SalmonState: Bringing the sockeye home

Klawock Indigenous Stewards and partners are restoring damaged salmon streams — and working to rebuild Klawock Lake’s once prolific sockeye salmon run.

This story was published by SalmonState. Read the full story here. The story features the Klawock Indigenous Steward Forest Partnership, an organization focused on forest restoration that was started with support from SASS funds.

Photo from the SalmonState article: Crew from the Southeast Alaska Watershed Coalition, the Klawock Indigenous Stewards Forest Partnership, Keex’ Kwáan, and the Alaska Youth Stewards all helped with projects restoring fish habitat and stream structure at Seven Mile Creek, Klawock Heenya property just outside Klawock Lake. The area’s old growth was clearcut logged in 1987.

The community worked together with scientists from Juneau to make a plan to help the fish. This project is one piece of the Klawock Lake Sockeye Salmon Action Plan, authored by the Southeast Alaska Watershed Coalition, the Nature Conservancy, and Kai Environmental Consulting Services, in consultation with tribal, Native corporation, government, non-profit, and private sector partners.

“The Indigenous people of Klawock are sockeye salmon people. And to have these kinds of declines, to have this kind of impact in my own lifetime, let alone the generation before, it’s detrimental. It hurts our spirit. We’re doing our (best) out here to help at least give the sockeye a bit more of a fighting chance so that future generations will know what it’s like to have these fish,” Aboudara said.

Read the full story at SalmonState