Evan Chocknok Sr. favors his right leg while he walks but it doesn’t help much: When the left knee begins to ache, walking hurts. Next, his lower back might begin to flare, but all that must be set aside. On this windy day in early July, it’s time to pull his net—teeming with sockeye and king salmon—ashore.
Chocknok is participating in an annual cultural rite that has spanned millennia: the massive harvest of sock-eye and other types of salmon in the Bristol Bay region of what is now the state of Alaska. The Bristol Bay watershed produces half of the world’s sockeye salmon for commercial, sport and subsistence fishing, and the mind-boggling numbers of the yield—an average of 27.5 million fish harvested each year—don’t come close to touching the size and breadth of the region’s riches. Bristol Bay is big business for Alaska’s commercial fisheries. It is also home to 25 federally-recognized tribal governments representing the people for whom salmon has always provided sustenance. Far from the processing centers and ports that tabulate the take each day, radio dials are firmly set on the region’s signature station for updates boasting this year’s record hauls, while Native Alaskans like Chocknok work at their fishing camps along the shoreline to bring in food for their families.
Every living thing lives off fish. That’s why we don’t waste it. We yearn for it.
About 75 fish swimming up the Nushagak River, one of six watersheds feeding the Bay and one of the largest, have entangled themselves into Chocknok’s 60-foot long, 8-foot deep net. He wants to get them inland since it’s closing in on 10:30 p.m. He’s lucky enough sunlight remains to work by during the long summer days, but even with daylight, these last few fish prove almost too heavy to carry up the eroding bluff to his fish camp.
It’s a summer tradition that Chocknok, a 67-year-old Yup’ik man, says he’s enjoyed since childhood and now cherishes with his reunited childhood sweetheart, Elsie Albrite. It speaks to a way of life—harvesting wild animals, sea life and plants—and centuries-old practices that have come to be known as subsistence, a key element of Alaska Native culture and identity.
This is no weekend trip to the cabin to cast lines under the sun and wait for a fish to bite. Winds whip on the bluff. Dark, foreboding clouds hover low enough to keep commuter flights on the ground. The planes are essential to daily life here and connect people from one village to another in an area where few roads link communities. High-tide swells prevent skiffs from crossing the rivers and the rough conditions delay the arrival of some family members from the nearest town.
“It’s the hardest work on earth, but I love it,” says Chocknok, who lives in New Stuyahok, a coastal community in Alaska’s southwestern region about 60 miles upriver from camp. “There will be lots of work in the morning when we start cutting the fish…first thing in the morning.”
Take what you need, not what you want
One mile upstream from Chocknok’s camp, fish have already been caught and cut up into thin strips where they hang in Tim and Mary Wonhola’s smokehouse. The Wonholas have been married 42 years and return almost annually to this Lewis Point campsite with one purpose: To catch enough fish to begin filling the freezers back home in New Stuyahok.
Tim Wonhola says the nearly 50 million fish in this Bristol Bay watershed are as sacred as they are substantive food. “Every living thing lives off fish,” said the 71-year-old man who works through arthritis that gets more painful each year. “Eagles eat it. Bears eat it. Humans eat it. Aquatic life eats it. That’s why we don’t waste it. We yearn for it. Our body craves for it.
“My mother would greet the first king salmon that comes to her table. Tears would come down her eyes. She would say, ‘Now my kids won’t go hungry; fish are returning.’ The elders used to say take want you need, not what you want, and leave the rest for tomorrow.”
Camps such as these in Lewis Point sit about a 20-minute skiff ride (under normal conditions) away from Dillingham, a fishing port of 2,400 year-round residents and considered the region’s hub to smaller communities along the Nushagak River. They can also be found along beaches throughout the Bristol Bay watershed. Elders often spend the most time harvesting during the great salmon runs. Family members—adult children, grandchildren, nieces and nephews—visit from as far away as Barrow, more than 1,000 miles north, and pitch in. At first glance, the camps resemble buildings long since abandoned, but closer look reveals sturdy, heated bunkhouses, a steam bathhouse, smokehouses and open-air structures where salmon are hung to dry before entering a smoke house.
