Katie Kangas’ salmon memories live in her body. They are the ache of the knife in her hand after hours of cutting fish in summertime. The heft of a wooden pole loaded with scored fillets. The smell of cottonwood smoldering in her corrugated metal smokehouse.
Kangas is a grandmother now. Her ancestors, Koyukon Athabascans, harvested fish for thousands of years on this stretch of the Yukon River, 200 miles west of Fairbanks, Alaska, by small plane.
Here, in the village of Ruby, children have always learned how to handle fish by watching and repeating. Teaching them kept elders vital. To her children and grandchildren, Kangas passed on bits of language and details about the natural world, like the way the cottonwood trees tell you the chinook salmon are coming by letting their downy seeds float on the wind. Knowing how to catch, cut, dry, smoke and can salmon is how a person knows they are from here. The chew of a half-dry salmon morsel, oil and phenols lingering, tastes like this place. Or at least this is how it was.
Chinook are better known in Alaska as king salmon. The massive, fat-rich fish that people in this predominantly Indigenous village always relied on to fill their freezers and caches for winter have dwindled alarmingly over the past two decades. Scientists link the decline to water temperature increases related to human-caused climate change, and there are also concerns about salmon incidentally caught in the ocean by large operations trawling for bottom fish. In the late 1990s, chinook numbers became so paltry that managers began restricting fishing, including subsistence — fishing by locals for their food supplies. A major crash in 2008 nearly curtailed the commercial fishery, and it never recovered. Managers closed the river to almost all fishing in 2021. Still, there has been little improvement.
People adapted. Ruby, a village of 150 that’s only accessible by boat or plane, kept up the rhythm of summer processing, working with smaller, leaner chum salmon, which they had previously caught and dried mostly to feed their sled dogs. But those chum runs, once relatively reliable pulses in the spring and fall, began failing in 2020, taking scientists and residents by surprise. In response, the Alaska Department of Fish and Game limited and then closed both the Yukon chinook and chum fisheries. For the last few summers, for maybe the first time in more than 10,000 years, there was almost no fishing for either species allowed on the Yukon River at all. Without fishing, the practice of going to fish camp with family, an essential Alaska Native tradition that brings relatives from urban centers to the villages and enables the passage of knowledge about culture and the land from one generation to the next, couldn’t happen. Its absence left a hollowed-out, idle anxiety, Kangas said.
“What am I going to do?” she asked in July, looking out her kitchen window toward the river. “There’s a big empty river out there.”
DOWN A BRUSHY BLUFF, Kangas can see the Yukon, a mile or more across, granite-colored, swirling. It is pure force, born of glacial melt and rain, grinding boulders to silt, dragging blades of springtime ice over the bank, shaving white spruce and trembling aspen to nothing. The third-longest river in North America, it drives 2,000 miles from Canada to the Bering Sea. The salmon runs have always been a counterforce, muscling upriver, part of the longest salmon migration in the world.
Until very recently, people along the river relied mainly on chinook — Oncorhynchus tshawytscha, the largest of the salmon species. Historically iconic fish that could weigh as much as 100 pounds, their flesh was heavy with oil to fuel them as they pushed upriver. Chinook have the longest life cycle, generally seven years or so, during which they spend time in the ocean eating and growing, before returning to the Yukon to spawn. Over time, for reasons scientists are still studying, the average size of chinook salmon across the species’ range, from California to the Yukon, has decreased and more fish have been returning earlier to spawn. Chum, also called keta or dog salmon, have also always been plentiful in the river. They have a life cycle of three to six years, and their large coral eggs, prized in the Asian market, were harvested commercially for years. The river also has a small run of silver or coho salmon, which have recently had some of their lowest runs on record.
There used to be so many fish, everyone caught enough to eat it all winter and to share. One big chinook brought so much meat, people could fish commercially and support their families. Last year, Kangas began writing down the things she missed about the way fishing used to be:
“What am I going to do? There’s a big empty river out there.”
