:
I now call this meeting to order. Welcome to meeting 99 of the House of Commons Standing Committee on Fisheries and Oceans. This meeting is taking place in a hybrid format, pursuant to the Standing Orders.
Before we proceed, I would like to make a few comments for the benefit of witnesses and members. Please wait until I recognize you by name before speaking. For those participating by video conference, click on the microphone icon to activate your mic, and please mute yourself when you are not speaking.
For interpretation, for those on Zoom you have the choice, at the bottom of your screen, of floor audio, English or French; for those in the room, you can use the earpiece and select the desired channel.
As always, please remember to address all comments through the chair.
Before we proceed, I again want to remind members and guests to be very careful when handling the earpieces, especially when your microphone or your neighbour's microphone is turned on. Earpieces placed too close to a microphone are one of the most common causes of sound feedback, which is extremely harmful to interpreters and causes serious injuries.
Pursuant to Standing Order 108(2) and the motion adopted on June 16, 2022, the committee is commencing its study of the population sustainability of Yukon salmon stocks.
Welcome, everyone. On our first panel, on Zoom, from Little Salmon Carmacks First Nation we have Chief Nicole Tom, and from the Pacific Salmon Foundation we have Stephanie Peacock, senior analyst. In person, from Kwanlin Dün First Nation, we have Brandy Mayes, manager of operations, fish and wildlife, heritage, lands and resources. Thank you for taking the time to appear today. You will each have up to five minutes for your opening statement.
I'll go to Mr. Arnold, who has his hand up.
:
[
Witness spoke in indigenous language]
[English]
It is good to see you.
I would like to begin by acknowledging that the land on which we gather is the traditional unceded and unsurrendered territory of the Algonquin Anishinabe people.
Thank you to the committee for this opportunity to speak on behalf of Yukon River chinook and my people.
My name is Brandy Mayes, I am a proud descendant of the Tagish Kwan people, the original people of Kwanlin Dün First Nation and Whitehorse, Yukon. I belong to the Dakhl’aweidí clan, the Killer Whale and Wolf clan crest. The clan crest assures me I am part of the land and part of the water. As a beneficiary of Kwanlin Dün First Nation, my culture is who I am and where I come from. My family has lived at the headwaters of the Yukon River, Chu Níikwän as we call it, and Marsh Lake for generations.
Today, I am here in my role as manager of operations and fish and wildlife for Kwanlin Dün First Nation. I am also a land steward officer for my first nation. Additionally, I am the Canadian co-chair for the newly formed Yukon River Panel's traditional knowledge committee and first nations adviser to the Yukon River Panel. I have been involved in fish and wildlife management for over a decade, with a focus on indigenous knowledge, ethical harvesting and land stewardship.
The waterway now called Miles Canyon through to the Whitehorse Rapids was well known to generations of first nations people. Our ancestors called this area Kwanlin, which means “running water through canyon” in Southern Tutchone. Not only was this section of the river an excellent area for fishing, but well-worn trails on the banks of the canyon tell of centuries of people travelling overland in search of game. The banks of their river were lined with fish camps, lookout points, hunting grounds, burial sites and meeting places. Our values, language and traditions are rooted in this land. The headwaters of the Yukon River were home to the Tagish Kwan and a regular meeting place for people in other first nations to come to trade and fish.
Life changed forever at the turn of the century with the building of the city of Whitehorse. Our people have a long history and have always had a relationship with salmon. Unfortunately, Yukon River chinook salmon in Kwanlin Dün First Nation traditional territory have been depleted to a point that our citizens have voluntarily reduced or completely withdrawn from harvesting salmon.
This is one of the longest salmon migrations in the world. The impacts to our culture, our people's health, food security and the ecosystem, and thereby bears, eagles and others that depend on these returns, are devastating. Pressures such as overfishing, ocean commercial fishing, bycatch, climate change, predation and other ecological factors have taken a toll on the chinook returns.
The 1958 completion of the Whitehorse Rapids dam flooded our traditional fishing locations and put the productive culturally important Michie Creek and M'Clintock River stocks in an uncertain situation.
The water use licence for the Whitehorse dam will expire in 2025. KDFN is involved in the process and engaging our community. We are working to ensure that KDFN interests are represented and prioritized throughout the dam relicensing process. This includes the preservation or enhancement of KDFN environmental, cultural and heritage values in the Southern Lakes region, as well as the health and well-being of the KDFN community.
In 2023, the Whitehorse fish ladder saw the lowest count in history, with only 54 chinook passing through the ladder. The Takhini River, a tributary to the main stem Yukon River, counted just over 350. Those are nowhere near historical numbers.
The collapse of the salmon population is one of the greatest challenges this region faces. We know the Yukon River Panel and governments of the U.S. and Canada have a role in managing the treaty obligation, but the current management model isn't working. Chinook have been managed to near extinction.