Inside the smokehouse Mary Wonhola, 64, tends to the fish. She moves strips around the house to ensure a balanced smoking. She burns driftwood sticks, cottonwood for its moistness, and birch fungus in the evening. When she walks away from the smokehouse, the scent remains embedded in her clothing and hair, and gets stronger with each visit.
“It’s the best perfume in the world,” she says. “That’s my subsistence.”
While the fish hang in the smokehouse, work continues around the camp. Tim cuts plywood and begins building a new sheltered entry to the bunkhouse. He also wants to fortify the east side of the house, where a brown bear tore open a hole after the Wonholas left camp last year. There are also a few nets that need mending for next year.
It’s the hardest work on earth, but I love it, says Chocknok.
Meanwhile, using her 5-foot tall, 85-pound frame, Mary splits wood for the stove that also keeps the bunkhouse warm. She cleans clothes and towels rubbing them against the 19th-century designed washboard and ringing them out with gnarled hands that reveal decades of hard living. She then hangs them on a line while battling wind gusts attempting to pull the clothes off the line.
Soon it’s time to eat. “Mama says it’s time for a snack,” says Tim, putting down his hammer and using the break to make sure all plates are full.
“The human stomach is small,” he says. “My mother used to tell us feed anybody who comes by you. Their stomach is as big as yours. It doesn’t take much to feed it. Our well-being comes first. That’s how it’s been passed on from generation to generation.”
For the Yup’ik, as well as some Aleut and Aluttiq people of Bristol Bay, the way of subsistence is, in the environmental catch-phrase of the day, sustainable. But far from the source of so much of the world’s fish, in corporate boardrooms and the corridor’s of Washington D.C., a push is underway to open up the region to expanded mineral extraction that could jeopardize the purity of the water, the fish, and Native culture.
In May of this year, the Environmental Protection Agency under the Trump administration settled a lawsuit with the limited partnership financing the Pebble Mine, clearing the way for the company to apply for a suite of federal permits for the proposed copper and gold open pit mine. Two months later, the EPA proposed removing water restrictions the Obama administration placed on the project three years ago under the Clean Water Act.
The Pebble Partnership says these developments simply create a level playing field and give the company a chance to bring forth its proposal. Lined up against mine proponents are the state’s lucrative commercial fishing, local communities and Alaska Native groups. But at the height of this year’s bountiful catch, the reality of the potential destruction of this wild fish nursery seems beyond contemplation.
Tim Wonhola says the risks are too great, and the prospect of the project advancing has galvanized the watershed communities. “If something happens, there is nobody there to clean up,” Wonhola says. “They don’t care about the animals; it’s not a food on their table. Around here subsistence is a way of life; it’s our way of putting food on the table.”
A place that’s always been
With the first cut into a sockeye salmon, Elsie Albrite cracks a smile. “This is a good fish,” she says. They all are. A month earlier, she had a benign tumor removed from her kidney. Doctors told her to take a year off from the fish camps to enhance her recovery. Instead, she and Chocknok share duties of cutting salmon into large and small strips that will first be soaked in water then brined, a step that helps pull out moisture while the fish is smoked.
She began working about 10 hours after Chocknok finished hauling in his net and moving the fish near the carving tables. “I really like this camp; it’s nice and quiet,” she says. “I wasn’t supposed to be here, but I didn’t want him to be alone.”
Later, with about five fish remaining to be cut, she acknowledged deep soreness in her hands that could take another day to ease. “I really enjoy cutting up fish and hanging them up,” she says. “They really aren’t too heavy after hanging them up. Some people don’t understand, this is our food in winter; it’s our currency. We hardly buy any meat in winter. It’s too expensive.”
Subsistence gathering doesn’t end with the salmon. Next the Wonholas and others will pick berries on Alaska’s tundra in the region; together with their families they will hunt moose, caribou and even beaver, which can be used to make mittens and hats. “Oh boy, those are the warmest hat and gloves you can get,” Wonhola says. “And it doesn’t cost you a dime.”
It’s a year-round cultivation, a recurring gift from the land and water. “The land is home; it’s our home,” Wonhola says. “We know where to go to hunt. We learn how to live it; we learned how to find locations by what the elders have taught us, and they used the traditional knowledge.
“Each season a certain place provides food and we look forward to that season. It hasn’t changed; it’s always been like that here. That’s why people here call this, ‘A place that’s always been.’”
