Amid declining salmon runs, Coastal Villages Region Fund has shifted away from subsidizing village-based seafood processing, a move that some in the Kuskokwim region support and others criticize.
On a morning in late summer, inside a modest engine repair shop, Cleveland was juggling jobs fixing the transom of an aluminum skiff and stripping a four-wheeler down to the guts.
Coastal Villages, like the five other CDQ groups, is structured as a nonprofit with a community development mission. But it includes muscular for-profit subsidiaries ranging from a Honda dealership in Homer to companies that run longline crab and pollock vessels. Amongmajor investments was $32.4 million spent on a large processing plant in the community of Platinum. But even with hefty annual subsidies, sustaining local commercial fisheries in Western Alaska has often been difficult.
The nonprofit built mechanic-welder shops in Quinhagak and 17 other communities, and pays for staff to run them. A program named “People Propel” that was initially launched to help finance fishing gear has broadened to cover 30% of the cost of buying big-ticket subsistence equipment like snowmachines, four-wheelers and even home appliances. The group touts that the $16 million it put into the initiative in the last decade has leveraged the purchase of $48.
“Our program takes Bering Sea monies and uses it to improve the lives of folks in our region. And it’s been our experience that the best way to do that is to develop our fisheries,” said Ragnar Alstrom, executive director of the Yukon Delta association, which represents six communities. But opinions on Coastal Villages’ revamped spending strategy run the gamut, and in Quinhagak it’s not hard to find supporters with examples of programs that have had meaningful benefits.
As a method of pulling fish from the water, factory trawling bears almost no resemblance to the intense, opportunistic bouts of labor plucking salmon from gillnets in rivers within boating distance of people’s homes. For decades, that’s what people in the Kuskokwim Delta have meant when they spoke of “commercial fishing.”, a fishing job might mean weeks of 12- or 16-hour shifts standing on your feet in a loud, windowless floating factory feeding pollock into filleting machines.
. All together, more than 1,000 of the region’s 9,300 residents received cash from Coastal Villages in 2011.The money earned from salmon was also important to Eek, a village of some 400 residents a dozen miles inland from where the Kuskokwim River empties into the Bering Sea. It is a boardwalk town, with a warren of wooden ramps and bridge walkways crisscrossing spongy tundra.
“Seven communities made money. … So the other 13 were basically getting scraps in terms of benefits,” said Larson Hunter, who chairs Coastal Villages’ board and lives in Scammon Bay, one of the communities farthest from the major salmon stocks and processing plants.report“The benefits of the CVS program have been unavoidably concentrated in a relatively small number of communities.
A central goal is servicing the equipment vital to subsistence. It’s one thing to help people buy new four-wheelers and outboard motors, but the benefits are limited if the machines sit idle because shipping them to Bethel or beyond for repairs is prohibitively expensive. His task one morning in early August was fashioning a seal harpoon. He fitted a sharp, hand-filed brass point into a black wooden shaft as his Bluetooth speaker pumped out hip-hop. Two of his friends, sitting at a plastic folding table, worked on spears of their own.
Coastal Villages has long had a scholarship fund to assist Kuskokwim students in pursuing higher education. It also offers some high schoolers field trips outside the region and sponsors a maritime training program that teaches navigation and other skills. Coastal Villages has made a modest start. While it used to offer loans to help with housing, it now partners with tribal and federal agencies and is developing a template for helping with the home-buying process by guiding program participants through the survey and home-financing process. It’s also helping secure outside grants to level homes that have shifted over the decades.
Adams grew up in the region back when salmon runs were far stronger. In her youth, her father gave her a small motor and net so she could skipper her own commercial boat.
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