The Alaskan ocean bycatch in the trawl fishery is impacting and intercepting vital Yukon River salmon, not to mention the impacts on the ocean habitat and ecosystem. Mass amounts of pink and chum hatchery salmon being put into the system are competing with the chinook salmon food source.
Our late Elder Louis Smith said, “You must save the salmon. If it wasn’t for salmon there would not be one Indian left in the Yukon. We would have all starved. Now it is our turn to save them.”
What are we going to do as a nation, Canada, to save the salmon? As a country, how do we rebuild these life-giving salmon, when they are facing so many barriers? To rebuild a population that has been depleted to the point of near extinction is going to take every resource we have. It's going to take every effort we have.
This includes all levels of government on both sides of the border. Stopping fishing is not enough.
Canada needs to dig deep into the impacts of the Whitehorse generating station and its impacts on salmon, freshwater fish, animals and habitat.
Canada needs to fulfill its treaty obligation to the Kwanlin Dun First Nation Final Agreement under chapter 16.3.2.2, the Whitehorse fishway redevelopment project.
Canada needs to continue to provide capacity, money and resources to the Yukon River salmon rebuilding strategy and continue to support Kwanlin Dün on the feasibility and development of a salmon stewardship centre. That will support all Yukon first nations in their rebuilding and restoration efforts as a gathering and teaching place, a restoration and research hub, and a centre for chinook restoration.
Canada needs to work with Yukon first nations and their governments to support cultural inclusion in the rebuilding strategy and to have equal inclusion of both traditional knowledge and science in all decision-making.
This rebuilding plan has to include all levels of government, both international and domestic, and the people who reside along the river and its tributaries. The salmon need this. It is not just science that has a role in how to recover these stocks. We need to recognize the people who have relied on the salmon since time immemorial, the people who have protected and who have had a relationship with our precious relatives for thousands and thousands of years.
We need a commitment to ensure that our Yukon first nation citizens and governments are engaged in a holistic and meaningful way. We need to collaborate and work together in honesty and respect. We need to recognize different government processes while keeping momentum alive and striving towards consensus in decision-making.
We need to uphold our shared commitments to the vital habitats of the Southern Lakes region and to our salmon. As Elder Louis Smith said, we must save the salmon. Salmon can be resilient if we give them safe passage, clean water, a healthy habitat and a safe environment.
Let's do this together, Canada. We need a wild river with wild salmon. These things bring purpose. It is our responsibility as governments, as first nations, as Canadians—as humans.
When we take care of the river—
:
[
Witness spoke in Northern Tutchone]
[English]
I would like to acknowledge the attendants in the room who have gathered here to pay respects to the Yukon River and the efforts to call the salmon back.
As a Northern Tutchone mother from the Little Salmon Carmacks First Nation, respect for the salmon has been ingrained in my DNA since time immemorial. As a child, fish camp was the most significant cultural bond and identity that was transferred every year. Our family would gather elders, children, youth, mothers, fathers, aunties and uncles, and our family bonds were solidified. Language, traditional laws, cultural values and oral stories were transferred from one generation to the next. This was the centre of the Northern Tutchone identity, tied to our keystone species, the chinook salmon, and our keystone place, the Yukon River.
There is a physical, mental, emotional and spiritual connection to a fish camp. The whole process from beginning to end is hard work. Physically, you are actively engaged with the water, setting net and carrying out various duties to run the fish camp. Mentally, you have time to reflect and concentrate on your well-being. You must be sober and in good mental health so as to not pass on any negativity to the salmon preparation for your family. Emotionally, your cup is full of laughter, wisdom, joy and love shared with the environment, salmon and family. Spiritually, you are paying respects to the original agreements with the salmon by following your traditional laws and values.
I quote from our history with regard to coexistence with other animals: Traditional law, or “dooli”, is the most sincere expression of respect that humans can offer. But what is respect? Consider the contrasting viewpoints of the Northern Tutchone and modern science. Whereas science views salmon as a simpler life form operating on basic instincts, much as a complicated little machine would do, Northern Tutchone consider salmon to be a distinct culture, a culture whose fortunes have been intertwined with the Northern Tutchone for countless ages in an intricate relationship that has not always been smooth. Crow, for instance, caught no salmon because he created a permanent barrier/trap across the river. He had to learn the lesson. And the salmon people were offended by their treatment by humans, so they took the little boy to the ocean to teach proper respect.
This, then, is how the Northern Tutchone view salmon, not as primitive animals that are almost oblivious of humans, but as equals, as intelligent beings that are fully aware of their surroundings and what is happening to them, as persons who deserve the same respect as the Northern Tutchone would receive if that person were to give up their life for the survival of another.
