Each spring, in Alaska’s Sitka Sound, herring return to spawn, touching off a long-running clash between commercial fishers and the Tlingit tribe, whose subsistence harvest of herring roe has been going on for millennia, as Brett Simpson explains in FERN’s latest story, published with The Nation. “Today, their subsistence harvest accounts for less than 1 percent of the herring roe taken in Sitka. Japanese buyers have dominated the fishery here since their own herring population was decimated by overfishing in the 1960s. For nearly 50 years now, Alaska’s commercial fishers have made millions feeding the demand for Japan’s traditional kazunoko delicacy. “
This hyper-specific export market is also extremely wasteful. Seiners—boats named for their expansive seine nets—scoop up entire schools of herring, male and female alike, but sell only the eggs of mature females, usually over six years old. The rest is bycatch.
“The Sitka Tribe of Alaska—Sitka’s federally recognized tribal government—says that its food security, along with the herring, has paid a price. In Tlingit tradition, herring eggs were a staple nutritional source. Today, they are a rarer delicacy eaten in communal, celebratory settings. In the years since the commercial harvest began, the tribe’s harvest has diminished to the point that its citizens were forced to ration the eggs, feeding elders first. And tribal citizens aren’t the only ones who rely on the fish. Herring are a keystone species, a “forage fish” that sits at the bottom of the food chain; countless other fish, birds, and marine mammals depend on them. If the fishery collapses, the entire ecosystem is at risk.”