First task, clean out the smokehouse, scrub the buckets, poles and totes. Have salt and smoke wood ready. Next, send out the fishermen and women and wait. Who would be that lucky one to get that first king? The first king was a celebration! The fish was deeply admired before decisions were made on how to prepare it and how to share it with family and elders. Soon anyone who tried was successful. I fished with a partner for many years and as soon as we got our first king I would buy her a six-pack to celebrate the return of our happiness. Later when our daughters were fishing I’d buy them candy to celebrate. Decades of skills were passed from the generation of my mother-in-law to mine, to my daughters to their children, and then, suddenly, it stopped.
Government fish managers are studying the causes and trying to stem the decline. In April, the Alaska Department of Fish and Game signed a seven-year agreement with Fisheries and Oceans Canada, which some people are calling a moratorium, pausing chinook fishing for the length of a full life cycle in hopes of helping the fish recover. If the run shows signs of recovery, the entities agreed, chinook fishing could be permitted again before that. Chum fishing, which is managed separately and re-evaluated yearly, was also limited, pending improvement.
The pause on chinook fishing in particular requires deep sacrifice on the part of Yukon River villages. Many on the river, including Kangas, are angry that while their fishing has been curtailed, large commercial trawlers, fishing the bottom of the Bering Sea with massive nets for pollock, cod and other fish, are still allowed to incidentally catch some salmon that would otherwise return to the rivers. The incidental catch, called bycatch, is made up of non-target species. There is also worry about overfishing in general in the sea, and what the large nets that are dragged across the bottom might be doing to the ecosystem. Bottom trawling has been linked to fishery collapse in other parts of the world.
According to the North Pacific Fishery Management Council, fewer than 20,000 chinook salmon were caught as bycatch in 2023. Genetic sampling suggests that less than 1% of those were headed to the middle and upper Yukon River. More than 100,000 chum salmon were caught as bycatch that year; most of those came from hatcheries in Asia, but a little more than 2% were returning to the upper and middle Yukon. The council is considering management changes to further limit bycatch of chum.
Scientists say that climate change is a larger factor than bycatch in the disappearance of the fish. Many Alaska Native people living in villages along the river agree that climate is a factor, but also believe that the government should regulate the trawling industry to further limit the catching of salmon. Alaska Native leaders argue that tribes should have more say in the management process, where they say Indigenous people don’t have meaningful influence, while commercial fishing interests — with paid lobbying organizations — have considerable sway. Meanwhile, as they face years to come without chinook salmon, Indigenous river communities are looking at ways to hold on to the traditions and flavors that have brought families together every year.
In Ruby and more than 40 other villages, home to 12,000 mostly Indigenous people, there’s a crisis not just to do with nutrition and economics — salmon is a major food source that offsets the high cost of flown-in groceries — but with culture. With a seven-year pause, a generation of children is growing up without an opportunity to practice the skills that sit at the center of their identity, Kangas said. It’s one more example of how climate disruptions in Alaska, parts of which are warming almost four times faster than the rest of the world, are also cultural disruptions.
Several years have come and gone with no salmon. The vast Yukon is empty. Sometimes fishing disaster checks arrive. Happiness for a day. $800.00 dollars can buy one load of groceries from Fairbanks including handling and freight and it is enough for a few weeks.
By the time they were eight years old, the oldest among Kangas’ 14 grandchildren and five step grandchildren knew how to help when their parents were pulling in the net. They knew how to drive a boat. They could hold a knife and feed a smokehouse fire, their hair and clothes absorbing the smell, an essential scent of summertime.
In Ruby and more than 40 other villages, home to 12,000 mostly Indigenous people, there’s a crisis not just to do with nutrition and economics but with culture.
And, they knew the tastes of things. They teethed on salmon strips as infants. They ate dinner as a family, with a meal of baked fish and beets to mark the start of the season. But Kangas’ youngest grandchildren won’t grow up with that same knowledge.
This summer, Kangas found a jar of king salmon in her cache, forgotten and spoiled. It must have been at least five years old, from before they knew how bad things could get, before every jar of fish became impossibly precious. The meat was a pale pink, the rendered oil filled the jar to the top. It brought a wave of grief, knowing she’d let the jar go to waste.
