Emmonak: The Alaska Trilogy #3

Matt Fox called me with pain and urgency in his voice. A couple of years prior, he had moved on from his work as a fish biologist with the Alaska Department of Fish & Game, but his friendships in the village of Emmonak where he’d work remained.

“The Natives are in real trouble up there.” The previous winter of 2009, a dreadful year of fishing devastated the local economy, and then an early freeze prevented fuel barges from reaching the village. Cash strapped locals were staring down a long winter and heating oil prices topping $11/gallon.

More so than many of his colleagues, Matt had forged personal relationships with people in the community over the eight years he worked there, and he didn’t just understand how meaningful their relationship was to King salmon; he felt it.

For years, the King salmon run had been in decline.  After a few abysmal years at the turn of the century, the numbers had not rebounded, as many managers and even more fishers estimated it would. Their hope was rooted in the fact that salmon runs naturally experience population down-cycles that typically last a few years before the run rebounds. But the rebound didn’t come.

The conservation effort meant the commercial fishery that the Yup’ik depend upon for their limited but essential interaction with the cash economy went off a cliff. As the crisis continued, their ability to harvest King salmon for subsistence was heavily cut and then curtailed altogether.

I’d never been to the Yukon Delta, but I lived in Alaska in the mid-90s, worked as a commercial salmon and herring fisherman, so I shared that infectious love of the state that sticks like tar to anyone who’s spent time there. And I knew it took a lot to raise a quiver in Matt Fox’s voice.

“People need to know about it,” he said. And then, in his blunt way, “You’re a documentary guy. We have to do something.” And thus, Kings of The Yukon was born.

When you fly across the Yukon Delta, you cross miles and miles of oxbow sloughs, estuaries, and tundra pools. To the outsider, the landscape is just as foreboding as the desert you see flying over the southwestern United States. It’s desolate, vast, and otherworldly beautiful. All I could think as we made the puddle-jump from St Mary down to Emmo was that if I were to be deposited out there among all that beauty, without provisions and proper gear, I’d be doomed.

We touched down one afternoon in late July. There was no welcome party, no taxi service; baggage claim was a patch of gravel on the fringe of the runway. After a short while on the desolate gravel airstrip eating granola bars, a white pick-up came down the only road servicing the airport. Behind the cracked windshield was Ray Waska Jr, whose father is Matt’s closest friend in the village.

We hopped into the back of his truck, cab full of family members no doubt eager to see this new batch of outsiders descending upon their town to make a movie. I sat on the wheel well and looked down and at my feet, a reminder of just where I’d landed: a well-used ulu amid fishing gear and empty pop bottles.

Rolling into town, I couldn’t avoid the culture shock: stick-built houses with pallets for walkways, junked snow machines, and outboard motors, four-wheelers everywhere. It recalled scenes from my native Appalachia, but then it dawned on me. All of this clutter, what lower 48 suburbanites with their manicured lawns might think is detritus, the Yup’ik consider resources. In the same way they use every bit of the salmon and seal that they harvest, every piece of that dead snow machine is useful. Replacement parts don’t come easily in this part of the world.

Ray Junior dropped us at his father’s house. Keenan, my friend and cinematographer, fiddled with his bags while I double-counted mine, forever anxious that I’d left an essential piece of gear in the belly of a bush plane.

Another of Ray’s sons stopped by to pick up an ax, so we chatted with Jacob Waska for twenty minutes or so. For both Keenan and me, this was our first real conversation with a Yup’ik, people we know as Eskimos, and Jacob was warm, jovial, his face bright with eyes that became half-moon slivers when he smiled. He was an excellent ambassador.

We said a farewell, Jacob ambled off, and we went inside to meet Ray Senior and his wife, Laurie. Their home was warm, and the rooms were situated around a small wood stove in the center of the common area. On the walls hung portraits of family members that seemed to span decades.

“How many now?” Matt said. “Grandkids?”

Ray’s face lit up with a smile like his son’s.

