For the past few years, smokehouses in the Yukon River village of Anvik have sat empty. After salmon populations crashed, dozens of Alaska Native communities along the river faced a stark new reality, one without the fish that fed families and sustained Yup’ik and Athabascan traditions for generations. This summer, though, smoke once again wafted […]

When Stan Zuray began noticing white spots, a mushy texture and a weird “sour watermelon” smell in the Chinook salmon he was pulling from the Yukon River, he knew something was going wrong. That was back in the 1980s. By about 1990, he and others just stopped fishing what he calls “the ass end of […]