A Native Perspective on Regenerative Ocean Farming
by Dune Lankard
As a young child growing up in Alaska, spring would always signal brighter, longer days, and usher in another season when animals and delicious fish species would pour into our ancestral homelands in the Copper River Delta and Prince William Sound. Every year, these cherished memories come flooding back and I recall with nostalgia the countless times my mother Rosie and Auntie Irene would gather us kids from both sides of the family and load us up in cars and trucks, then happily with lots of laughter, head out to the Delta, where remnants of ice and snow were still on the ground from the long and arduous winter. It was always chilly, but we were bundled up and ready for another family subsistence adventure.
Soon after arrival, we would search the skies for circling Bald Eagles, because we knew they knew where the fish were. Then we would select a place that had easy access to the river and lots of driftwood and logs to sit on so we could build a campfire to stay warm. That’s when the fun would begin! We would take turns dipping hundreds of hooligan (a tiny 10-inch long fish like Smelt) out of the river with long handled small mesh dip nets. We would then fill up several five-gallon buckets with Hooligan to last us into the summer and winter. Once the fish were onshore, we would quickly clean the entrails and pop the heads off and fry the oil rich hooligan (once cooked the meat falls off the backbone) and eat them hot straight out of the frying pan. Yummm … All of us kids would eat like we were royalty.
Each spring and well into the summer, we would harvest razor clams, spotted shrimp, rockfish, halibut, cod, sea bass and begin fishing for all five species of Pacific salmon: Chinook (king), sockeye (red), pink (humpy), chum (Keta) and Coho (silver) that would fill our nets all spring, summer, and fall. In the Sound in the autumn, we would harvest a late run of Pacific herring for bait for our winter fisheries, then during cold snowy winter months we would harvest tanner crab (snow crab) and three other species of king crab.
Copper River Delta
Photo Credit: Nels Evangelista
Our Delta and Sound regions were known for having one of Alaska’s longest salmon fisheries and the Delta was home to the world-famous Copper River salmon. Fishing on the Delta in mid-May, it was not uncommon to come back home from a 12-, 24-, or 36-hour fishing opener with Copper River salmon, occasionally Dungeness crab, razor clams (if there was a good minus tide), sturgeon, halibut, and sea bass. We lived with abundance and thought that wild salmon would be plentiful forever and our way of life would never end. We took nature’s bounty for granted, because we felt that this was just the way it would always be. Boy, were we ever wrong!
Our region was hit by several natural and man-made disasters that forever changed our way of life both on the land and in the ocean. Shortly after Alaska became a state in 1959 (the year I was born), the 1964 Good Friday 9.2 Earthquake, which lasted four minutes and 38 seconds, rocked our world and our fisheries. Exactly 25 years later on Good Friday 1989, the Exxon Valdez oil tanker hit Bligh Reef (44 miles from our home in Cordova) and spewed millions of gallons of crude oil into the Sound and onto our pristine beaches, impacting 1,500 miles of our coastline.
Once again, our fisheries were devastated. The Exxon spill killed our herring run and created dead zones in the Sound that still exist today. Twenty-five years later, the effects of climate change began wreaking havoc on our fisheries, which today are on the brink of collapse. Ocean acidification, the Blob (warming of our ocean currents) and sea-level rise have forced dozens of Alaskan villages to relocate to higher ground and will displace thousands. Every year, our wild salmon are returning fewer in number and smaller in size, meaning they are not surviving in the ocean and are competing for disappearing food sources.
Wherever I have traveled around the world, I knew that as long as I could get to the water, I would be okay. I could find a way to feed myself and make a good living harvesting fish from the sea or lakes. This is no longer the case. In Alaska, the 1973 Limited Entry Act turned our traditional fishing way of life into a commodity. Our fishing rights were granted in the form of a fishing permit that could be sold to anyone, including people living outside Alaska. I remember when my grandma Lena Saska or momma Rosie would tell us about the seasons of animals or when certain seafoods were ready for harvest or when to go pick wild berries. They would explain to us kids why we needed to respect and honor everything, and to never take this sacred gift of life for granted or it would be taken from us. Well, here we are...at that crucial moment in time.
Dune Lankard tending to his fishing net
Photo Credit: Will Saunders
Glacial Runoff in the Copper River Delta
Photo Credit: Nels Evangelista
200,000+ tons returning home to only 4,000 tons annually. This development dealt us a blow because half of our annual fishing income was derived from the herring fisheries. If the herring recovers, nearly every species impacted by the spill, would also recover.
