Opinion: Tribal governance of Alaska fisheries? What’s the catch?

One of the most significant conservation issues in state and federal fisheries today is a need for more equitable tribal representation and understanding of Indigenous knowledge. The assumptions and metrics of success baked into our state and federal constitutions, laws and policies directly conflict with long-term sustainability and, most importantly, directly oppose how the “Last Frontier” became and remains relatively abundant today.

It is because of tribal governance and thousands of years of stewardship that our state and federal governing bodies have authority on any harvestable surplus for commercial, personal, and subsistence use. Tribes have always lived in a reciprocal relationship with our lands and water; one of the most beautiful things about our collective Indigenous knowledge and thought are the unique relationships we have developed with other tribes and, most importantly, our relationship with our animal and fish relations. What does it mean to recognize a salmon, our waters, or other “managed” relations as sentient beings with agency, free will and possibly even understand our collective human thoughts and rationale?

As people, as “stewards” with delegated authority or an Anglo–Christian ideal of control and Western understanding of the use and what quantifies as appropriate use, there is only one answer to any question regarding how we best conserve. That answer will always be incorporation, individualism, control, and power through our state and federal laws that recognize PhDs and now lobbyists’ ideals of “conservation.”

We as a collective society have stopped listening to our small-boat captains, river fishermen, tribes, elders and expert knowledge-holders who can see past the hypocrisy that industrial representatives, whose 401(k)’s are tied to ensuring business as usual, will never have our collective best interests in mind.

Suppose we can collectively look past our assumptions and colonized minds. In that case, we will see the stories our elders have always taught us are true, our Indigenous laws and covenants are factual, and those guiding principles are needed more today than ever. When we as a collective can agree on something small, or possibly even the fundamental teachings of our elders, not to take too much, to share, to have humility, and respect the world around us, everything around us has agency and free will. This completely changes the focus point of “management.” We can get past the paternalism, the control, and the general assumption that we somehow know best by using PhD models by those who have spent literal days in the field observing, testing, and understanding vs. our millennia-old Indigenous ways of knowing that are so advanced that our management, our relationships, and responsibilities through law and covenants to the world around us are baked into action-oriented songs, dances, and our traditional stories.

Our tribes have recognized that everything around us has a spirit, not in the way you’re likely thinking. Tribes are the original stewards and orators of abundance-based management, and unfortunately, we have not had the chance to develop into contemporary forms of governance.

Our elders have always had the answers; no one is asking the right questions; it’s very likely our tribes would have commodified our resources, utilizing lands and waters near our nations, driving cars and planes, and using cellphones to talk our national languages. As a society, if we want to understand the issue today, we need to understand our past and look at how intentionally colonization happened across our nations, without our tribal consent, and for what purpose. A local Bristol Bay elder has always said, “(we the tribes) have always known the right answers; you (we) are not asking the right questions.”

Craig Kaviak Chythlook of Fairbanks is fisheries policy director for Native Peoples Action.

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