Opinion: Tribal governance of Alaska fisheries? What’s the catch?

Updated: 1 An hour ago Published: 1 An hour ago

One of the most important conservation issues in state and federal fisheries today is the need for more equitable tribal representation and understanding of Indigenous knowledge. The assumptions and measures of success embedded in our state and federal constitutions, laws, and policies are in direct conflict with long-term sustainability and, more importantly, in direct conflict with how the “last frontier” became and continues to be abundant today.

Because of tribal rule and thousands of years of stewardship, our state and federal governing bodies have authority over any harvestable surplus for commercial, personal, and subsistence use. Tribes have always lived in a mutual relationship with our lands and waters; One of the most beautiful things about our collective Aboriginal knowledge and thought is the unique relationships we have developed with other tribes and, more importantly, our relationships with animals and fish. What would it mean to acknowledge salmon, our waters, or other “managed” relationships as conscious beings with agency, free will, and perhaps even an understanding of our collective human thoughts and reason?

As people, as “stewards” with delegated authority or an Anglo-Christian model of control and the Western understanding of use and what might be defined as appropriate use, there is only one answer to any question of how to best maintain. This answer will always be integration, individualism, control, and power through our state and federal laws that recognize PhDs and now the lobbyist ideals of “conservation.”

We as a collective society have stopped listening to the small boat captains, river fishermen, tribesmen, elders, and expert know-hows who can see beyond the hypocrisy of industrial representatives, whose 401(k) is tied to ensuring business as usual. We will never keep our collective interests in mind.

Suppose we can collectively look beyond our assumptions and colonized minds. In this case, we will see that the stories our elders have always taught us are true, that our indigenous laws and charters are realistic, and that these guidelines are needed today more than ever. When we as a group can agree on something small, or perhaps even the basic teachings of our elders, to not take on too much, to share, to be humble, and to respect the world around us, then everything around us has agency and free will. This completely changes the focus of “management.” We can move beyond paternalism, control, and the general assumption that we somehow know better by using doctoral models by those who have spent literal days observing, testing, and understanding versus millennia-old indigenous ways of knowing. We are so advanced that our governance, relationships and responsibilities through law and conventions to the world around us are incorporated into our traditional, action-oriented songs, dances and stories.

Our tribes have come to realize that everything around us has a soul, and probably not in the way you think. Tribes are the original agents and orators of abundance-based governance, and unfortunately, we have not had the opportunity to evolve into contemporary forms of governance.

Our elders have always had the answers; No one asks the right questions. It is very likely that our tribes have commodified our resources, used the lands and waters near our nations, driven cars and planes, and used cell phones to speak our national languages. As a society, if we are to understand the issue today, we need to understand our past and consider how intentional colonization occurred across our nations, without our tribal consent, and for what purpose. One local elder in Bristol Bay always said: “(We) tribes have always known the right answers; you (we) don’t ask the right questions.”

Craig Kaviak Chithuluk of Fairbanks is fisheries policy director for Native Peoples Action.

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