To help speed up the recovery, we are hoping that the herring spawn on our restorative offshore kelp farms rather than in the intertidal zone where oil from the Exxon spill still lingers 32 years later. By spawning offshore in clean healthy kelp forests, the herring may find a way to rid themselves of the disease that is killing them. In the spring of 2020, herring in Southeast Alaska spawned on a 100-acre kelp farm, showing us that herring are smarter than humans think. To ensure their survival we need to explore all of our options, and kelp farming has proven to be a successful mitigating approach.
Life is full of ironies and mine is no exception. At age 12, my first payday from the sea came from kelping, specifically harvesting herring roe (eggs) on kelp in the early 1970’s. Ironically, it seems that one of the last wages I will receive from the ocean will also come from kelp.
After several bad fishing seasons in a row, with deep regret I recently sold my salmon drift net permit for the Delta and Sound fisheries before the value completely collapsed, just like fishing permit values plummeted after the Exxon spill. It was getting harder and harder to convince myself that this year would be better than the last.
Having witnessed first-hand the steady decline of our fishing way of life, I knew I had to look at the ocean differently. This led me to a restorative kelp and mariculture solution for Alaska. The ocean has given me and my family one of the best lifestyles possible – allowing us to take care of our families, doing what we love, being free on the ocean, and getting paid to feed millions of people from our Delta and Sound harvest. I came to realize that it was time for me to give back to the place that had given me so much and taken care of me and my people for thousands of years. I felt the need to identify real solutions and find ways to restore our once robust oceans and plentiful wild fisheries.
Duke Lankard fishing
Photo Credit: Will Saunders
I had known about the work Bren Smith and his non-profit GreenWave’s regenerative ocean farming was doing for about a decade, because we were both part of a global fellowship that helped us do our game changing work. Sea change work, in our case. When I first met Bren, I knew what he was doing was groundbreaking work, and that he had a solution that would help our oceans. So, as our fisheries began crashing in Alaska, I contacted him and traveled back east to New Haven, Connecticut, to see how we could work together to bring this fledgling kelp solution to Prince William Sound and our spill zone waters.
Brainstorming with Bren and his dedicated GreenWave team, I headed back to Alaska with renewed hopes and dreams of helping our ocean to fully recover from the Exxon oil spill and deal with the numerous mounting impacts of climate change. I sat down with friends and family and said, “we need to jumpstart a region-wide, and eventually state-wide, Alaska Restorative Kelp Initiative that brings Native tribal members, women, youth and fishermen together to help restore the ocean and to learn how to grow traditional sea vegetables and to help us get this new ocean industry off the ground. Besides we don’t have to build high-speed boats that burn enormous amounts of fossil fuels chasing kelp around, and we don’t have to feed it, water it, or fertilize it, just care for it.”
Our goal at Native Conservancy was to do more than just protect wild salmon habitat. We aimed to get involved in protecting our unique subsistence way of life. Even though we had led successful conservation campaigns over decades to permanently protect over 1 million acres of wild salmon forest habitat that was scheduled to be clear-cut in the parallel path of the Exxon Valdez oil spill, we knew that saving habitat just was not enough anymore. We had to honor our ancestors and apply the lessons of the past to the challenges we were facing. Growing restorative habitat and entering the kelp space was the answer. Back then, I knew that if we took the clear-cut approach, we would end up like all the salmon nations along the coastal temperate rainforest, where there would be no more Native people engaging in traditional fisheries foraging for wild salmon and making a good living from the sea. Short-sighted logging practices and poor forest management severely impacted and destroyed wild salmon spawning habitat and contributed to the disappearance of wild salmon runs. Few understand that wild salmon are forest animals.
Bull Kelp in Alaskan waters
Courtesy of Native Conservancy
Indigenous First Nation communities along the coasts harvested sea vegetables, including kelp and bivalves for thousands of years. There is a coastal Native saying, “when the tide is out… the table is set.” This was absolutely true! My momma Rosie was the “best clammer”(razor clam digger) of her time, and our ancestral homeland Eyak was known as the “Razor Clam Capital of the World.” Mom dug 1 ton (2,000 lbs.) of razor clams in one minus tide. Think about that. Later my three sisters (Pam, Deb and Linda Lou) would become the best clammers of their time, before the razors disappeared in the mid-1970’s – about a decade after the 1964 Earthquake.
