‘Get better hearing aid:’ Hunters ask wildlife managers to listen

Hunters, whalers and fishermen expressed their frustration to land and wildlife managers last week about the lack of collaboration when it comes to regulating marine mammals, caribou and fish.

“These agencies, I hear you every year say, ‘Yeah, we’re listening to you,'” said Faya Ewan from the Copper River area. “It’s time to get a new hearing aid because we need our voices to be heard at the table.”

The audience filled the rooms during various talks that spanned over a week during the Elders and Youth Conference and Alaska Federation of Natives convention.

“Amazing turnout,” said the President and CEO of First Alaskans Institute Liz La quen naay Kat Saas Medicine Crow. “It was a full room.”

Pollution and interconnection of land and animals

During the Alaska Native Co-management of Marine Mammals workshop, people shared their concerns about pollutants affecting animals and how the health of one species in one part of the state affects species hundreds of miles away.

“Our caribou don’t know those boundaries, our fish that travel up to the ocean don’t know those boundaries, our marine mammals that rely on those fish — it’s all connected, and we’re facing some of the most major changes that we’ve seen in our lifetime,” said Liz Quaulluq Cravalho, vice president of lands at NANA.

Utqiagvik whaling captain and walrus and seal hunter, Delbert Rexford, spoke about the importance of monitoring the presence of heavy metals in belugas and other marine animals. The concern was shared by other people in the room, including Savoonga’s Vi Waghiyi who is the White House Advisor for Environmental Justice.

“The Persistent Organic Pollutants — we now know the Arctic has become a hemispheric sink for these,” she said. “We’re finding them at such high levels. It’s so important not only to work on management but also on the protection of the ice as these POPs arrive here through air and ocean currents and they get trapped in the permafrost, ice and glaciers.”

Besides pollutants, marine animals are affected by the fish they eat, Ewan said.

“Our salmon feeds your marine mammals, and we live off of that, and we barter and trade our food,” Ewan said. “Our salmon is sick. They’re not growing full grown. And our health is affected by this big time. ” I’m starting to wonder about the maktak we get from up north and the beluga whale that we get from the different areas (if) that, you know, is safe to eat.”

The conflict between local subsistence hunters and those coming from other parts of the state; land ownership conflicts, the federal hunting regulations and the lack of reliable data on animal population were among the themes people discussed during the Co-stewardship Talking circle at AFN.

“People, coming from Anchorage, who have no right to hunt and fish here in Anchorage but, boy, they can come out to my country and clean our river,” Ewan said. “We’re trying to survive we’re trying to teach our generation how to live up the land.”

Need for listening

But the biggest concern people kept bringing up was the lack of collaboration between agencies and residents.

“What happens is, we get plans written and then we are asked to comment on them,” said Karen Linnell with Ahtna. “We’re not asked to participate in the planning process and that’s one of the breaks in the process. Tribal Consultation is not sending a fax and asking us to write a comment back.

“Tribal Consultation is a dialogue,” she said. “Stewardship is sitting at the table together, drafting that plan.”

Johnathan Samuelson was co-leading the session on Protecting Our Ways of Life during Youth and Elders. After inviting each of the participants to speak about their subsistence culture, he said that empathetic, careful listening is something that agencies wildlife managers and people from other regions could improve.

“‘Tell me your entire life story in three minutes, and why I should listen to you,’ — Those are the things they ask us to do when we’re trying to protect our ways of life,” Samuelson said. “‘Find something else to eat. Go to the store. Order it.'”

Agencies don’t have the full context for making management decisions, Samuelson said, and it’s important for hunters and fishermen to provide their input.

“They’re not the voice of our fish. We are,” he said. “They are not the voice of our caribou. We are. Our land speaks our languages, yet we’re forced to learn English so that people can understand us.”

To voice their concerns directly to the agencies, residents broke into small circles during the Co-stewardship Talking circle at AFN, and spoke to the representatives from the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service, National Park Service and Bureau of Land Management and U.S. Forest Service.

“It wasn’t a passive listening session,” Crow said. “It was a real engaging session where people could talk kind of at a higher level about what co-stewardship actually means, and what true partnership and government-to-government means and what working with tribal communities actually means.”

After the workshops and talking circles, some attendees said they left feeling encouraged. Gabe Canfield from Ketchikan said she is looking forward to seeing more spaces where people are able to discuss co-management.

“I thought it was really good,” Canfield said. “It’s a long-time coming. There need to be spaces where we’re working with governments and working with officials who are going to be working on implementation.”

The agencies are planning to host at least six additional Co-stewardship Talking Circle sessions. The circles will be held in various Alaska communities and virtually, said Crystal Leonetti, the Alaska Native Affairs Specialist from the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service,

“After those talking circles conclude, we plan to compile a report of what we heard in those sessions,” Leonetti said.

Continuing conversations started during the AFN week will be crucial, Crow said.

“It was a great start to what is a longer process,” she said.