In southwest Alaska, dominant narratives of subsistence and conservation are concerned predominantly with material relations with fish, with the number of fish that are killed. In Akiak, an Alaska ...Native (Yupiaq) village located along the Kuskokwim River, people's relations with Chinook salmon (Oncorhynchus tshawytscha) extend beyond the material, encompassing also the temporal. In this article, I contend that state and federal fishing regulations enact and extend settler colonial representations of Indigenous disappearance. Framing Yupiaq people's appeals for "a taste of fish" as a temporal matter, I examine how state and federal fishing regulations rupture the temporality in which Yupiaq people's relations with Chinook salmon unfold and threaten people's well-being. By examining the vitality of human-salmon relations through an optic of care, I describe how Yupiaq peoples in Akiak experience the adverse effects of interrupted and postponed relations with Chinook salmon in "confusion" among youth. In turn, I illustrate how people get on with living despite the limits that the present politics of fisheries management place on their ability to take care of each other on their own terms, and in their own time.
Salmon are intrinsic to health and well-being in Alaska, and sit at the center of myriad social, cultural, and spiritual practices, norms, and values. These practices and values are essential to ...living and being well in many communities in Alaska, but often remain invisible and unaccounted for in management contexts. This paper stems from the collective efforts of a cross-disciplinary, cross-cultural project team brought together as part of the State of Alaska's Salmon and People (SASAP) knowledge synthesis project. In this paper, we assess the sustainability and equity of Alaska salmon systems through a well-being framework. Key objectives include (1) defining and conceptualizing well-being in the context of Alaska salmon systems; (2) developing and assessing well-being indicators for Alaska salmon systems; and (3) evaluating how well-being concepts are currently incorporated into Alaska salmon management and suggesting improvements. We draw on specific examples to evaluate the application of well-being indicators as a tool to more effectively measure and evaluate social considerations, and discuss how to better integrate well-being concepts into governance and management to improve data collection and decision making. As part of this effort, we discuss trends and inequities in Alaska fisheries and communities that impact well-being, and tensions between equality and equity in the context of Alaska salmon management.
Getting Stuck: Salmon and Social Entanglements of Care along the Kuskokwim River in Alaska examines care as enacted through fishing and relations with salmon. In Akiak, a Yupiaq village in southwest ...Alaska, people live with a painful paradox: they are hamstrung by the regulation and criminalization of fishing practices that are vital to social and psychic well-being while they are, at the same time, often neglected by a medical system meant to prevent harm. Anthropological theories of care concerned with human health have tended to focus on practices of care that are directed to and for others. Figuring care in the image of “being snagged” (embedded in the Yup’ik root naginga-), this dissertation fleshes out a non-hierarchical mode of care that is quite different from the care that one typically seeks out and receives in a clinical setting. In Akiak, this non-hierarchical care, in which the division between cared-for and caregiver is ambiguous or absent, occurs principally when people are fishing and processing and preserving Chinook salmon. Moments of shared concern for salmon constitute an attentiveness to others through which care is conveyed in co-presence. By focusing on practices that are concerned less with treating than with sustaining social relations that promote well-being, anthropologists can more carefully attend to why people make the choices they do about care. Paying attention to non-hierarchical forms of care, this dissertation unsettles dominant biomedical and settler imaginaries of care and salmon conservation that delegitimize or overlook life-giving relations.
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