From the proceeds of the sale of my fishing permit, I bought a 40-foot boat with plenty of deck space and a heavy-duty crane to lift our kelp farm equipment (buoys, anchors and lines) around the Sound in order to be a part of this emerging resilient economy. We worked strategically to build a new model around the concept “non-profit + for-profit = social-profit.” This approach helped form the Blue Wave Futures Collective of ocean farmers, that includes local Native people, women, youth and fishermen who are in it for the long haul for four main reasons: restoration, the creation of much needed ocean habitat, the growth of traditional food sources for our people, and the building of a new and regenerative economy that creates blue carbon jobs.
To further this kelp economy in Alaska, we undertook several pilot projects that gave us hands on experience in locating and growing kelp seed and to overcome the numerous barriers to entry, as we sought to bridge habitat restoration and food security. Among the many lessons learned and challenges we faced, we identified serious bottlenecks that exist for future ‘kelpers’ including securing long-term, low-interest start-up loans; funding to perform landscape analysis (to see what can grow where); the high cost of permitting; securing boats to locate, harvest, and transport wild seed; and securing adequate support to build kelp seed nurseries and hatcheries. Kelp farmers will need vessels to source seed in the summer, lay their kelp arrays (farms) in the fall and monitor them all winter in numerous coastal storms, then harvest their kelp in the spring. Future farmers will also need processing spaces (including commercial kitchens for experimenting with value-added products for growing a local cottage industry and statewide markets). They’ll also need to figure out how to minimize their carbon footprint, reduce transportation costs, and create marketing and sales opportunities for the potential millions of pounds of kelp.
Prince William Sound
Photo Credit: Molly Leebove
Like any upstart industry, we need courageous, bold and visionary donors and social impact investors to join us in leading the way and to understand that once we are successful at integrating a restorative and regenerative ocean economy, the recovery of our oceans and fisheries will follow.
Native Conservancy is going to work with Alaska tribes to write a Declaration of Principles and an Indigenous Kelp Farmers Bill of Rights to see that our oceans are permitted fairly, managed properly and with honor and respect for Alaska’s Native communities. We are committed to working with Native peoples and to being regenerative ocean farmers to figure out how to best address and overcome the barriers to entry in this new ocean industry.
This is also an opportunity to change our relationship with food. We need to respect traditional food sources, start growing and processing our own food, feed our communities, and market directly any excess. In these times of shortages and hardship, this will help create sensible local regenerative industries that sustain our people, restore our lands and oceans, and re-localize our economy.
I remember when Bren first shared with me the idea of “Who Farms Matters.” Indigenous First Nation people were the original stewards of the land in Alaska and throughout the Americas. Ironically, Indigenous peoples are now the “outliers” on their own ancestral lands and are the ones who must step up once again and become the stewards of the land and the oceans. As my friend Dr. Elizabeth Hoover says, “how can we call ourselves sovereign, if we can’t feed ourselves?”
Duke Lankard
Photo Credit: Will Saunders
Dune Lankard is an Eyak Athabaskan of the Eagle Clan whose Native name is Jamachakih: “Little Bird that screams really loud and won’t shut up.” Dune grew up in Eyak (now called Cordova) in Southcentral Alaska. Born into a fishing family, his life’s journey as a subsistence and commercial fisherman began at age five. He later earned a living as a fishery consultant and commercial fisherman in the Copper River Delta and Prince William Sound. The 1989 Exxon Valdez oil spill transformed him into an activist and social change leader. Dune has founded and co-founded numerous organizations, including the Eyak Preservation Council and Native Conservancy. His tireless efforts have helped secure the preservation of more than 1 million acres of wild salmon habitat in the Exxon spill zone. He has also received wide recognition, including Time Magazine’s Top 50 Heroes for the Planet, as well as Fellowships with the Ashoka Foundation, Future of Fish and a Prime Movers Award. He is a board member of GreenWave and is now fearlessly venturing into kelp and mariculture farming in Prince William Sound to restore habitat, grow traditional foods and help build regenerative economies and resiliency for oceans and coastal communities.
We’re honored to work with Dune Lankard, Native Conservancy Executive Director and GreenWave board member, who leads our programming with Indigenous communities.
Dune is a global leader of ocean activism and Indigenous rights. In this reflection, Dune shares his perspective on the cultural, ecological, and economic history and significance of the ocean, as well as his vision for regenerative ocean farming in Alaska.