Thus, it deeply pains us to witness any instances of disrespect to the good salmon, on whom we rely every year for our health and well-being. We fear that their role in the rhythms of nature is being abused and that the entire ecosystem is in jeopardy. By bringing back traditional knowledge, we are striving to redress this imbalance, as we have done in the past, but we are no longer alone in this responsibility, and we desire that other cultures respect our concerns and work with us to achieve a more harmonious relationship with the salmon and all life.
I was recently told a traditional knowledge story that came from the Alaska territory. Elders knew that there would be plenty of salmon when there were plenty of monarch butterflies. This traditional knowledge was new to me and was never taught by my people. In curiosity, I researched the monarch butterfly and found that it became endangered in 2016. Soon after, our salmon declined drastically, so, you see, the knowledge held within the peoples of the land is of value and can help restore the policies that are to the detriment of the ecosystem.
The Yukon first nations would like to bring attention to the devastation that we are feeling in our hearts due to the decline of the Yukon River salmon. We ask that all parties engage in the habitat protection and attention to resources and capacity that are needed in order for Yukon to proceed in this endeavour. We can no longer argue or dispute the reason.
We must now work in unity before the salmon becomes extinct. This tragedy is a direct threat to our inherent rights to harvesting. This alone makes the Northern Tutchone people question what has happened to make it so. The mismanagement of the international fisheries is an infringement on our treaty. Our forefathers sacrificed lands for the right to feed their families with healthy homeland foods. The treaty must be honoured. Traditional knowledge tells us, “Don’t drag nets. Don’t mess with fish.”
These ancient laws have long been broken. We hold a responsibility to protect the rights to clean water and sustenance for future generations. We ask that Canada and the United States champion this initiative and that true reconciliation take place.
Mahsi cho for all your time.
My name is Stephanie Peacock. I'm a senior analyst with the Pacific Salmon Foundation. I am based in Whitehorse, Yukon, and I am joining you today from the traditional territories of the Kwanlin Dün First Nation and the Ta’an Kwäch’än Council.
The Pacific Salmon Foundation is a non-governmental organization dedicated to the stewardship and conservation of Pacific salmon in B.C. and the Yukon. We invest in community-driven initiatives and lead science programs that help inform salmon conservation and management efforts.
My area of expertise is in salmon population ecology. My work centres around compiling and analyzing salmon-related data to understand the status of salmon in B.C. and the Yukon. Through that work, I have gained familiarity with the status and trends of Canadian-origin Yukon chinook salmon—not just a uniform group of fish but one comprised of 12 genetically and ecologically distinct populations called “conservation units”.
Each of these conservation units has a unique evolutionary history and is an irreplaceable unit of biodiversity. Conserving this diversity within Yukon chinook is essential for resilience in the face of climate change. A recent study found that Yukon chinook return migrations to Canada were 2.1 times longer and 1.4 times more stable through time than they would have been if there was just a single homogeneous population.
Unfortunately, the reality is that we have very little information on how most salmon conservation units are doing. The publicly available data on Yukon salmon is focused on border passage. There is not a single estimate in DFO's publicly available spawner database for any chinook spawning in the Yukon since 2008. We need to improve monitoring and data availability at the scale of conservation units to be able to identify when and where actions are required to avoid local extinctions and loss of biodiversity. From the limited data that we do have, the recent declines in Yukon chinook seem to be reflected across conservation units.
Why are these salmon disappearing? There's no single cause. The likely suspects are the usual—decades of habitat degradation and loss. In the Yukon this is mainly due to mining and hydroelectric dams, commercial fishing and climate change. However, there are a couple of things that make Yukon chinook unique. Canadian Yukon chinook are the longest-migrating salmon in the world, and this increases their exposure to threats in fresh water. In particular, with climate change we are seeing unprecedented increases in river temperatures, which has correlated with reduced productivity of Yukon chinook over the past 28 years. This does not bode well, given the predicted impacts of climate change. Strategies to mitigate rising river temperatures and their impacts on salmon, such as the protection of undeveloped watersheds and wetlands, need to be prioritized.
Yukon chinook are bilaterally managed under the Yukon River Salmon Agreement of 2001, which recognizes that effective conservation and management are of mutual interest. However, harvest remains a primary focus of management, even as allowable catches have declined to zero. Further, the Yukon River Panel has failed to agree on management recommendations in recent years. In the face of unprecedented declines, we need to re-examine this agreement and sharpen the focus on biodiversity conservation and rebuilding.
The complexity of the life-cycle and management systems for Yukon chinook necessitates a multipronged approach to recovery. Management discussions must shift from border passage to preserving the biodiversity within Canadian-origin Yukon chinook. Canada can lead this discussion by supporting the monitoring and assessment of conservation units and improving access to data. There needs to be pressure on the U.S. to prioritize effective salmon conservation, as outlined in the Yukon River Salmon Agreement, and reduce any illegal fishing or incidental mortality of chinook.