One of the questions Indian Health Services asks is, “Are you depressed?” Standard question. Standard answer is always no. I don’t think that is true anymore for all of us who harvested king salmon. When our source of salmon disappeared, it was a weird depression that could not be explained in a clinical setting but there were signs. What do you do now in mid-June and July?
BEFORE THE CHINOOK population began to slide, in the early 1990s, the river was home to a robust commercial fishery that reached all the way to Canada and buoyed village economies. People fished with fish wheels, which operate like watermills, powered by the current, outfitted with wire baskets that scoop fish from the current and deliver them to a holding tub. Then they’d process the fish onshore, heading and gutting them.
In the smokehouses, the heavy fillets, scored and hanging from poles over a smoldering fire, dripped with oil. Commercial fishing on the river fell off as the chinook runs did. Subsistence harvests began to fall as well. Fewer and fewer chinook salmon made it all the way across the international border to the Yukon Territory to spawn.
Fisheries managers’ goal is for 71,000 chinook to make it to Canada, but that’s a long way off. In 2023, the sonar fish count in the lower river, at Pilot Station, recorded the second-lowest chinook count ever, with 58,500 fish. (The lowest was in 2022.) About 28,000 of the fish that entered the river there were of the type that was headed to Canada, but only about 15,000 made it. By September 2024, about 64,500 fish had been counted at the mouth of the river, though only 24,000 made it across the Canadian border, again far short of the goal.
The situation is more mixed for the chum, which have two runs, in the summer and the fall. In 2023, the summer run was projected to be between 280,000 to 900,000. A healthy 846,000 passed the Pilot Station sonar. But in the fall, as many as 602,000 fish were projected to pass into the river. Only about 290,000 made it, short of the number needed to open the river to fishing. Just over 22,000 of those fish passed the Eagle sonar station at the Canadian border, less than one-fifth of the average fall run. The 2024 summer run again showed signs of improvement, with approximately 758,000 fish passing into the river by mid-July. The fall run, however, was estimated at 200,000, compared to a historical average of 900,000 salmon. A smaller run of silver or coho salmon also had historically low numbers.
Salmon bodies carry memories, evidence of the lives they lived in the oceans and rivers, stresses from heat and poor nutrition. Recent science has shown that the chinook face a number of obstacles related to the river’s temperature. In the Arctic region, air temperatures have increased by more than 2 degrees Celsius, or over 3 degrees Fahrenheit, over the last 100 years. The northern part of the planet is warming more than twice as fast as the rest of the world. Temperatures higher than 18 degrees Celsius, or 64.4 degrees Fahrenheit, have been measured most years in the river since the 1990s.
Warmer water makes it harder for fish to reach their spawning grounds. It increases their metabolic rate and their heart’s demand for oxygen, but it also holds less oxygen. It may also make fish more vulnerable to a parasite called Ichthyophonus, which infects their organs, especially the heart.
Vanessa von Biela, an Anchorage-based fish biologist with the U.S. Geological Survey, conducted a study with other scientists in 2016 and 2017, looking for evidence of heat stress — basically the fish version of heat stroke — among Yukon salmon.
“Overall, it was 50% of the chinook salmon we sampled had evidence of heat stress,” she said.
In the years after that study, the water got even warmer. In 2019, record high temperatures and drought caused multi-species salmon die-offs across the state because in-river temperatures exceeded about 70 degrees Fahrenheit, the threshold at which it becomes hard for fish to survive.
Next, von Biela and Kathrine Howard, a scientist with the Alaska Department of Fish and Game, studied how heat stress was impacting fish offspring.
“We found that, indeed, there is a strong relationship between the river conditions that parents face and how many offspring come out in the next generation when they’re counted in the ocean,” von Biela said. “In years where the parents faced warmer migration temperatures, especially when those temperatures were warm early in the season, they produced fewer juveniles on average.”
The scientists also theorize that warmer water may be changing the prey available to fish in the ocean, while also increasing their metabolisms. Some fish are deficient in thiamine, another sign of a change in their diets, which causes developmental problems, Howard said.
