In Lion’s Club Park in Bethel, Melanie Taikupa Brown leans over a salmon, gutting it with care. The Kuskokwim River it once swam in flows behind her.
“Did you bring your ulu?” Brown asks a volunteer with their hands full of salmon, which is soon to be cooked.
The salmon will be grilled in the pop-up park barbecue as a small crowd gathers for the community meal of fish and hot dogs.
Posters for the event invited community members to pukuk their freezers, which, Brown said, is a way of cleaning out reserves of last year’s salmon to make room for new catches.
“I always grew up knowing that it meant, like, if you're eating a moose bone or a caribou bone, you clean it until it's pure white,” Brown described. “You get all the gristle off, you know, you don't waste anything.”
The "Return of the Salmon" celebration was put on by the grassroots organization Mother Kuskokwim, a group formed in opposition to the proposed Donlin Gold mine project’s environmental impacts.
Brown works as the outreach director for SalmonState, an advocacy organization promoting polices that protect wild salmon habitats across Alaska that has partnered with Mother Kuskokwim.
“Unfortunately, there's some threats that exist to the continuation of salmon returning that are upstream threats from potential mining activity,” Brown explained. “And then, also, there's some things happening in the ocean that are keeping king salmon and chum salmon from returning home.”
The decline in salmon populations along the Yukon and Kuskokwim rivers has been attributed to changes in climate, including warming ocean temperatures. This year marks the sixth consecutive year of salmon fishing closures on the Yukon River.
Salmon fishing is still open on the Kuskokwim, but environmental advocacy groups like Mother Kuskokwim say that the river still faces human-related threats, including bycatch from large-scale fishing on the Bering Sea.
The proposed Donlin Gold mine upriver has been the center of regional controversy. One focus point is the potential environmental impact were the tailings dam holding the mine’s hazardous waste to fail.
In 2022, Bethel community opposition spurred the creation of Mother Kuskokwim and its mission of protecting the river and its surrounding land areas from the proposed mine.
“This essential food source that really focuses the cultural life, ways of the people, is being disrupted,” Brown said. “And so this is meant to be a celebration, but also kind of a call to action for people to really come together around their love of salmon.”
After filling their plates with fresh salmon and other potluck dishes, the small crowd settled into picnic tables and folding chairs for a June afternoon of live music. They were also entered in a raffle for a 150-foot fishing net and other prizes lined up by Mother Kuskokwim.
Speaker and storyteller Quentin Ciissiar Simeon welcomed the crowd in by standing on a wood pallet stage.
“I grew up on this river, and it really taught me how to be a human being,” Simeon said. “And I'm really grateful to gather all of us people here today to fight for our fish, to welcome them home, and to be real good human beings and stewards of this land in this river that has given us life and sustenance ever since we came out of our mothers' wombs.”
The event was a mix of community jubilee and a call to protect the salmon that they were celebrating. Eek musician Mike McIntyre took to the pallet stage, addressing the group before his acoustic guitar set.
“We have a really valuable resource here, a very valuable resource for all of us to eat. Just to have a mine that is threatening our people, our way of life — it makes you want to fight,” McIntyre said.
As people filled up on fresh and pukuked salmon, the river flowed past Lion’s Club Park, birds and small boats punctuating its vast expanse.
In June it’s a nod to what is to come, empty freezers now ready to be filled during the summer season ahead on the Kuskokwim.
