On an August afternoon in Nikolski last summer, nearly all 20 people who live in the small Aleutian village came out for the grand opening of a new community center.
Infrastructure projects like this are a big deal in places like Nikolski, where there isn’t a major employer or industry.
Nikolski doesn’t process pollock like its neighbor, Unalaska, the hub of the Bering Sea trawl fishery, but the money for this project still traces back to the pollock fleet because of the Community Development Quota program. The federal program gives 65 eligible Western Alaska communities a stake in the Bering Sea and Aleutian Islands fisheries. In practice, it’s one of the ways pollock money ends up paying for basic infrastructure in places that don’t have many other options.
On Wednesday, the North Pacific Fishery Management Council is expected to vote on whether to set hard caps on chum salmon bycatch in the Bering Sea pollock fishery.
The council has heard over 100 public comments, many from Western Alaska tribal leaders and fishermen calling for tougher limits. They say the fishery’s chum bycatch is a direct threat to salmon-dependent communities.
But the council has also heard from CDQ supporters who warn that a hard cap could have unintended consequences and hurt coastal villages that rely on CDQ income for infrastructure projects like Nikolski’s community center.
Today, almost a third of the pollock quota in the Bering Sea is controlled by six regional CDQ groups.
One of them, the Aleutian Pribilof Island Community Development Association, or APICDA, partnered with the Native Village of Nikolski to build the community center. Its projects include health clinics, power distribution upgrades and housing projects, among many others.
The group’s chief executive, Luke Fanning, said that projects like these rely on the trawl sector. He warned that if the North Pacific Fishery Management Council puts hard limits on the pollock fishery, it could jeopardize roughly 70% of the funding for CDQ programs.
“Life in these communities looks very different if you don’t have that fishery taking place,” he said.
But the program has its critics. Declining salmon runs have led to a moratorium on salmon fishing in parts of Western Alaska, devastating subsistence communities in the Yukon-Kuskokwim Delta. Research points to climate change as the driving factor, but many Y-K stakeholders have asked for stricter limits on the trawl fleet, which caught 498,044 chum salmon as bycatch between 2015 and 2024.
The majority of stakeholders most affected by the salmon crisis testified in favor of stronger limits to the pollock fleet at the fishery management council’s meeting over the past several days. But a minority warned that a cap could cut into CDQ revenue that supports those same villages.
Louise Paul is a community service representative for Coastal Villages Region Fund, a CDQ group in the Y-K Delta. She told the council that the program’s funding is essential for the group’s 20 villages, especially as they rebuild after Typhoon Halong.
“I am an evacuee from Kipnuk and now residing in Bethel,” she said during public testimony on Sunday. “If the quota from the trawling industry with Coastal Villages is lowered, it will definitely affect the people and the efforts of our livelihood — the way we subsist is on the line.”
In the small Aleutian community of Akutan, where APICDA is completing a tsunami shelter and community center, Unangax̂ scholar and activist Haliehana Stepetin says the CDQ program is central to the community, and to Indigenous stewardship of marine resources. But she also thinks it relies too much on extraction.
“Sustainability, to me, as an Indigenous person who lives here, means that the life-ways that we have here now, and that were here when my grandparents lived here, remain so that future generations of Unangax̂ people can continue to live off of it,” Stepetin said. “Our living off of it is not tied to capitalism.”
Stepetin said CDQ doesn’t have to be an all-or-nothing proposition: It can be both true that CDQ money pays for things communities need, and that Alaska Native communities should be willing to ask what the pollock fishery is costing their salmon runs.