The story of the recent chum decline is also connected to warmer water, though the picture is not as grim. Ed Farley, a Juneau-based fish biologist with the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, recently completed a study with other scientists that looked at chum salmon in the ocean. They found that over a couple extremely warm years, between 2017 and 2019, the juvenile chum diet changed. In cooler years, scientists found more Oikopleura, a marine invertebrate, in their stomachs. But in warmer years, the fish relied on less-nutritious jellyfish, and so they went into their first winters at sea with low body fat. The ocean remained warm over the winter. Returns in the subsequent years were low.
“We’ve seen chum salmon respond negatively to these events, and, you know, had really poor returns,” Farley said. “However, if you’ve been monitoring what’s going on in the Yukon recently, you know the numbers of (summer) chum salmon are starting to come back.”
Even as chum recover, the risk of warmer water and record warm years remains. To the extent that river temperatures correlate with air temperatures, there will likely be more years like 2019, said Rick Thoman, a climate specialist with the International Arctic Research Center at University of Alaska Fairbanks. The river’s volume, which is connected to snowmelt, also matters. Years with less snow may mean the river is more likely to warm with the air temperatures, he said.
In the Bering Sea, where the fish go to eat and grow, the long-term trend is for earlier spring sea ice melts, allowing the sea to absorb more of the sun’s heat when the sun is high in the sky.
“So, in the future, the combination of events like 2019, with very early sea ice loss and hot early to mid-summer will remain episodic but occur more often in the next few decades,” he wrote in an email.
Chinook salmon runs — disrupted in part by human-caused problems like dams and pollution as well as climate-related flooding and droughts — are faltering all along the West Coast, from the Sacramento River through to Canada. There are many reasons Alaska should be one of the last places on earth where salmon are thriving; the state has few dams and its salmon habitat is perhaps the most pristine in the world. The Yukon River is at the northernmost extent of the salmon’s range, von Biela said.
“If it’s already too warm here, it’s such a sobering thought,” she said.
THE VILLAGE OF RUBY sits on a hillside that slopes toward the river. Metal-roofed single-story houses nestle along its few roads, their grassy yards surrounded by tall trees, most with a smokehouse outside. On the wooded edges of town are the weathered remnants of old houses and businesses and derelict fish wheels. Ruby started out as a turn-of-the-century gold mining town, staked at a time when white prospectors were coming from the Lower 48 by steamship, traversing the White Pass or Chilkoot trails and then heading northwest on the Yukon River into the interior of Alaska.
Prospectors — many European by birth — found and developed several productive gold mines near Ruby, and by the early 1900s the area had drawn thousands of residents. Soon after, the population declined, census numbers show. Men left to fight in World War I, and a fire and flood tore through the village. In the post-war era, residents from Kokrines, a longtime Athabascan trading village nearby, moved to Ruby, taking advantage of the opportunity to go to school. Many Alaska Native people living in the village now have white prospectors and miners in their family trees.
Patrick McCarty, 71, the First Chief of the Village of Ruby, grew up going to a fish camp three miles out of town, heading there right after school got out every spring. When he was young, a single chinook could be as big as a child in your arms. Fish of that size are long gone now.
“All summer, getting kings,” he said. “We had two wheels going back then to fish, with one above the camp and one below.”
Back then, people like miners and mail carriers still traveled a lot using dog teams, he said. His family boarded their dogs in the summer. They used to dry the chum salmon or “dog fish” and stack them in bales.
“They were like about 50-55 pounds per bale, and we sold them to the local trading post,” he said. “That offset the cost of, you know, living.”
When he grew up, he invested in a big fish wheel for commercial fishing, but even in the early 1980s, he noticed that the runs were getting smaller and more variable. Soon it didn’t seem like a wise line of work.
There are many reasons Alaska should be one of the last places on earth where salmon are thriving; the state has few dams and its salmon habitat is perhaps the most pristine in the world.
He found other work and fished only for subsistence, even as commercial fishing continued on the river. Looking back, he thinks that everyone took too much — the commercial interests and the residents.
“One year when the fish first crashed, (in the early 2000s) when the salmon crashed, I caught two king salmon,” he said. “My wife and I, we made do with that. We made steaks and had enough for boiling. We didn’t eat it all the time, we ate chicken or beef or pork chops.”
