Once, you could plunge a branch into the waters off Sitka, Alaska, where the herring spawned, and it would stand straight up amid all the herring eggs. Now, the branches used by the Tlingit people there to collect the herring eggs for subsistence use are more often than not only sparsely coated. Commercial fishing boats are the cause.
We Tlingit have been harvesting herring eggs for thousands of years. In late March or early April, the herring return to the inlets of Southeast Alaska to lay their eggs in the moss and kelp along the shore. Their arrival heralds the coming of spring—like a door opening into the cold, dark room of winter. The Tlingit, Haida, and Tsimshian people step out of the darkness and into the light of a world awash with renewed life. Returning salmon feed on the herring, as do many other creatures including halibut, tuna, cod, and seals.
“This place is really, really magical when the herring come,” Khasheechtlaa Louise Brady, head of the grassroots Sitka-based group Herring Protectors, tells me in March. “It’s magical all the time, but when the herring come, it’s amazing. Like right now, the eagles start coming back, and I’m able to go, ‘Ahh … the herring are around the corner. I can make it.’”
This cultural lifeline extended all the way to Seattle when I was a boy. My Aunt Betty or Aunt Amy would bring herring eggs when visiting from Alaska. I didn’t know much about these eggs, except that they were delicious and they were Tlingit. So when I heard the herring egg harvests were being endangered, I set off on a quest to help save this one thread of my mother’s culture that had survived my relocation.
Herring eggs on branches served at the home of the author’s cousin, Barbara Searls, in 2017. Photo by Frank Hopper
The Herring Egg Dilemma
At its root, the problem is a clash between two worldviews. The Alaska Department of Fish and Game manages the herring fishery using a method called Maximum Sustainable Yield. According to Thomas Thornton, professor of environment and society at the University of Alaska Southeast, this method measures the physical size of herring population, called the biomass, to determine how much can be safely harvested without endangering the survival of the species.
Commercial fishing boats with permits are allowed to catch between 12% and 20% of the allowable harvest, depending on the state’s yearly biomass estimate. Tons of herring are scooped up in seining nets in Sitka Sound, then transferred to processing boats where lines of workers slit each fish open, remove any egg sacs present, and toss out the herring carcasses. These egg sacs are sold to markets in Japan to make kazunoko, a high-priced delicacy that became popular during that country’s economic boom of the ’90s. The result has been overfishing of the herring fishery.
Thornton has written several books, articles, and reports on the Tlingit connection to the environment and has become an outspoken critic of the state’s method of managing the herring fishery.
“We need a more ecosystem-oriented model to manage herring, not a single-species population model,” Thornton explains.
The current method doesn’t take into account the effect of the herring population on King Salmon, for example, or other species who rely on them.
“You have to think about them in an ecosystem perspective and all that they’re providing to all of these other species, instead of just saying, ‘Oh, well we figure if we catch this many, we’ll be able to sustain this population.’”
And, of course, one of the “species” of this ecosystem are Tlingit people like me who rely on the herring and their eggs to sustain our culture.
We Are All the Same
From her home in Sitka, Alaska, Brady gives me a Tlingit teaching about Raven, the trickster, who once released daylight from a box where his grandfather had been hoarding it. This famous story, commonly known as “Raven Steals the Sun,” has been depicted in Tlingit art for millennia. But most people leave out the ending, in which the sunlight scares everyone, causing them to run away in different directions.
“The people who escaped to the ocean became the fish, and the people who escaped into the air became the birds, and the people who escaped into the forest became the four-leggeds, and so on,” she explains. “So we all started out in the same place, all together, in the dark.”
“This story is like the Tlingit version of Darwin’s On the Origin of Species,” Brady continues. “We’re really all the same, when it comes right down to it.”
Reflecting their worldview, the Tlingit method for harvesting herring eggs is much gentler and more respectful. The Tlingit prepare nice, comfy places for the herring to spawn, securing rows of hemlock boughs in the water, and then waiting for the fish to come and coat the branches with fresh herring eggs. Thornton explains how special this method of harvesting is.
