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ABSTRACT. Indigenous Peoples and salmon in the lands now called Alaska have been closely entwined for at least 12,000 years. Salmon continue to be central to the ways of life of Alaska Natives, contributing to physical, social, economic, cultural, spiritual, psychological, and emotional well-being. Salmon have also become important to Alaskan settlers. Our research and advisory team conducted a synthesis of what is known about these diverse human–salmon relationships, drawing on 865 published scientific studies; Indigenous knowledge; state, federal, and tribal data; archival materials; oral histories; and cross-cultural dialogs at working group meetings. Two important socio-cultural dimensions of salmon–people systems emerged from this synthesis as fundamentally important but largely invisible outside of Indigenous communities and the social science disciplines that work closely with these communities: (1) the deep relationships between Indigenous Peoples and salmon and (2) the pronounced inequities that threaten these relationships and stewardship systems. These deep relationships are evident in the spiritual, cultural, social, and economic centrality of salmon across time and cultures in Alaska. We describe Indigenous salmon stewardship systems for the Tlingit, Ahtna, and Central Yup'ik. The inequities in Alaska's salmon systems are evident in the criminalization and limitation of traditional fishing ways of life and the dramatic alienation of Indigenous fishing rights. The loss of fish camps and legal battles over traditional hunting and fishing rights through time has caused deep hardship and stress. Statewide, the commodification and marketization of commercial fishing rights has dispossessed Indigenous communities from their human and cultural rights to fishing ways of life; as a result, many rural and Indigenous youth struggle to gain access to fishing livelihoods, leaving many fishing communities in a precarious state. These deep relationships and relatively recent fractures have motivated a concerted effort by a group of committed Indigenous and western scholars to better understand the root causes and opportunities for redress, as well as to document the breadth of research that has already been conducted, in an effort to improve the visibility of these often-overlooked dimensions of our salmon systems.
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A long evolutionary reach for fishing nets
Adaptive evolution is not just the stuff of geological history books—it is an ongoing process across ecosystems and can occur on a year-to-year time scale. However, in a world rapidly changing as the result of human activity, it can be challenging to differentiate which changes result from evolution rather than other mechanisms ( 1 ). On page 420 of this issue, Czorlich et al. ( 2 ) reveal a fascinating example that suggests that commercial fishing drove rapid evolutionary change in an Atlantic salmon population over the past 40 years. Their findings are surprising in two ways—that fishing for salmon drove evolution in the opposite direction from what one would typically expect, and that salmon evolution also was affected by fishing for other species in the ecosystem.
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- Award ID(s):
- 1743711
- PAR ID:
- 10373843
- Date Published:
- Journal Name:
- Science
- Volume:
- 376
- Issue:
- 6591
- ISSN:
- 0036-8075
- Page Range / eLocation ID:
- 344 to 345
- Format(s):
- Medium: X
- Sponsoring Org:
- National Science Foundation
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- Free Publicly Accessible Full Text
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Accepted Manuscript1.0
- Journal Article:
- https://doi.org/10.1126/science.abo6512
