Western Alaska leaders take food security to a circumpolar assembly

Leaders from Alaska's Yukon-Kuskokwim Delta are in Iqaluit, Nunavut, this week for the first Inuit Circumpolar Council General Assembly in nearly a decade, where food security and hunting practices sit alongside language and identity on the agenda.

Four officials from the Association of Village Council Presidents are there — Board Chairman Thad Tikiun, Vice-Chair Martin Andrew, Secretary Julia Dorris, and CEO Vivian Korthuis — part of an 18-member Alaska delegation drawn from the Bering Strait, Northwest Arctic, North Slope, and Yukon-Kuskokwim regions.

AVCP represents 56 federally recognized tribes and 27,000 people in 48 Yup'ik, Cup'ik, and Athabascan communities along the Yukon and Kuskokwim rivers and the Bering Sea coast.

Food security carries particular weight there. Bering Sea pollock trawl fisheries have taken more than 246,000 Chinook and 3.5 million chum salmon as bycatch since 2011, according to the Kuskokwim River Inter-Tribal Fish Commission, while subsistence fishing on both rivers has faced closures.

The council, founded in 1977, holds a permanent seat on the Arctic Council.