Although research into the drivers of these declines must continue, we cannot wait for evidence to accumulate before taking actions to prevent the extinction of Yukon chinook.
Thank you.
:
I don't see one biggest risk. I see multiple risks.
Of course, we're facing climate change, and with the warming waters and the distance, the size of the fish that are coming back are not the same as they used to be, therefore they are not producing the number of eggs that they have, historically. We are in the process of needing more fish to get to the spawning grounds.
Another one that I really feel we need to address is the number of hatchery fish from pink and chum that are being released into the Bering Sea and the ocean. The trawlers are a huge component of that.
Then, of course, on the Canadian side they are facing—because it's the longest migration—the barrier of the Whitehorse Rapids generating station or hydro plant, which has an inefficient ladder. They're also facing juvenile mortality on the out-migration.
There's not just one. There are multiple. I'm sorry that I couldn't give you one.
:
Thank you very much, and thanks to the three of you for being here.
I also thank all the committee members who have supported making this study finally happen. I'm thrilled that we're able to have this discussion on such a critical issue, and I hope that, over the next few meetings with witnesses, all of us will not only understand why this is a critical issue, not just for Yukon but for North America, but also reflect on the concrete steps that can be taken to address this situation.
Chief Tom, to start with you, in your opening comments you described yourself as a mother. I know you have a family, of whom you're very proud, and you have a community right in the middle of Yukon—the hub of the Yukon, as they say—Carmacks, Yukon, in a very beautiful location. However, I wonder if you can describe the impact on your community and family from the state of chinook salmon, including the fish camps and the tradition around the fish camps.
:
Actually, I agree to a certain extent, Mr. Arnold. We should pretty soon have an hour or so dedicated to committee business to look at what's already in the bucket to be done and what new ones have come in, and see where and when things are going to fit.
Between now and June there's really not a lot of time. We have one sitting week in March. Then it's April, May, June and we're done. We should try to do that no later than Thursday of this week, or we should try to do it when we first come back from the break week, to try to nail this down.
Again, I'll go back to the motion as amended.
I know it was asked that we have February 27 and February 29, but that may not happen. We will have an hour or so dedicated to just committee business when we come back after next week's break, to look at the schedule and see where we can fit things in.
We have witnesses lined up for Thursday already, for the Yukon salmon study. I don't want to cancel on them right now, because they're making arrangements.
Go ahead, Mr. Arnold.
When we look at both knowledge systems, they're equally important, but we tend to put indigenous knowledge aside and recognize most of the science.
When you actually look at what's happening on the Yukon River, the people who live along the river are the people who actually know what's happening. They've maintained the salmon populations and had a relationship with salmon for thousands of years, and they've not depleted it. Then we look at how we've been managing this by science, and we're in trouble. It's been by the numbers only and it's been quantitative, and it hasn't been looking at what is happening in the river.
We look at what the Pilot Station site says, and it says that this is the science. It looks at the numbers coming through, and it says we're going to manage to the upper level in terms of how many salmon we can take out of that system, when the indigenous people are saying, no, we actually have to slow down.
Our people have been saying for 20 years that we need to slow down in fishing. We need to recognize that we need to not take all the first run, because those are the first ones that are going to get through it. They're the fast ones. They're the males. Then people say, “Okay—it's the middle of the run, so we're going to take the next ones.” As people on the river, we know those are the bigger salmon. Those are the slower females that are coming through. We know we need to get those females through, and that's why we don't take that big pulse in the second run. We take the first ones because we know there are still more males coming.
This is just traditional knowledge, and that is the actual knowledge from seeing what's happening on the river. That's why it's so important to take that into consideration when we're looking at developing and rebuilding a plan, or even when we're managing within the “in season”, as they call it.
:
There was no hint in there was there, Mr. Chair?
It's good to be with you. I want to thank each of the witnesses today. Thank you for taking the time. We're honoured to have you join us. Thanks to our colleague Mr. Hanley for pushing to make sure this happened and for his passion around this issue. It's so important and so vital.
I hope someday to have the opportunity to visit the beautiful Yukon territory. I've never been to the Yukon, but hopefully that will happen at some point.
Hearing your stories and hearing about the obvious significance and connection between the salmon and your peoples is powerful indeed.
I'm a practical person. I know I'm not as technical or scientific, but could you just step back and look at it through a layman's lens and cut right through all of the data and the information, which is all very important, and bring it down to what you would rank as the top three biggest challenges? I know there are numerous challenges, but what are the top three biggest challenges to which you feel we could get a solution the fastest or have action and practical steps taken the fastest to get us closer to seeing a rehabilitation of the stocks in your rivers?
I know it's kind of a big, broad, open question, but I think a lot of people listening today want to know what we can do with respect to temperatures and things like that overall. They're big challenges that are going to be with us for a long time. I don't know if there's anything immediate, especially by one nation, that is going to fix or solve that problem, but perhaps there are things within our control locally that we can do.
