a permission slip to kill hundreds of thousands of salmon offshore, while the other hand closes our subsistence fisheries and criminalizes us for feeding our families. 

On the Yukon River, the State of Alaska and Government of Canada forced a seven-year moratorium and ambitious escapement goal for Chinook salmon. The in-season fall chum salmon run estimates have been below the minimum drainage-wide escapement goal that does not support mainstem subsistence harvest. We have absolutely no subsistence salmon fishing opportunities.

Hard bycatch limits and adherence to subsistence law could help us save our salmon. Our lives depend on the science of Indigenous knowledge — and putting our right to fish above corporate profits.

Our salmon are being pushed toward extirpation. And so are we.

• Brooke Woods is a lifelong fisherwoman from Rampart, Alaska, on the Yukon River, and a University of Alaska Fairbanks Tribal Governance of Fisheries Spring 2026 graduate. Alaska Beacon is part of States Newsroom, the nation’s largest state-focused nonprofit news organization.