by Troy Letherman
“This land of bounty has provided for our families, our culture and our traditional way of life for tens of thousands of years,” says Lydia Olympic, a Yupik/Sugpiaq from the village of Igiugig, which is located on the shores of Lake Iliamna in the Bristol Bay region of southwest Alaska.
These days, a good bit of Olympic’s time is spent organizing and educating people on the development proposals that could threaten Bristol Bay’s fisheries resources, but she still finds time every summer to return home to help her family harvest and dry salmon at their fish camp. Of course, the fisheries represented in this small slice of Alaska are second to none, so there’s definitely a need for extra hands once the salmon start to return.
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