I'll start with you, Ms. Mayes, and then I'd be interested in hearing from Dr. Peacock and of course from Chief Tom. That's my long preamble, but now it's over to you to answer the big question.
:
Welcome back, everyone.
Before we proceed, I would like to make a few comments for the benefit of the witnesses who just joined us.
Please wait until I recognize you by name before speaking. For those participating by video conference, click on the microphone icon to activate your mic, and please mute yourself when you are not speaking.
There is interpretation for those on Zoom, which means all the witnesses for this session. You have the choice at the bottom of your screen of floor audio, English or French.
Also, I simply want to remind members to be very careful when handling the earpieces, especially when your microphone or your neighbour's microphone is turned on. An earpiece that's placed too close to a microphone is one of the most common causes of sound feedback, which is extremely harmful to interpreters and causes serious injury.
Welcome, witnesses.
We have today, in our second panel, by Zoom, as an individual, Bathsheba Demuth, dean's associate professor of history and environment and society at Brown University. We also have Mr. Dennis Zimmermann, fish and wildlife consultant, Pacific Salmon Treaty Panel member, Big Fish Little Fish Consultants. From Beaver Village Council, we have Chief Rhonda Pitka, and from the the Council of Yukon First Nations, we have Elizabeth MacDonald.
We will begin with opening statements.
We'll go with Bathsheba Demuth for five minutes or less for an opening statement.
It's an honour to speak with you today. I'd like to start my brief remarks by framing who I am. I'm an environmental historian currently writing a book about the relationship between people and ecology along the Yukon watershed over the past two centuries, so salmon and the way salmon stocks have been managed clearly have a lot to do with this story.
As part of this work, I've been travelling the river, particularly, up to this point, on the Alaska side, by boat and by dog team, as well as working with archival sources and scientific research.
What is clear from this at a very general but, I think, critical point is that salmon are an integral part of Alaska native and first nations communities' lives as well as those of other subsistence users along the Yukon River and its tributaries. This has been true for as long as there have been people along this river.
Today, fish camps are places of cultural sharing, language learning and social revitalization, so being able to fish is an issue of food security and environmental justice. I know that members of this committee are travelling to Yukon to speak with first nations and people on the ground, so I will focus briefly on three points that have emerged from my interviews and general research around settlement, mineral extraction and the regulatory challenge that climate change poses for the Yukon River treaty.
First, with respect to settlement, I'm going to generalize here substantially, because the Yukon is very long, but a key historical adaptation to living in the Yukon's Arctic and subarctic ecologies has been for societies to move, to be fully or partly nomadic, so that when, say, a caribou migration pattern changed, people could adjust where they lived and hunted to be able to intersect with both caribou and salmon.
Since the acts of colonization by the United States and Canada, particularly through compulsory education, first nations and Alaska native peoples have become far less mobile, because you can't move a village like Old Crow just because the caribou are in a different place, but you can build communities near good salmon fishing. So the colonial expectation of permanence has made salmon a particularly critical resource for indigenous communities, both culturally and economically. I wish to underscore the critical need for salmon in communities along the Yukon that are at the end of the global supply chain so that food is expensive and sometimes simply unreliable. This fact makes salmon a critical food security issue.
Second, I'll discuss the history of mineral extraction and salmon. In some ways, this is a familiar history that starts with the Yukon gold rush near the Klondike River, intersects with salmon and their need for spawning streams, and continues through the Faro mine and other large-scale mineral projects. Residents along the river have emphasized to me over the last several years how concerned they are that this history is not over due to potential land withdrawals by the Bureau of Land Management in the United States on the d-1 lands, which would be familiar to Alaskans, as well as the Manh Choh mine and the proposed Ambler Road, all of which would impact Yukon River tributaries.
Historically the wealth that has been generated from mining projects has not stayed in local communities, while the harms have. All along the river, I've heard concern that this history of environmental injustice is likely to be repeated, in part because the discussion of salmon futures is so often separated from that of mining and economic development writ large.
Third and finally, the Yukon salmon treaty and the Yukon River Panel, as my fellow panellists here all know, are charged with setting annual goals to ensure that enough spawning salmon are able to meet the minimum sustainable escapement numbers by regulating the quantity of fishing that happens in the Yukon River. When the treaty was signed in 2001, I believed that this was a sensible move based on the history of commercial and subsistence fishing for Yukon salmon, both of which occurred primarily in rivers, but of course, Yukon salmon spend most of their lives not in the Yukon but in the Bering Sea, which is an ecosystem that is experiencing such a rapid degree of change that I'm basically out of superlatives, as the climate warms and where there are additional ecological pressures from the pollock fishery, which removes some three billion pounds of biomass from the Bering Sea basin every year.
