Pollock trawlers say 40,000 Alaska salmon caught as bycatch this year
Alaska’s U.S. Senate race is embroiled in an emotional fight over fish. Salmon that have long sustained Indigenous people are not returning to some Western Alaska rivers, and with the race close, fish are all over political ads across the state.
Many Alaskans rely on salmon to feed their families, but those fish and others are increasingly hard to find. The stakes reach beyond the state’s rivers: the race could affect the balance of power in Washington, D.C. The NPR report notes that President Trump is trying to preemptively block election results in Alaska if the Republican incumbent loses.
Evon Waska lives at the water’s edge, where he said his parents settled when they gave up their nomadic life. “Well, this is my smokehouse, and this is where we make smoke, right?” Waska said. His drying racks should be filled with salmon, but they are empty. Most years now, too few salmon return from the Bering Sea to his river, the Kuskokwim. To conserve fish, government agencies often close the river to fishing, even for people like Waska who fish to feed their families.
Waska blames trawlers — industrial fishing boats miles offshore. “They don’t close the trawlers. They close me and my people first,” he said.
Waska is up against a $1 billion industry, much of it based in Seattle. Trawlers tow sock-shaped nets a quarter mile long, with openings as wide as a football field, to catch pollock — the white fish served as imitation crab in McDonald’s Filet-O-Fish. Also scooped up in those nets are prized king salmon and other fish, caught by accident and wasted, a problem known as bycatch. Alaskans are increasingly angry about it.
The fight has filled the state’s political ads. One ad says Sullivan is championing legislation to reduce bycatch and strengthen Alaska’s fisheries; another says he is taking big money from out-of-state corporate trawlers; a third says Peltola “tells a lot of fish tales to get votes.”
Republican Senator Dan Sullivan has been an ally of the pollock industry, but this year he is touting a new bill. “It’s the most comprehensive bycatch legislation ever to reduce bycatch, protect seafloor habitat,” Sullivan said in an archived recording.
Democratic challenger Mary Peltola, who is Indigenous and from the Kuskokwim, says she would ban factory trawlers, the largest of the pollock fleet, and calls Sullivan’s bill an election-year ploy. “Dan Sullivan reeled in over $300,000 from trawlers and waited until the 11th hour for a half-hearted and half-baked solution,” Peltola said.
Heather Mann, who leads a trawlers association, says scapegoating the pollock fishery will not help western Alaska. “Even if you were to eliminate pollock, the chances of salmon runs being restored, what the science shows us is it would have a minimal impact,” Mann said. So far this year, pollock trawlers say they have caught 40,000 Alaska salmon — waste that is a tiny percentage of the massive pollock harvest.
In the Kuskokwim River village of Kwethluk, the loss is felt most sharply. Subsistence fishing is the main occupation there and the backbone of the culture. Tribal president Mary Nikolai stepped into a neighbor’s cold smokehouse and was pained to see it had gone unused all summer. “Most of the smokehouses are like this. And it’s like a slow trend of closing our workforce out,” she said.
Whoever wins, Nikolai said, she hopes this close Senate race tells the world of the threat the villages face. Liz Ruskin of Alaska Public Media reported from Kwethluk for NPR News.