Natural Wealth
By Amy Gulick, Safina Center Fellow
Photo: A full smokehouse of wild salmon is a form of wealth for Alaska Native people living their traditional and customary ways of life. ©Amy Gulick/amygulick.com
I duck inside the low doorway of a weathered outbuilding. It’s dim with a smoky haze, but the dazzling riches before me illuminate the space. The bright orange flesh of king salmon hanging in strips fills the room. It’s as though I’ve stepped into the treasure-filled tomb of an ancient king. But a gold crown or bejeweled scepter isn’t particularly useful during a cold dark Alaska winter. More valuable are the salmon in this smokehouse along the Kuskokwim River.
“I was taught to always be ready. To have food for the winter,” says Shelly Leary, inspecting each strip of salmon. “I feel poor when I don’t have food put up. When the smokehouse is filled, I feel good because I know I have enough.”
It’s mid-June, and among the season’s first salmon strips we speak in lowered voices, respectful of the bounty before us. Each lovely strip drips with its own oil, the source of rich omega-3 fatty acids prized for their health benefits. The aroma of smoked fish permeates my skin, clothing, and the pleasure center of my brain. It’s dry and warm—cozy even—in the smokehouse on this drizzly cool day. I feel a great sense of comfort and I’m not sure why. Never having to think much about where my food comes from or the possibility of its scarcity, how could I begin to understand Shelly’s feeling of well-being that comes with a full smokehouse?
Photo: Traditional knowledge is passed from one generation to another as a boy watches his grandmother cut salmon at the family’s fish camp on the Kuskokwim River in Alaska. She uses an uluaq, a traditional crescent-shaped knife used for millennia by Yup’ik, Iñupiaq, and Aleut cultures to cut fish. ©Amy Gulick/amygulick.com
“I was in Seattle not too long ago for minor surgery,” she says as she rearranges the salmon, making room for more. “A friend from Alaska was with me, and we walked around the city looking at the tall buildings and the crowds of people. We wondered what all those people would do when something bad happened. What would they eat? We were glad we were going home soon.”
That’s it. That’s the difference between my and Shelly’s comfort derived from her full smokehouse. Mine is immediate gratification—a warm place and delicious food now. Hers is long-term security—food for the winter, like money in the bank. I live under the delusion that there will always be food even though I am not growing, fishing, hunting, or storing it. Shelly lives under no such pretense. Who is the wiser?
Shelly is Ingalik Athabascan, and she and her family are among the 18 percent of Alaskans considered subsistence users of Alaska’s fish and wildlife under federal law. For thousands of years, Alaska Natives fished, hunted, and gathered as a way of life. Today, approximately 130,000 rural residents—both Natives and non-Natives—still rely on fish and wildlife, taking eighteen thousand tons, or an average of close to three hundred pounds per person a year. Fish account for 56 percent of this bounty. There is no other place in the United States wild and abundant enough that a significant number of people can still live this way. Most of us are thousands of years removed from the ways of our hunter-gatherer ancestors, so today’s concept of subsistence is often misunderstood. To those who don’t live this way of life, subsistence can imply a meager existence—living hand to mouth, day to day, on whatever one can scrounge from the land. This is the definition of “poor” in some societies. But most Alaskans who live a subsistence way of life consider themselves the richest people in the world.
The wealth of wild salmon extends well beyond food. Ever year, these remarkable fish bring people together as extended families gather, teach, learn, and pass on their traditional knowledge about how to catch, clean, cut, and preserve salmon. The annual payout of salmon connects people to their families, communities, cultures, and the land and waters that both fish and human need to thrive. A life this rich is priceless, and worth defending.
Amy Gulick is a photographer/author and Safina Center Fellow. Her award-winning books include: The Salmon Way: An Alaska State of Mind and Salmon in the Trees: Life in Alaska’s Tongass Rain Forest. Visit www.amygulick.com.