Every person I have spoken to on the Yukon River Panel is deeply dedicated to having generations of salmon, but in this contemporary environment they do not necessarily have the levers to pull to address either bycatch or the changing climate.
Essentially, the Yukon River Salmon Agreement lays out 20th-century tools for what are becoming very 21st-century problems—climate change and ecosystem change due to intensive harvesting.
I want to leave my remarks here by noting that people do have tens of thousands of years of experience in living well with salmon, and, in fact, this is the normal historical experience for salmon and people, so it is a thing that can be done.
Thank you.
Thank you for the opportunity to address this esteemed committee today. My name is Dennis Zimmermann. I reside at Whitehorse, Yukon, on the traditional territories of the Kwanlin Dün First Nation and the Ta’an Kwäch'än Council.
There are various hats I wear related to salmon. I am a member of the land claim-established Yukon Salmon Sub-Committee, and I also sit as a Canadian representative on two international salmon treaty tables: the Yukon River Panel, chapter 8 of the Pacific Salmon Treaty, and the Transboundary Panel, chapter 1 of the Pacific Salmon Treaty. I'm a respective Government of Canada and recreational fishery nominee through those two processes.
First and foremost, I want to acknowledge the significance of this specific inquiry and the unique importance of the Yukon River chinook salmon.
Briefly, Yukon River chinook were historically large, old and prominent, in that returning adults would often travel in river and over 3,000 kilometres to their spawning grounds in Canada. I've often talked to Alaskans who catch both Canadian-origin and U.S.-origin chinook, and they speak of the Canadian “king” salmon as leaving puddles of fat on the ground when they put them up in their smokehouse. This nutritional value is highly prized in communities that have severe food security concerns.
I should also identify that with the lens through which I work with salmon—and I often find I'm in the minority—my work has always been centred around community values, human dimensions and the intricate socioecological systems that surround these cherished species. I also work within the philosophy that if people, first nations, recreational fishers and the general public are not interacting with salmon in some way, they are not likely to care nor wish to support it.
Having worked with various Yukon first nations on a number of community-based salmon plans, I've witnessed first-hand the profound impacts that the decline of salmon populations has had on cultures, peoples and ecosystems throughout the territory. As we know, the life history of Pacific salmon has faced multiple stressors at all life stages, many of which have recently been exacerbated by the effects of climate change.
Very briefly, in delving into the causality of this crisis, one needs to reflect on past fishery practices, where it's evident that the maximum sustainable yield approaches, coupled with uncertainties in run-size projections and a reluctance to manage in-season fisheries, took their toll on chinook salmon populations and essentially beat down their resilience over the years.
Over decades, we've witnessed the loss of older-year classes and of larger, more fecund fish, ultimately resulting in a shift towards fewer, younger and smaller salmon returning. We call this “quality of escapement”, which is not generally accepted within the treaty as a metric to meet escapement goals. In my opinion, there was not enough risk-and-precautionary principle built into the management regimes, whereby treaty escapement goals were considered to be met by achieving a bottom end of ranges and putting just enough Canadian-origin fish into the spawning grounds.
Despite a proliferation of science often thrown at Yukon River chinook—what we often refer to as the counting and measuring approach—the status quo has failed to effectively address the decline in salmon populations. Approximately two decades ago, Yukon first nation voices began sounding the alarm, particularly at the headwaters in Canada, with the Teslin Tlingit Council, where at every meeting elders like Madeleine Jackson would advocate for voluntary subsistence fishery closures in Canada and across the river.
These community voices continue to sound and have moved consistently downriver to the point where we are now, where the impacts are being felt from the headwaters to the ocean. All 50-plus communities that depend in some way on Yukon River chinook in Alaska and Yukon are suffering, no longer fishing, and, most importantly, losing their connection to salmon culture.
Unfortunately, this is another fishery that has shown us that management decisions often lag behind the pace of the resource decline. It is with heavy hearts that we must acknowledge that there may be no fisheries into the foreseeable future. Despite the bleak outlook, we can't lose hope, and we need to continue fighting for Yukon River salmon. Now is the time to ensure that science does not go alone and that we employ all the tools in the tool box.
This means, in my opinion, enhanced investments in community-based stewardship efforts, maximizing the value of the few fish that are returning through ceremony, language, story and knowledge transfer. Through small-scale restoration efforts, this may include a variety of habitat restoration efforts, or indigenous-led conservation hatcheries, as an example.
Also, it means maintaining advocacy and diplomatic efforts within the United States and the international community and continuing to advocate for Canadian-origin chinook returns to spawning grounds, as well as coordinating efforts on the high seas as it relates to bycatch, unregulated international fisheries and production hatcheries in the Bering Sea.