“Thirty-two,” he said. Then his face turned quizzical and he looked at his wife. “Thirty-two or thirty-three?”

“Thirty-two,” she said, and she was smiling, too.

A short while later, one of Ray and Laurie’s grandsons, Stephan, gave us a lift into town to check in at Kwik’Pak, the native-owned and operated commercial fishery. We still didn’t know where we were going to sleep that night. Ray had offered us lodging, but since there were three of us with a bunch of production gear, we were hoping for an opening at the Kwik’Pak bunkhouse so as not to impose.

Our transportation was Stephan’s four-wheeler, the ubiquitous mode of summertime transportation they refer to as “Hondas” no matter the brand. We loaded our bags into a trailer, and all climbed aboard, Matt on the handlebar rack, Keenan and I on the rear cargo shelf. As we moved through the central part of the village, Matt pointed out signs of the recent civic improvements: a new high school, freshly graded roads, a boat building shop.

“None of that was here,” he said over the rumble of the engine. The sewer system runs above ground on account of the winter freeze. Vacuum tubes, not unlike those that used to transport paperwork in municipal offices, delineate the neighborhoods.

There were skiffs everywhere, more than you could count, net and cork lines hanging on racks, fish totes, and orange crab buoys that mark the location of nets in the river. The closer we got to the slough, the more it was unmistakable: this was a fishing village.

We were relieved to find that Kwik’pak had a couple of rooms for us in their bunkhouse. We spent the rest of the day prepping our production gear, catching up on rest, and getting ready to head out with the Waskas over the next few days, capturing a portrait of their subsistence lifestyle. There was a lot to do with a commercial opener looming, and we aimed to observe their preparations and then head out on the river when ADFG gave the green light. Whatever else might come up in the meantime, berry picking, collecting river logs, tending the smokehouses, we would tag along.

Best laid plans.

The next morning we woke early and headed to the Kwik’Pak dining room for breakfast and coffee. Keenan got a jump on Matt and me and was already sitting at one of the indoor picnic tables when we arrived. It was one of those moments. Something happened. As soon as I saw his expression, shell-shocked and troubled, I knew it. Something was wrong.

“Jacob died this morning,” he said.

“Ahhh, Jesus,” Matt said as he dropped to the bench and rubbed his head. I felt like a 5’10” bag of sand.

Jacob Waska

The night before, sometime after he finished cutting wood with the ax we saw him borrow, Jacob went out berry picking with his family. Later in the evening, he said he wasn’t feeling well, so they packed it in and headed home. Jacob went to bed and then, in the early morning hours, he passed away.

The village was devastated. Jacob was the coach of the high school basketball team and he worked other jobs around town. He’d told us how he’d worked at the local restaurant for a while, and people loved his burgers the best. “When I make them, you never go away hungry,” he said with that beaming smile.

We spoke with several people about the loss, about how shocked people were, how young he was, right about 40. Without prompting, each of the locals we spoke to closed their feelings with the same sentiment. It was so sad, they all said, but it’s normal. I didn’t press them or inquire more deeply, so I can’t say what that meant to each of them or how that perspective might reflect the Yup’ik way of seeing the world. I took it to suggest how tough life in Emmonak can be, how common it is to lose people before they reach Elder status or before they even get close.

We spent the day strolling through Emmonak, intent on keeping a low profile out of respect for the Waskas. We met old acquaintances of Matt’s, checked in with Fish & Game, took a portrait here and there. Along the way, we ran into a guy Matt knew from years back, Marlando Redfox, and when he learned what we were working on, he invited us in to speak to his grandmother, Bernadette, one of the village elders.

Despite their seemingly unkempt exteriors, the Yup’ik homes we visited were warm, cozy. Generations of family portraits filled the walls, folk art, and religious effects throughout. The entrances are crowded with overloaded coat hooks and a phalanx of footwear. We sat down with Bernadette in her kitchen to talk about growing up on the Yukon.

