Just as hundreds of fishermen begin pouring into the Aleutian Islands ahead of its most productive season, a conflict over restrictions on commercial salmon harvests has erupted.
After the Alaska Board of Fisheries passed restrictions on the Aleutian commercial fleet to protect salmon bound for Western Alaska spawning streams, Alaska’s acting attorney general, Cori Mills, invalidated the measures last month.
Now, subsistence advocates say they may try to win the restrictions back in a lawsuit against Mills.
The board’s new regulations, pushed by subsistence fishermen for years as Western Alaska salmon runs declined, would have shortened the number of days and size of the harvest that commercial fishermen could make in the Aleutians, widened a regulated area and added some restrictions on net depths.
The threat of a lawsuit follows the subsistence advocates’ attempt to re-implement the regulations ahead of the commercial fishery opener on June 6. The advocates tried to join a lawsuit originally filed by the commercial fleet and its allies that challenged the restrictions — but the judge threw out the suit Monday.
A lawsuit and ethics complaints
June is when salmon, after fattening themselves for years in the North Pacific Ocean, squeeze through narrow channels between the Aleutians on their way back to the waters where their lives began as eggs in gravel beds.
Some are headed for spawning streams in rural Western and Interior Alaska — regions where Indigenous subsistence fishermen have seen salmon populations crash for over a decade, making it difficult for residents to put food on their tables.
The conflict over these salmon pits the mostly Indigenous subsistence fishermen, along rivers like the Yukon and Kuskokwim, against the commercial fleet in the Aleutians, which hails from all over Alaska and the lower 48.
Each group says the salmon is critical to maintaining their way of life, their community and their culture. The commercial fishermen say their income has taken a big hit in recent years, due in part to falling fish prices — but also because they have been voluntarily regulating their own fishery, closing down on some days in an attempt to let salmon pass through to Western Alaska subsistence rivers.
The issue heated up ahead of the February meeting of the Board of Fisheries. After years of pressure from the subsistence fishermen and Tribal leaders, the board adopted more restrictive measures targeting the June salmon fishery in a section of the Aleutians known as Area M.
After the most contentious proposed restrictions passed in a 4-3 vote, the Aleutians East Borough, along with six local Tribes aligned with commercial fishing interests, filed two ethics complaints against several of the board members in the majority.
The complaint alleged that Olivia Irwin, Märit Carlson-Van Dort, and Curtis Chamberlain had conflicts of interest. It also alleged that Chamberlain made a “materially false statement” when he denied having advocated for Western Alaska fishermen against Area M commercial fishing interests in his role as a lawyer for the Calista Corporation, the Alaska Native regional corporation for the Yukon-Kuskokwim Delta region.
That lack of disclosure, the complaint alleged, violated both Alaska’s Executive Branch Ethics Act and its Administrative Procedure Act.
After the borough said its ethics complaint went “unanswered for 42 days,” it filed a lawsuit in April in Anchorage Superior Court asking a judge to strike down the new regulations on the basis of a lack of scientific evidence — as well as based on Chamberlain’s alleged “materially false statement.”
Other groups joining the borough’s lawsuit included an Aleutian tribal government and two Area M commercial fishing organizations.
Weeks later, on May 19, Mills, the acting attorney general, sided with the commercial fishermen in their ethics complaint — rejecting most of the board’s regulation changes because, she ruled, the vote to pass the regulations was improper. A spokesman for the state Department of Law did not respond to multiple requests for comment about Mills' decision.
The Aleutians borough and the commercial fishing groups then dismissed their lawsuit, given that the attorney general had nixed the regulations they challenged.
In a last-ditch effort, though, a group representing Western Alaska subsistence harvesters, the Bering Sea Fishermen’s Association, filed a formal objection to the dismissal. After the judge overseeing the case, Herman Walker Jr., rejected the request, the subsistence group said it may try to appeal to the Alaska Supreme Court.
Mike Kramer, a lawyer for the subsistence groups, complained at the lack of public rationale the attorney general gave in her short letter siding with the commercial fishermen on the ethics violations, as well as the judge’s subsequent rejection — typed in a single word, “denied,” on the groups’ motion.
“I would hope he would have spent a little more time and actually typed up his own order denying our motion,” Kramer wrote in an email.
For subsistence fishermen: every salmon matters
Charlie Wright is one of the subsistence fishermen, and chair of the Yukon River Inter-Tribal Fish Commission. He is Athabaskan and grew up in the Yukon River village of Rampart, and later lived for decades in Tanana, downstream.
When he was growing up and raising his own family, Wright practiced subsistence fishing as much as possible, taking for granted sometimes how much abundance there was.
“There was so much fish when I was a kid that we could literally see them jumping from my grandma's camp,” said Wright.