“The herring have a choice,” Thornton says. “They can choose to spawn in your area, or they can go somewhere else. You cultivate them to choose the area where you want them to spawn. You do that materially with your hemlock branches but also another way is with your songs, your prayers, your invocations. And that’s another idea that’s pretty foreign to science.”
In a sense, the herring and the Tlingit share a culture during the spawning season. We rely on each other, in a way that could be termed a “covenant.” When this covenant is broken or damaged, life goes out of balance as it did for me.
The author, aged 2, in Juneau with his older brothers Delbert (standing) and Lloyd. Family archive photo
The Pain of Losing My Culture
In 1960, my family moved from Juneau to Seattle to escape the racism my white father and Tlingit mother experienced in Alaska. Two months before my third birthday, we moved into a house in a poor Seattle neighborhood called Georgetown, not far from the industrialized Duwamish River and Todd Shipyard.
I was too young to understand what had happened. Juneau is a lush, green town hung as if in a hammock of protection between Mount Juneau to the east and Gastineau Channel to the west. The town was slow-paced when I was little and filled with round, brown faces, many of whom were related to me.
But Seattle was huge and noisy and filled with unfriendly people. At first, I thought we were only visiting and would eventually return to Juneau. I hated Seattle, and waited for the day when we would return home.
On my third birthday, as my mom placed a birthday cake in front of me, I finally understood. We were never going back. If we were, we would have returned before my birthday. With this realization, I blew out the candles and ran off to hide under the front porch.
I didn’t have the ability to express what I was feeling or process the enormous grief. I shoved my anger and sadness deep down inside me, like holding a beach ball underwater. Every once in a while, the beach ball would slip from my unconscious grasp and pop up into the real world, causing me to create a crisis or a catastrophe for no apparent reason.
This put a wedge between me and my parents, in particular between me and my father. No one understood at the time, not even me, that what I craved was a Tlingit elder, an uncle to teach me the way of my clan.
A Tlingit Elder Speaks Out
In 1997 testimony before the Alaska Board of Fisheries, Tlingit elder Mark Jacobs Jr. of the Dakl’aweidi (Killer Whale) clan explained the problem of the commercial sac roe industry in a uniquely Tlingit way.
“I’ve never seen anything worse than sac roe fishing,” he testified. “I would say that, allegorically speaking, it’s worse than taking a whole herd of deer and killing them all and taking only the liver, and from the doe only.”
Jacobs told the board of fisheries how he had monitored a spawning ground the previous year. The spawning activity looked robust. When the fish dissipated a few days later, he went to inspect the area.
“There were no herring roe on the beach,” he told the board members. “That’s what you call ‘false spawn.’ In my early days, those things were never known. When the herring spawned, you were sure to get what you’re after, herring roe on branches, herring roe on all the kelp and on all the rocks.”
Commercial fishermen at the meeting had already given testimony that they saw plenty of herring swimming around Sitka Sound. They believed the Native subsistence harvesters were overreacting.
But Jacobs explained that the fishermen in their boats and the board of fisheries members in their offices in Juneau had no way of knowing what was really going on. To know that, you have to get close to them and become an intimate part of their life cycle, just as the Tlingit have done for thousands of years.
The board of fisheries had no idea or concern that sac roe fishing during the spawning season stressed the herring population and removed the vital herring elders, the “experienced spawners,” from their schools right at a time when their knowledge was most needed.
The loss of this herring cultural wisdom must be devastating for the herring, just as it was for the Tlingit, Haida, and all Native people.
Members of the group Herring Protectors sing the “Herring Honoring Song” to the assembled group in Sitka on April 6. Video screenshot by Frank Hopper
Returning to My Mother’s Homeland
My mother’s family originally came from Sitka. As members of the Kaagwaantaan clan, our roots there go back farther than anyone can remember. The community is the center of traditional herring egg harvesting, which is why my aunties always brought some when they visited. It was part of our family’s heritage.
