A permitting system designed in the 1970s was supposed to make Alaska’s commercial fishing industry more sustainable and more profitable. But over the last 50 years, it has hollowed out many Indigenous coastal villages where residents no longer can earn a living by harvesting salmon.
Nick Katelnikoff learned to fish from his father, and he says his first paycheck as a fisherman came when he turned 8 years old. Now 76, pictured aboard his boat, the MZ L, he’s the last skipper running a commercial fishing vessel from his home village of Ouzinkie, on an island just north of Kodiak.
When Katelnikoff was still beginning his career in the 1970s, he was one of a dozen or so skippers in Ouzinkie — a small Indigenous village on an island just off Kodiak’s coast. The policy was known as “limited entry” because it restricted who could enter the industry, and it created permits that have since been valued collectively at more than $1 billion.
“If you’ve got young people who live in the fishing communities where the fisheries occur and they don’t see that as an opportunity, that’s bad public policy,” said Rachel Donkersloot, a researcher who grew up in the Bristol Bay region and has spent more than a decade studying obstacles to fisheries access. “Being able to provide for yourself from that fishery should be a birthright.”
But the one-time windfalls severed an Indigenous tradition of commerce tied to Alaska’s ocean harvests — a trade that could now require a permit to access. And the high prices put them out of reach for many rural Alaskans who lacked a credit history or who didn’t have collateral for a loan. At the time, many of Alaska’s Indigenous communities were just beginning to encounter those systems. And in some cases, sophisticated urban operators took advantage of that inexperience to buy their permits at low prices, according to people who witnessed the transactions.
“It’s just terminated this ability to be self-sufficient and self-determined,” said Jonathan Kreiss-Tomkins, a former state legislator from Sitka who tried and failed to reverse the permit losses before he left office in 2023. He described spending time in struggling rural villages in his district that were once “thriving, bustling communities 40 years ago that ran on commercial fishing.
After decades of inaction, state lawmakers are reconsidering parts of the limited entry system amid a broader effort to aid the fishing industry. Alaska’s seafood businesses and fishermen have faced major upheaval in the past two years, stemming from reduced demand and low-priced competition from Russian harvesters.released in January, a legislative task force noted the “large loss of permits held in rural and Alaska Native fishing communities.
Gardiner wasn’t a full-time fisherman, either. He was still in high school, just looking for a fun way to earn a few bucks. He and a buddy made perhaps a “couple grand” in profit each summer, he said. Gardiner’s experience was a symptom of what he describes, more than a half-century later, as a “sickness” that was afflicting Alaska’s fishing industry.
The economists said that far fewer boats and nets could catch the same amount of fish, allowing the industry to return to profitability.The limited entry program was not Alaska’s first attempt to restrict the number of fishermen. Legislators had initially approved policies aimed at making it harder for people from other states to access its waters.
Alaska voters approved a constitutional amendment paving the way for the limited entry system in 1972, and state lawmakers passed a bill to implement the policy the following year. Bush planes, the only way to reach the road system, arrived in the village just once or twice a week, Liboff said. Many Koliganek residents spoke no English, only their Indigenous Yup’ik language. Most finished school after eighth grade; there were just a handful of full-time jobs.
“You didn’t need a full-time job to survive,” Liboff said. “People got by. I don’t remember anybody being hungry.” Two brothers who had fished in an equal partnership realized that only one could pass their single permit on to their children. In another village, Liboff knew a Native woman who didn’t speak English and had what he said was a common misunderstanding about the permit system. She thought that if her children needed to generate some cash by selling the permits they initially qualified for, they could simply earn new ones later.
Congress also passed legislation in 1971 that terminated Indigenous land claims in Alaska. In exchange, the Alaska Native Claims Settlement Act transferred some 10% of the state to Indigenous people — but it did so through newly created, for-profit corporations. Native leaders and advocacy groups, in recent years, have increasingly questioned how well that for-profit model serves their interests and aligns with their culture.
Urban and out-of-state fishermen were more likely to own cutting-edge boats and gear that allowed them to catch more fish and reap bigger profits. As a result, they were willing to pay more for a permit than fishermen without those advantages.“The economic rationale of why you want to privatize the rights to fish is all about efficiency.
But the bill never got to the House floor for a vote. Kreiss-Tomkins said he thought the proposal “bewildered” some of the legislators from urban communities who weren’t familiar with the limited entry system. There was also a wariness from fishing industry stakeholders who represented existing permit holders, he said.
“They love fishing. But they don’t have the opportunity,” Christiansen said. “How are you going to be able to come up with half a million dollars to get in?”
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