But Wright says that due to a mix of overfishing, climate change and poor management of the fisheries on the Yukon River, the fish are going away. Summer chum salmon on the Yukon River have seen about a 72% decline over the past 5 years, compared with the two decades prior. And that’s on top of declines in the other subsistence food he relies on, like moose and caribou.
“I lived my whole life on a river, and I'd be still there, just living that good, healthy lifestyle,” said Wright. But now, instead of hunting and fishing in his village himself, he has moved to Fairbanks so he can spend his time sitting on 11 subsistence advocacy boards and committees to try to preserve his way of life.
“The whole salmon culture from the Yukon River is gone now,” he said.
Wright points out that while the Aleutians commercial fishery remains open, allowing the harvest of some Western Alaska salmon, the Yukon River has been closed down to most subsistence salmon fishing for years.
Studies show that the Aleutians fishery is taking some fish from Western Alaska. But the research is inconclusive as to how many.
Scientists also believe climate change is the driving force behind the region’s salmon declines. Still, longtime subsistence fishing advocate Karen Gillis, with the Bering Sea Fishermen’s Association, said with a crash so dire, getting every spawning salmon back matters.
“Where we can influence human-induced harvest of these stocks, we need to be doing that,” she said.
Commercial fishermen: finances suffering due to restrictions
Aleutians East Borough Mayor Alvin Osterback is Alaska Native and has lived in the commercial fishing town of Sand Point his whole life.
He was born in 1950 and watched his community grow from a place with no harbor to one transformed by infrastructure money flowing in after the construction of the trans-Alaska pipeline.
“Then the state had more money, they started building harbors, so fleets got better, boats got bigger, we got better gear,” said Osterback.
Osterback says the money from the new fleet and larger fishery helped the community grow from some 300 people to about 1,100 permanent residents today.
“And then when the salmon fleet showed up, it was probably triple that size,” he said. “It was good. People here made good money.”
Osterback said various regulations over the years “interfered with our ability to be assured that we were going to have a profitable season,” leading him to switch from seining to setnetting, a cheaper operation requiring many fewer people and less fuel.
But even setnetting got tricky over the past few years amid tighter restrictions on harvests, he said. “It was just harder to get crews, when you don't know if you're going to be fishing or if you're going to be sitting on the beach,” said Osterback.
Osterback said that the regulations the Board of Fisheries voted to adopt in February were too restrictive to the fleet in his area. Instead, Osterback prefers a system of management the Area M commercial fishermen have been using for the past three years.
After the commercial fishermen caught an unusually high number of chum salmon in their June fishery in 2021 — almost 1.2 million fish — they adopted a voluntary strategy to shut down if they catch too many chum salmon along with the sockeye salmon that they target.
The Area M fleet has taken fewer salmon overall the past several years, dropping from their haul from some 65 million pounds in 2021 to 53 million pounds in 2023. Amid falling prices, that also means they have made less money: harvests in 2021 brought in some $47 million, while the 2023 catch brought in $18 million.
The fight isn’t over
Now, management of Area M will revert back to the voluntary measures of the past few years.
Gillis, the subsistence advocate, described that plan as a “fox guarding the hen house,” with state managers at the Alaska Department of Fish and Game who are in full support of the commercial fleet.
The next Board of Fisheries meeting in which Area M is on the agenda is still two-and-a-half years away.
But both sides say they could force a change to bring Area M into discussion at next winter’s meeting. Gillis said the Bering Sea Fishermen’s Association also is considering suing the state in an effort to revive the Board of Fisheries restrictions.
Osterback, the borough mayor, underscored the importance of commercial fishing to his region — arguing that shutting the Area M fleet down for more days each year won’t help Western Alaska subsistence users.
“What's taking place today, I think, is really hurting both sides. It hurts us and our communities. Those people up there are not going to be happy until we are totally shut down, we have no economy and no fishery,” said Osterback. “Then you'll have two areas with no economy and no fishery, and that's not going to help anybody.”
Wright, the Yukon River subsistence advocate,said that he and his allies just want commercial fishermen to stand down on certain days to try to see if salmon would begin spawning in their rivers once more.
“We're not trying to take nothing away. We just want to see if that works — see if we could get some more salmon back on the spawning ground, so people can at least eat and try to create a sustainable fishery for us all,” Wright said. “If we work together in unity, then I think it'll be a better day for everybody.”
Olivia Ebertz is a freelance journalist. Reach her at oliviaebertz@gmail.com.
This article was originally published in Northern Journal, a newsletter from Nathaniel Herz. Subscribe at this link.
Disclosure: Northern Journal Publisher Nathaniel Herz was paid $1,000 for work commercial fishing in 2025 by Mike Wood, a Board of Fisheries member. Herz asked an outside editor to do the major editing of this story, and to review any subsequent edits he made for bias.