Finally, I'm hopeful that with the continued support of the Department of Fisheries and Oceans, Yukon first nations and other partners, our current efforts towards a holistic Yukon River chinook rebuilding plan will provide the blueprint and momentum to help conserve and rebuild our populations so that future generations may maintain that sacred connection to salmon.
Thank you for your time.
:
Thank you for the invitation to appear before this committee to assist in building greater understanding of the crisis involving Yukon River chinook salmon and the impacts this crisis has had on indigenous peoples in Alaska as well as Canada.
I am Chief Rhonda Pitka of Beaver, Alaska. Beaver is a small fly-in-only community on the Yukon River, just south of the Arctic Circle, and the first community downriver of all the confluences of the Porcupine River and the Yukon River. I am chairwoman of the Council of Athabascan Tribal Governments, a consortium that serves nine tribes in the Yukon Flats of Alaska. I am also a public member of the federal subsistence board and a member of the Yukon River Panel.
Our people have historically relied on chinook and chum as our main food sources and as a central part of our culture and way of life. Our people are “salmon people”. Our health and the health of the salmon are inextricably linked. What befalls the salmon befalls our people. Over the past 20 years we have seen stocks of Yukon River chinook and chum salmon obliterated by numerous challenges, all of human origin, all originating from outside our small communities along the Yukon River.
As the stocks of salmon have dwindled, our food security has become imperiled. The smokehouses that used to be filled with a winter's supply of salmon sit empty. Our children's critical link to our food culture and way of life has been severed. We have not had salmon for funeral potlatches for our people. In the last four years of no harvest, this crucial religious and cultural ceremony need has not been met. There are not enough salmon to feed my community or the communities of the Upper Yukon River in Alaska that I represent or our relatives in Canada along the Yukon River and Porcupine River. That much is clear.
We have not fished in the last four years. We have not had a subsistence harvest that has met our needs. We've been told that our subsistence harvest is the reason we have not had returns of salmon. That is simply not true. Subsistence accounts for less than 1% of the total take of statewide harvesting of fish and other resources.
The subsistence fishers of Alaska have generously given their traditional knowledge to the State of Alaska and the U.S. Fish & Wildlife Service. Without this traditional knowledge, it is difficult for managers to have a clear idea as to whether their models of the run are correct. The managers use the number of salmon coming in at Pilot Station to estimate the run size and abundance of Canadian-origin chinook salmon. There is currently no mid-river sonar to “ground truth” that estimate.
The subsistence harvest helps management by giving in-season information on the timing of the run and the size of the run and on whether the estimates at the mouth of the Yukon River are accurate. The accuracy of the run size and timing are dependent on the knowledge of those fishermen along the Yukon River.
The chinook salmon fishery disaster hinders the customary and traditional selling, bartering and trading economy of the fishery. This is absolutely the case along the Yukon River, where depleted salmon runs have prevented our people from fishing and from participating in traditional economic practices of selling, bartering and trading Yukon River salmon. We used to have extensive traditional bartering networks and community relations, which have been strained because we have not had enough salmon to trade. The backbone of our livelihood is the traditional salmon fishery. The subsistence fishery is the primary economy in our region. Where I'm from, in the Village of Beaver, we do not have grocery stores. We don't have access to regular fresh food that people have, so we have to fly in food if we don't have it on the ground.
Furthermore, totally unaddressed through existing federal processes is the loss of tribal food sovereignty and food security and the loss of the ability to teach our children and transmit indigenous knowledge related to salmon stewardship, including providing for healthy salmon and salmon populations, processing, preparation and storing. Entire social networks, health and well-being have been devastated. Our children have never handled salmon. Our fishermen slump into depression, while domestic violence incidents and suicide increase along with increases in substance abuse, because our people are not fishing.
The loss of the Yukon River salmon and the cultural activities and spiritual values associated with salmon fishing are devastating our communities and villages.
Our tribes are not sitting idle. While the state and federal governments have continued conducting studies on the impacts of climate change, debating the impacts of bycatch in intercept fisheries and subsidizing commercial fisheries, here is what our tribes have been doing.
We have not fished. We implemented a self-imposed moratorium in 2014 in order to allow salmon to make the spawning grounds. This resulted in meeting the border passage goals into Canada in 2014. We have left our fish camps empty. Many of our children have not fished in their lifetimes.
We were told to buy seven-and-a-half inch nets as one of the management ways to change the numbers of salmon that we were getting, so we did that. We changed our net sizes to six-inch nets. When that didn't work, we bought four-inch nets for our people.
We've educated ourselves on ocean fishery science. As a fisherwoman along the Yukon River, the ocean is not where I'm from, but I've had to educate myself on things that are way outside of my purview.
We have spent thousands of hours and dollars on advocacy and legal action around the fisheries in our region—
:
Thank you very much for inviting me to participate today in the study.