There is no doubt that the warming water is harming the fish, he said, but the state should have managed the fishery more conservatively.
“The state did wrong by allowing us to overharvest, where our every meal was salmon,” he said.
He used to always take a picture of himself with his catch, standing in the doorway of the cabin on his boat. Over time, compared to the doorway, the fish started getting smaller. He really noticed it in 2019, he said. They also felt different in the net.
“I noticed then, they weren’t even fighting as hard,” he told me.
He, too, was concerned about the bycatch in the open ocean, the mile-long nets and the many huge ships. Even if communities along the river had taken less, maybe it wouldn’t have mattered, he said.
For his part, he tries to guide his grandson to the river and teach him about not taking too much. The last time they were able to fish together for chinook, he said, his grandson was 9 or 10. His grandson learned how to untangle the net when it got caught up, and McCarty showed him how to keep the catch cool and bring it home.
“My grandson, he would wash the fish, I’d split them, and my late wife did the rest,” McCarty said.
They got a few extra, and McCarty was able to show his grandson the act of bringing fish to relatives who didn’t have any, an essential cultural value.
“He participated in that. He learned sharing, giving,” he said. “I was fortunate to have him with me when there were still fish.”
IN MIDSUMMER, just upriver from Ruby on Straight Island, the village holds a culture camp for children to learn about how their family members lived off the land. This past year, Rachael Kangas Madros, Katie Kangas’ daughter, ran the camp for about 30 kids. Halfway through the second day, the children gathered under a massive tarp around a small fire in the pouring rain. The kids, who ranged in age from toddlers to high schoolers, had already learned to build fire and shelter. Now it was time to talk with those older than them.
Kangas Madros and Serena “Cuucitcuar” Fitka laid out the complicated way the government manages fish — a mix of federal and state rules. Both women work for the Yukon River Drainage Fisheries Association, a nonprofit that advocates for village interests with government managers. They also talked about the controversial plan, put forward for study last year by Alaska Gov. Mike Dunleavy, R, to supplement the river’s salmon with hatchery fish. Historically, hatcheries have had mixed results elsewhere, sometimes leading to declines among wild fish.
“Where’s the salmon eggs gonna come from? Are they gonna come from our rivers, or are they gonna come from other streams?” Fitka, the executive director of the association, asked.
She said that the fishing closure is something people are just trying to get used to.
“People are still having to struggle with not being at fish camp, because it is so ingrained in our system,” she said. “People get the whole family involved, there are people that you always see then, the communities would come back and be together. And that’s not happening anymore.”
The kids at culture camp would learn about cutting and smoking with a few fish, she said. But they wouldn’t be chinook salmon; they’d be donated fish from another part of the state. And the kids wouldn’t be able to experience how it felt to catch them, or to cut so many their hands automatically knew how to navigate the blade along the spine and slice along the rib bones, without any waste.
“We still need to teach them what we still know or remember about fishing, even though there’s no fish,” she said.
“People get the whole family involved, there are people that you always see then, the communities would come back and be together. And that’s not happening anymore.”
Kangas Madros understood that the seven-year agreement was an effort to conserve the fish and rebuild runs. “But what’s upsetting is to know that elders have passed on and did not get their traditional cultural food that they have grown up on, that they have harvested and that they have eaten,” she said.
In the village, there’s a rhythm to things, she said. Moose hunting in the fall, and in the winter she works on crafts with salmon skin and bones. Summer rolls around and everybody gears up to fish. Fishing is at the center of summer activities.
“So it’s like a cycle,” she said. “And now the cycle is broken.”
And, given the unstable climate and the continued bycatch waste in the ocean, there’s no knowing if things will ever return to how they were.
“We don’t have the certainty that yes, in seven years, there’s going to be the salmon for our kids to take upon themselves to learn that tradition and culture and value and that food security. It’s tough,” she said.
