Salmon dining to help suffering Alaska villages

Three years ago, Seattle seafood consultant Jon Rowley was drawn to the Yukon River delta by salmon — silver chinook endowed with prodigious amounts of oil that help them swim some 2,000 miles across Alaska to distant Canadian spawning grounds.

With proper handling and marketing, Rowley figured that these fish could gain the same type of celebrity status as the Copper River salmon he began promoting back in the 1980s.

But this winter it's the fishermen, not the fish, that have Rowley's attention.

The fishermen are Yup'ik Eskimos whose villages in western Alaska have been slammed by a dismal salmon season, high fuel prices and recent cold snaps that forced some families to skimp on food as they tried to scrape up enough cash to warm their homes.

Their plight has helped stir an unusual relief effort aimed not at some distant Third World nation but at rural communities in oil-rich Alaska.

Rowley helped launch a monthlong fundraising event that began Sunday at Elliott's Oyster House at Pier 56 in Seattle, where Yukon chum salmon, marketed as keta, will be on the menu. From 20 to 25 percent of the revenue from each keta plate will be donated to a fuel fund for Alaska villagers.

"These are strong people who are used to enduring hardships," said Rowley. "They do it quietly and are not used to asking for help."

But last month, delta fisherman Nicholas Tucker wrote a letter — that was then sent out in an e-mail to newspapers and others organizations — that starkly detailed the situation of 21 families in the village of Emmonak.

Those families included a father who had run out of milk for his 1-year-old daughter, an elderly couple who poured so much money into heating oil that they couldn't afford to buy their groceries, and a family of nine whose menu had been pared back to Spam and rice. The e-mail buzzed all over the Internet, eventually winding up in Rowley's inbox.

Public disclosure of these private hardships was controversial. Some villagers were angry as bloggers spread the news. Others supported speaking out.

"With the cost of fuel and the lack of fisheries, it kind of just exploded," said Billy Charles, a former mayor of Emmonak. "But it's been developing for years."

In the past two weeks, hundreds of food boxes have been airlifted to Emmonak and other western Alaska villages as part of a private aid effort.

Villagers will get some relief from the heating crunch in February, when a U.S. subsidiary of Venezuela's national oil company provides vouchers good for 100 gallons of fuel oil. The fuel assistance won't be enough to get the villagers through the cold that often lasts long into spring. So there is a wider effort to help that includes Elliott's Oyster House donations from sales of the Yukon chum-salmon dinners.

Chum are far more abundant than the Yukon chinook, which are marketed as Yukon king.

In the years ahead, Rowley, who works as a consultant for an Emmonak-based salmon processing company, is hopeful that chums can become a much bigger source of income for the Yup'ik fishermen.

The big challenge is to distinguish these Yukon fish from other chum, which often have pale, bland-tasting meat. The Yukon chum have a lot more oil that turns their flesh orange, and are promoted as a much richer-tasting fish than the standard chum.

"It's a really good eating fish and becoming more popular," said Jeremy Anderson, director of operations for Elliott's parent company, Consolidated Restaurants, which is sponsoring the February fundraising effort.

Most of the Yukon commercial fishermen live in a half-dozen villages spread across a vast, flat expanse of land, which is braided by a tangle of channels where the river nears the Bering Sea. Subsistence hunting and fishing are still an integral part of the village economy. Federal and state aid is an important source of cash, as is the summer fishing season, with more than 680 fishermen holding permits to gill-net salmon. Back in 1998, the average permit holder took in nearly $9,000. But last summer, as the chinook salmon run faltered, the average permit holder grossed less than $2,300, according to preliminary Alaska state estimates.

State biologists expect another weak run of Yukon chinook this year, continuing a decadelong trend of largely disappointing runs in the prized fishery. It is unclear what mix of ocean and freshwater conditions are behind the chinook decline. But the situation has likely been aggravated by accidental netting of Alaska-bound chinook by pollock trawl fleets.

Runs of Yukon chum salmon have been in much better shape, with a summer commercial harvest of 500,000 fish and a fall run of 400,000 expected this year, according to the Alaska Department of Fish and Game.

Rowley said a key to marketing chum is getting the Yup'ik fishermen to focus on quality. He said there has been progress.

Fish used to be dumped into the skiffs and allowed to bang about as they stiffened into rigor mortis. Kwik'pak Fisheries, a local salmon processor operated by a fisheries development organization, now requires the fish to be bled and iced immediately.

Last year, as these chum hit the market, demand grew, and the price rose from less than 50 cents to 70 cents per pound, said Jack Schultheis, general manager of Kwik'pak in Emmonak.

Next year, fishermen are hoping the chums will fetch more money.

"They are getting some good fish down there (in Seattle)," said Humphrey Keyes, a fisherman in Emmonak. "It would be nice to see the price come up."

Hal Bernton: 206-464-2581 or hbernton@seattletimes.com