“I grew up in Kotlik,” she told us. “And we moved here in 1949, but when I was growing up, we used to go to camp, my Papa used to go, and my family cut fish, lots of fish.” Bernadette described the fish camp as the center of her family’s world throughout the summer months. “We used to go, month of June when the fish are running. They used to go oaring to check the nets. And we used to put the canvas in the boat with two oars, and the wind blew us,” and she swept her hands through the air, indicating a boat swiftly moving on the river. “Then finally my Papa buy a five-horse(power outboard). It was so fast.”

Wistfully, Bernadette recalled their harvest that lasted from late spring through the end of summer. “They’d never take their nets out all month. Kings and dog salmon, mixed.  We cut all of them. Momma cut all of them. I don’t know how old I was. I wanted to cut fish, to learn how. I used to watch my momma cut fish, and I try. I learn how.”

It’s easier for Westerners to imagine fish camp as a summertime novelty where you might go with your family, throw up a tent, and fish for a few weeks. But fish camp was far more than a summer pastime. Fish Camp was where elders worked alongside their grandchildren, passing on generational knowledge about their way of life: how and where to fish, techniques for cutting, drying, and curing, sharing knowledge about the migration of the land and marine animals and fish, on which the Yup’ik subsistence lifestyle is dependent.

Bernadette’s recollections reflected a lament we heard from others about the disruption of their customs due to the fishery’s condition. Whereas once the family would relocate to the fish camp for the summer, in recent years, the State’s fishery managers limited their ability to harvest to “windows” and “openers” that abided by a seemingly arbitrary Western clock and calendar.  If they could only fish a couple of times a week during the afternoon hours, many questioned whether it was worth the toil of moving out to camp.

Change is everywhere, and the elders see it. We talked to Nick Tucker alongside the building, where he works as an accountant for the native corporation.

“There are different signs that we use to be able to use to predict the return of salmon that come into our system, the length of the grass or a consistent wind either from the South or West or North. It determines which part of the region the fish will be arriving. You see swallows flying around; the fish are there. At the same time, unfortunately, the world has become different, unpredictable, whether the climate. The whole environment is changing today.”

The Yup’ik way abides by a deep-set cultural mandate: take only what you need to survive. The subsistence lifestyle is spiritually threaded with the abundance of their environment. The better an individual is at providing for his family and community, the higher his social status. But this ability to provide wasn’t just based on their skill as a hunter or fisherman. Many elders believe that sea mammals observe a man’s treatment of their kind and choose to give themselves to the hunters who demonstrated the most concern for the animals they harvest. Imagine if Bank of America would not grant you entrance unless you demonstrate financial competency and an honest community-minded relationship with money.

This manner of living in such close harmony with the world around you is dependent on balance. The Yup’ik do not amass wealth or resources beyond what they need to get through the following winter. They subsist. So when the world changes around them, even in the smallest of ways, they notice.

“Seals come around the month of August,” Bernadette tells us. “But now it’s earlier, everything is change. Everything early and the fish were early, and the berries are early. Everything. Change.”

The residents of Emmonak and the other villages of the Lower Yukon have been on tenterhooks about their fishery, but last year showed a glimmer of hope. The run of King salmon in the Yukon was still low, but it was the highest in a decade. Many see that as a sign of the King’s return. A more substantial run this year could lead to the recovery of a robust subsistence fishery, to say nothing of the commercial opportunities.

For Bernadette Redfox, it means she’ll have access to one of the things she loves the most, that cornerstone of her diet that has defined her family’s dynamics and cultural traditions that roll back through the ages like Bering Sea tides: King salmon.

After packing up our gear and saying goodbye to Bernadette that day, we walked back to Kwik'Pak. Matt was looking at the ground, smiling. “Did you see how she kicked her feet up whenever she said the word ‘fish’?” And then he did his best impression, making half-moons of his eyes and waggling one of his feet in the air: “Mmmm, I love fish. Have to have fissshh.”