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ABSTRACT We examine the coloniality of Alaska pollock (Walleye Pollock Gadus chalcogrammus) trawl fisheries governance and its role in enabling salmon bycatch, highlighting the resulting impacts on Alaska Native communities and subsistence practices. We expose how the systemic marginalization of Alaska Native voices and knowledge in federal fisheries management perpetuates dispossession, oppression, and is a barrier to food sovereignty and environmental justice. Alaska Native communities have long attributed the decline of salmon populations, particularly Chinook Salmon Oncorhynchus tshawytscha and Chum Salmon O. keta, to bycatch from the pollock trawl fishery—a concern ignored for over a decade. The repeated failure to meet salmon escapement goals has led to subsistence and commercial fishery closures, deepening food insecurity, health crises, and cultural disruption for Alaska Native peoples. Meanwhile, industrial trawl fisheries persist with minimal accountability, exacerbating ecological harm by capturing nontarget species, such as salmon, halibut, and crab, further impacting local, nonindustrial fisheries. We advocate for urgent reform of Alaska’s federal fisheries governance to center Alaska Native voices, integrate Indigenous knowledge, and address inequities in salmon allocation. Specifically, we call for revisions to the national standards of the Magnuson–Stevens Fishery Conservation and Management Act to ensure policies that respect Native sovereignty, promote sustainability, and mitigate the ecological and social consequences of industrial trawling. This approach is critical to achieving equitable and sustainable fisheries management that upholds environmental justice and Alaska Native rights. 

ABSTRACT In this research, we bridge knowledge systems and perspectives from Indigenous and rural fishers alongside state and federal managers and biologists regarding the state of salmon management and research processes in the Kuskokwim Region of southwestern Alaska. The key objectives were to identify strategies to improve salmon management, document perspectives on Alaska Native inclusion in current management and research processes, and illustrate ways to develop more inclusive management processes and organizations. We also identify key opportunities and barriers to relationship building between Tribes and management agencies. Lastly, we explore perceptions of equity and equality and how research and management account for these dimensions. This was a two‐component research project, with one component being primarily Indigenous‐led and community‐engaged, and the second component involving agency management and research staff. We carried out 28 semi‐directed interviews with 45 Indigenous and community knowledge holders across five different communities from June 2019 to May 2022, in addition to 12 interviews with state and federal managers and researchers in 2023. Our study revealed both key differences and shared understandings between state, federal, and community perspectives regarding salmon management and research and around agency inclusion of Indigenous Knowledge systems and Tribal governments. Shared visions and solutions for improving salmon management in southwestern Alaska and elsewhere reflect a greater need for community and Indigenous empowerment and inclusion in fisheries management and research, in addition to increased relationship building and agency time spent in communities. A key recommendation arising from this study is that trust and respect are precursors to meaningfully bridging knowledge systems. Our team encourages further investigation of current power and resource disparities that prohibit equitable knowledge sharing in fisheries management and research, while identifying broad solutions for improving the current salmon management system given diverse sharing across Indigenous, federal, and state experts. 

This Indigenous-led project aims to better understand historical and contemporary ways in which Alaska Native Peoples steward salmon and the values connected to salmon stewardship. Indigenous Peoples have stewarded Alaska lands and waters for thousands of years yet have been largely excluded from western science and management systems. In this project, we utilize a participatory approach that allows for the equitable valuing of ideas and knowledges to document the breadth and depth of Yup'ik and Athabascan knowledge and governance systems in southwestern Alaska. We reshape research methodologies by centering Indigenous frameworks and methodologies, including circle dialogues and multi-generational interviews led by Indigenous scholars and students in their home communities and regions. In this paper, we share the Yup'ik and Athabascan values, knowledge, management, and governance mechanisms that can improve the long-term sustainability and equity of Alaska salmon systems. This research elevates the voices of Alaska Native salmon stewards and experts from the Kuskokwim Bay and the Kuskokwim River. We elaborate on five key themes that emerged from this research, including traditional Indigenous ways of life, Indigenous stewardship, self-determination, food and livelihood sovereignty, and ecosystem changes, and identify a more equitable and sustainable path forward for salmon and people in Alaska. 

Understanding how species are responding to environmental change is a central challenge for stewards and managers of fish and wildlife who seek to maintain harvest opportunities for communities and Indigenous peoples. This is a particularly daunting but increasingly important task in remote, high‐latitude regions where environmental conditions are changing rapidly and data collection is logistically difficult. The Arctic–Yukon–Kuskokwim (AYK) region encompasses the northern extent of the Chinook Salmon Oncorhynchus tshawytscha range where populations are experiencing rapid rates of environmental change across both freshwater and marine habitats due to global climate change. Climate–salmon interactions in the AYK region are a particularly pressing issue as many local communities have a deep reliance on a subsistence way of life. Here, we synthesize perspectives shared at a recent workshop on Chinook Salmon declines in the AYK region. The objectives were to discuss current understandings of climate–Chinook Salmon interactions, develop a set of outstanding questions, review available data and its limitations in addressing these questions, and describe the perspectives expressed by participants in this workshop from diverse backgrounds. We conclude by suggesting pathways forward to integrate different types of information and build relationships among communities, academic partners, and fishery management agencies. 

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.