Diloola Erickson is tribal resource stewardship division director with Tanana Chiefs Conference, a consortium of the 42 Indigenous villages of Interior Alaska, many of them along the Yukon River. People know that climate change is contributing to what is happening with the fish, and they have for many years observed the chinook salmon getting smaller. Some tribal members, though, object to how both fish and trawling are managed.
“I think there’s mixed feelings about (the fishing pause). I think there’s a lot of people that agree with it, and there’s a lot of people that don’t agree with the way that it was done,” she said. “It was … a moratorium placed on our people and our fish without our input or consent. And I think that the process of it coming about was not an equitable process or an inclusive process.”
KATE KANGAS REMEMBERS the nights when fishing began after midnight, when Kangas Madros and her husband, Ryan Madros, would ride out on the aluminum skiff under the all-night sun. They’d unfurl a net and let it soak while they drifted downriver with the current. When they pulled it in, they’d pick out the fish and cast out again, until the boat held 20 or 30 silver bodies. They’d ride home in the early morning and head to bed while Katie and her husband, Ivan, took over.
It had been a custom for the family to fish in the second week of June, when the mosquitoes run thick and the potatoes and beets are just starting to fill in the garden. In the backyard, they always set up a little plastic pool for the grandchildren and let them play on their own. Ivan removed the fish heads and gutted them. Katie took each fish from him, washed it, split the body, and hung it to dry. She chose some fish to brine before hanging them up again, the ever-present breeze forming what’s called a pellicle, a tacky outer layer that holds in moisture and can absorb smoke. She’d have to watch carefully that the flies didn’t get in them. She knew by smell when they were drying right or not.
What happened next was directed by Kangas Madros. Rachael would cut the strips of smoked fish so they’d fit into a jar. She’d add a teaspoon of brown sugar, fresh jalapeños, and chopped garlic, and put batches of 36 into the pressure canner for 90 minutes. You could wrap your hands around each one when it was done and cooled, the weight of a jar a particular kind of wealth people know on the river.
Fishing in Alaska right now is a story of haves and have-nots. Red salmon in places like Bristol Bay and the Kenai Peninsula are having record years, while other runs, like chums and chinook on the Yukon, are failing. Over the last few years, Tanana Chiefs Conference has distributed frozen red salmon to the communities on the river that couldn’t fish. The fish from the tribe were from Bristol Bay, 400 miles south.
They were meant to keep people fed, but receiving them underscored the grief people felt over not being able to do the work of fishing. The work is as important as the food. Ivan Kangas called them “charity fish.” They were not a species Kangas was used to processing or eating, but she decided to try to put them up anyway. She got 10 fish, and her relatives had received donated fish as well, so they decided to pool them and fire up the smokehouse. Once the fish thawed, she eyed their bodies. Did she need to remove the scales? She called around. Nobody knew.
“I know nothing about these fish,” she said.
6 a.m. and coffee. All hands on deck. Grandkids were sent to gather birch bark. There were surprised shouts from the woods. “Gramma! Look, berries.” Gathering birch bark was always a fun task for the young ones and soon bags were full of the papery shreds of the tree. Mason asked me why we needed birch bark. I reminded him that Grampa needs it to make fire in the smokehouse to smoke the fish.
“I no remember,” he said, handing me the bag.
Mason, who we nicknamed “the otter” because he loved salmon strips from the time he cut his first tooth. Would he see long strips of smoked king salmon again, enjoy the organized chaos of cousins running free while Gramma, Mom and Aunties worked all day in the smokehouse? Would he help carry poles of dried strips to dump on the table and ask for one long uncut strip to proudly munch on?
Kangas split and scored the red salmon, making vertical cuts in each fillet, leaving them attached near the tail. Then she hung them over poles, climbed the ladder and hooked them up high in the smokehouse. The work, the smell of smoke, brought comfort. She took down some when they were “half-smoked,” finished on the outside, but still soft on the inside, a delicacy the elders miss most.
“The scored red fish looked beautiful hanging on the rack. We fired up the grill and enjoyed our traditional first taste of salmon with rice, pickled beets and pilot bread. It is a small lean type of salmon, but we savor every bite.”
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This article appeared in the November 2024 print edition of the magazine with the headline “When there were fish.”
