THE KUSKOKWIM RIVER — Evon Waska’s fish camp was too quiet this summer.
“Well, this is my smokehouse,” he said, opening the door to the plywood structure at the water’s edge in Bethel, where he says his parents settled when they gave up their nomadic ways.
It’s next to empty salmon-drying racks and fish-cutting tables that have seen too few fish for many years running.
A few smoked king fillets still hang. Waska caught about 40 at the start of summer. That was a relief. Some years subsistence fishermen on the Kuskokwim River weren't allowed to harvest any, and it’s worse on the Yukon. But Waska said he got only half of what his household needs.
His fish racks should be filled with silver salmon now. But the silver return was too weak to fish. So instead of getting more salmon in late August, his family was already dipping into what they put up for winter.
Waska, like a lot of people along the Kuskokwim River, say the problem is in the Bering Sea, with the trawl fleet. The trawlers are after pollock, but they are allowed to waste thousands of king and chum salmon, some bound for Western Alaska rivers like the Kuskokwim.
“They don't close the trawlers,” Waska said. “They close me and my people first.”
Waska is up against a giant. Trawlers in the federal waters of the Bering Sea and Gulf of Alaska catch nearly 3 billion pounds of Alaska pollock, the nation’s largest fishery by volume. They can tow nets as wide at the mouth as a football field and a quarter-mile in length.
It’s not just subsistence fishermen who are upset about bycatch — the other species those nets scoop up. Sport, charter and commercial fishermen are also boiling mad and demanding change. In Alaska’s tight U.S. Senate race, bycatch has become a flashpoint, and the race may turn on which candidate — Sen. Dan Sullivan or challenger Mary Peltola — is perceived as the most willing and able to rein in the the trawlers.
The trawlers say they’re not to blame for salmon declines in Western Alaska. They point to science showing a heatwave decimated Yukon kings and that much of the salmon trawlers catch is not even from Western Alaska.
And they say their bycatch rate — relative to the enormous pollock haul — is tiny.
Waska has heard those arguments. But trawler bycatch last year included almost 13,000 king salmon from Western Alaska rivers. The waste galls him. Salmon are at the center of Yup’ik communities and Waska feels their way of life is on the brink.
“Remember, they hunted the whales to extinction,” he said, “the buffalo, and holy cow, it’s the 21st century and they're going to let this happen.”
Silver salmon are not caught in trawl nets in any number. Still, Waska blames the trawlers more generally, for seafloor damage and removing a mass of fish from the ecosystem, year after year.
The Senate race
Bycatch has been Peltola’s signature issue since her first statewide campaign. In 2021, she spoke against the pollock trawl industry at a congressional hearing. She said people on Western Alaska rivers were unable to catch any king or chum that year to feed their families.
“There's such a double standard here,” she testified, “when this year alone, the industry captured as bycatch 12,000 chinook salmon and over 500,000 chum.”
She was elected to Congress the next year. She filed two anti-bycatch bills in 2024. They did not advance.
She’s now calling to ban “Lower 48 factory trawlers,” the large catcher-processors, nearly all of them based in the Seattle area.
Until recently, Sullivan was a favorite of the pollock industry, taking in $300,000 in political contributions. He began publicly calling out bycatch late last year. In June, Sullivan filed a Bycatch Reduction bill. He talked about it when it passed a Senate committee in September.
"We see it as a general toolkit of measures to reduce bycatch, seafloor habitat impacts, while strengthening transparency,” he said.
In a sign of how central bycatch has become — and how quickly— Sullivan said the word “bycatch” more than two dozen times during this year’s Kodiak fisheries debate.
At his prior Kodiak fisheries debate, in 2020, he didn’t say the word at all.
Calls to end trawl bycatch come from all over the state. But the spiritual heart of the anti-trawl movement is the Yukon-Kuskokwim region.
Kwethluk
Upriver from Bethel, empty fish camps tell a story of loss.
In Kwethluk, with 900 people and few paying jobs, lack of salmon is an existential threat.
Tribal president Mary Nicolai said there used to be 60 active fish camps around here. A wave of sadness hit her as she stepped into a cold smokehouse that appears to have gone unused all summer.
“Most of the smokehouses are like this,” she said. “It's like a slow trend of closing our workforce out."
Her brother-in-law, retired Orthodox priest Martin Nicolai, said when he was a child, in the ‘50 and ‘60s, kids spent all summer at fish camp.
"Now our children don't see it,” he said. “They hardly spend their time in fish camp. They hardly know how to cut up a fish.”
Fish camp is where skills are taught and values are transferred from one generation to the next. Without fish, he worries the chain is broken.
“For us, it's our culture. It's our life. For them,” he said, meaning the pollock industry, “it's money. And we don’t think it’s fair.”
He said he hopes the close Senate race spotlights the injustice of bycatch. He wants the world to know the threat they face.
Next: The pollock industry feels they’ve got facts on their side — if only Alaskans would listen.