As I recall, my mom blanched the herring eggs while they were still attached to the branches. I devoured those eggs off the twigs, picking the hemlock needles from my teeth as my mom and aunties talked, laughed, and drank tea.
According to Alaska state law, subsistence herring eggs cannot be bought or sold. They can only be shared, gifted, or bartered. Free from the taint of money, they take on a spiritual quality for most Tlingit people. I intuitively understood as a boy that eating herring eggs is being loved.
So when I heard in December 2023 that the Sitka Tribe of Alaska had lost its final appeal in a lawsuit against the state of Alaska for mismanagement of the herring fishery, I traveled to Sitka to attend the annual Herring Honoring Ceremony put on by the group Herring Protectors. On Saturday, April 6, 2024, I stood with my Tlingit brothers and sisters in Totem Square on the shores of Sitka Sound and sang—or tried to sing—a song in Tlingit honoring the herring people, the Yaaw. One verse went:
Aa hei Yaaw hei Yaaw hei
Aa hei Yaaw hei Yaaw hei
Yee xhatulatseen (We cherish you)
Hei Yaaw hei Yaaw hei Yaaw
Hei Yaaw hei Yaaw hei Yaaw
A line of people wearing beautiful ceremonial robes with form line depictions of the herring and of the mythical Herring Woman on them turned to the water and sang the song to the herring while waving little hemlock branches. They then turned around and sang the same song to the people gathered.
The Herring Woman Kaxátjaashaa depicted in a beautiful ceremonial robe. Photo by Frank Hopper
The singing, the robes, and the branches became a liminal space between the Tlingit and the herring, where the two groups of relatives blended. The boundary between us dissolved as our identities flowed back and forth.
Brady, a member of the Kiks.adi clan and the main coordinator of the Herring Protectors, told the story of the Herring Woman, Kaxátjaashaa, who would sit on a large rock on the shoreline and sing to the herring. The little fish came and danced in the water before her. Kaxátjaashaa then lowered her hair into the water and the herring laid their eggs in it, thus forming the bond between the two tribes.
Later, about 50 of us boarded a catamaran and traveled to two pieces of land that had recently been donated to the Herring Protectors by allies Rachel Myron and Stephen Lewis. On the way we sang Tlingit songs, offered tobacco to our ancestors, and blessed the land by offering a sacred copper Tlingit shield, a tináa, into the waters offshore of it.
A young man offered me a bowl of herring egg salad, and for the first time in years I felt the eggs crunch silently in my mouth. Suddenly, I was 10 years old again, back at our old kitchen table listening to my mom and aunts talking. They occasionally used Tlingit words when they didn’t want me to understand something. Then they would cover their mouths and burst out laughing.
Tlingit elder Harriet describes the tribe’s history to the author, Frank Hopper. Video screenshot by Frank Hopper
I was roused from this memory by a Tlingit elder named Harriet, who was in her 90s. She came and sat by me and asked if I was related to so-and-so, because I looked just like him. She told me about her family’s past and about the history of our tribe. When the group sang, she joined in and danced, bouncing and rocking back and forth, still full of the joy of life and of being Tlingit.
That’s when I saw that being Tlingit isn’t something that can be taken away. I have been separated from my homeland, but part of it is always with me. I never lost it. My father never took it from me. The herring kept hold of me. Across all the years and all the miles, they held onto me.
As the catamaran filled with us Tlingit people zoomed through the waters of Sitka Sound, I felt like a herring swimming with my school to a spawning ground.
The herring do not have voices. That’s why people like Khasheechtlaa Louise Brady and the Herring Protectors must speak for them. All the herring can do is wiggle and jiggle when they spawn, creating a vibration that harvesters can sometimes feel, that speaks in an ancient language, a vibration that we Tlingit from Sitka carry and feel in our hearts.
This article originally appeared in Yes! Magazine at https://www.yesmagazine.org/social-justice/2024/08/19/fish-alaska-native-herring.
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