My name is Elizabeth MacDonald. I'm the manager of fisheries at the Council of Yukon First Nations. In this position I support the work of the Yukon First Nation Salmon Stewardship Alliance, which is our local AAROM. I'm also one of the vice-chairs of the Yukon Salmon Sub-Committee, which is an advisory body created under the Umbrella Final Agreement. For that role, I was nominated by the Vuntut Gwitchin government as a Porcupine River salmon representative.
I'm going to focus on the Yukon River salmon because Alsek River salmon are doing relatively better. I did provide additional information in a briefing note as well.
Chinook are the most significant salmon in the main stem of the Yukon River as both a food species and a culturally significant salmon. They are highly dispersed, with over 100 documented spawning locations. They are unique since no other salmon migrates as far, with the furthest migration being 3,200 kilometres. This is part of why they are so important, as they provide many people and habitats with food and nutrients.
Unfortunately, the salmon have been experiencing widespread declines and changes for some time. Traditional knowledge-keepers in the communities say this decline started before western science in the 1980s. Chum are also present in higher numbers, but they are not as widespread as chinook. In recent times chum have experienced highs and lows.
Chum are the most important and numerous species on the Porcupine River, a tributary of the Yukon River. Unfortunately, they are experiencing a long-term depressed population. In the last 23 years since the Yukon River Salmon Agreement has been in place, the spawning goal has only been met nine times. Very little information is available on chinook and coho in this river.
Then in 2020, we had a salmon crash. All salmon numbers plummeted. Chinook have been at about 12% of the average at the mouth of the river in the last two years, and up to 40% of them are dying between the mouth of the river and the border. Chum in the main stem have had four out of five of the lowest spawning estimates since 1980 and about 20% of the average spawning escapement estimate.
Estimates for porcupine chum at the Fishing Branch River weir in 2020, 2021 and 2022 were the lowest on record since 1971, at about 5.5% of the average spawning estimate. Last year was slightly better, I think due to better environmental conditions during the migration. Numbers of Porcupine River coho for the last two years have been the lowest on record.
The situation is dire for all the salmon species on the Yukon River. We are legitimately concerned about their extinction. I am sure we have already lost smaller populations of chinook.
Unfortunately, the solution isn't as easy as stopping fishing. Even if there were zero harvesting by humans, salmon numbers would not rebound. Climate change is having a larger impact. Since the crash, our river has been hot enough to kill salmon. We have sustained frequent flooding and we have seen low water, with much more variance than normal, which has affected migrating salmon and rearing juveniles during the freshwater stages.
The Bering Sea is also warmer than ever. This has impacted the food web, and salmon are switching prey. This has decreased the energy available to them and decreased some important nutrients. It has also resulted in a large increase in Ich disease, which is likely responsible for a significant number of the chinook dying during their migration.
We need climate action and we need to support Alaskans with habitat improvement in the Bering Sea. We also need to watch our own habitat and ensure that development and other impacts don't harm salmon. We need to increase our capacity. We have dedicated, passionate and absolutely wonderful individuals working diligently to improve things for salmon and fishers in the ecosystems on both sides of the border. The amount of passion and knowledge that we collectively share is incredible.
We have truly accomplished so much, but there simply aren't enough of us to do all the work. This is particularly true for my first nation colleagues, as most Yukon first nation governments don't even have a dedicated salmon person. Instead, staff cover many species. Each first nation needs its own dedicated salmon staff, so they can focus on restoration work and on keeping salmon culture alive until the salmon recover.
We also need accessible funding so we can do restoration work. Funding needs to be secure and long term, so we can focus on rebuilding salmon populations and not on administrating funding agreements.
If we lose salmon, we will be losing more than just food and culture. We'll be losing a key ecosystem species. Marine-derived nutrients are extremely rare 3,200 kilometres from the ocean. If we lose these, our freshwater terrestrial animals and habitats will also suffer.
Finally, I want to stress how Alaskan communities depend upon salmon for food. While this is also true on our side of the border, it is a larger issue in Alaska. In Alaska some people need to choose whether to fish illegally or to starve. We need to support Alaskans so they have better options and in turn can support salmon recovery.
Thank you.
:
That's great. Thank you, Mr. Chair.
Thank you to the witnesses.
I was just reflecting on the fact that I wish our witnesses were spread out over multiple meetings, because there's so much great testimony. It feels very rushed, and it feels like we're not able to really ask questions to the degree that I would like to. I can't speak on behalf of my fellow committee members, but for that, it's unfortunate.
I want to reiterate and ask that you please send along written information. I know the chair will say that, but I hope I can pick from the written components to support the recommendations moving forward.
There has been so much great testimony provided.
Chief Pitka, you talked about the importance of subsistence harvesting and being told that, despite accounting for less than 1% of the statewide harvesting, this is where the finger was being pointed for where the problem lay. Can you tell us a bit about that and how important it is to have that traditional knowledge when making decisions on how to best move forward?