The Last Salmon15

In photos: The fight for the Yukon River’s last salmon

For two decades, the Yukon River’s once-vital salmon runs declined while American and Canadian governments bickered over who was entitled to the last catch. While the governments argued over catchment numbers, the individual First Nations who live along the river, focused on salmon for future generations, began taking salmon conservation into their own hands.

The Yukon River, one of the largest and longest in the world, begins on the U.S. side of the border in the Bering Sea. The Yukon River salmon, that mostly spawn in Canada, must swim against the current for up to 3,000 kilometres before reaching their spawning grounds. That cross-border journey has caused tensions, especially around the harvesting of chinook salmon (known as king salmon in Alaska) with runs half their historic size. The low numbers have been attributed to harvesting, man-made barriers such as the Whitehorse hydroelectric dam, degraded spawning grounds due to placer mining, climate change and unintended by-catch of salmon by ocean going commercial vessels at the mouth of the river.

In 2017 the Alaska Department of Fish and Game briefly opened up its Chinook salmon fishery, citing the strongest returns since 2005, before quickly shutting it down in the face of opposition from First Nations and Native fishermen on both sides of the border. Now, Indigenous peoples are taking management into their own hands, coming up with agreements to deal with the jurisdictional squabbles and implementing voluntary fishing restrictions within their communities.

All photos by Peter Mather.

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Like a kid in a candy store
When those boxes of heavily redacted documents start to pile in, reporters at The Narwhal waste no time in looking for kernels of news that matter the most. Just ask our Prairies reporter Drew Anderson, who gleefully scanned through freedom of information files like a kid in a candy store, leading to pretty damning revelations in Alberta. Long story short: the government wasn’t being forthright when it claimed its pause on new renewable energy projects wasn’t political. Just like that, our small team was again leading the charge on a pretty big story

In an oil-rich province like Alberta, that kind of reporting is crucial. But look at our investigative work on TC Energy’s Coastal GasLink pipeline to the west, or our Greenbelt reporting out in Ontario. They all highlight one thing: those with power over our shared natural world don’t want you to know how — or why — they call the shots. And we try to disrupt that.

Our journalism is powered by people just like you. We never take corporate ad dollars, or put this public-interest information behind a paywall. Will you join the pod of Narwhals that make a difference by helping us uncover some of the most important stories of our time?

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