Alaska’s Dune Lankard, his People and the Sea

A hopeful story of an Eyak fisherman from the Exxon Valdez disaster to kelp farming.

David Helvarg (DH): We’re just outside Cordova Alaska on Prince William Sound with Dune Lankard, a member of the Eagle Clan of the Eyak Tribal Nation, a longtime commercial fisherman also the founder of the Native Conservancy that serves 32 tribes throughout Alaska, an innovator in kelp farming, now looking into electric skiffs.  So, a man of many skills.  Let me ask what was your first connection with the ocean? 

Dune Lankard (DL): I grew up in a fishing family and got out on the water when I was like five or six years old.  And once any of us was tall enough to reach the hydraulic handle for the power block, then we're recruited to go fishing. And you had to be alert when out on the sea.

One of the biggest things was just not to step off the side of the boat. Like when we went out on deck, we had to let someone know we were going out on deck in case we fell over for whatever reason, someone would know to at least that we were out there. And I remember one set that we made around a bunch of dogs.

(DH): That's Dog salmon. 

(DL): Yeah. Chum salmon. We had got several salmon sharks in the net and we would take the plungers and sink the corks (keeping the nets afloat) so that the salmon sharks could get out of the net.  They're like, eight, nine feet long and, big teeth. And I was just a young boy. And I remember walking up there and seeing a shark come straight for me with the fin out of the water and I got a little startled and I literally fell down on my bum with my feet dangling over the side of the boat looking at this shark looking at me.

And I was like, ‘Oh my God,’ and my father laughed. He said ‘that shark won't hurt you.’ But I was happy to see it get out of the net because we had three or four of them in the net chasing chum salmon that day. But my first income from the sea was actually when I turned 11 because we're grappling for herring roe on kelp 

(DH): and this is where the herring literally lay their eggs on top of the kelp, which is a long-time indigenous delicacy. 

(DL): Exactly, and so my first income from the sea was kelp fishing herring, long lining for bottom fish, purse seining for salmon and herring, gill netting for herring. Then the Exxon Valdez oil spill happened on March 24th, 1989. 

(DH): Again we're on Prince William Sound and this was the worst U.S. environmental disaster at the time. 

(DL): And when that happened Exxon hired me to go out and round up kelp and pull it aboard my boat and bring it over and put it in totes (large containers) where they would then take hot water wash and dump chemicals and soap into the totes.  And My job was to clean as much as the oil off the kelp as I could and then put it into a clean tote and then take that back out and dump it in the sea Because Exxon wanted everyone, especially in the media that was flying over, to see clean kelp and say ‘oh the damage wasn't that bad.’ 

(DH): But That process killed the kelp, no?

(DL): Yeah, it killed the kelp as soon as I put that hot water on it. And whatever organism that was inside of that kelp died immediately with the chemicals and the soap.

(DH): And today, 35 years later, a lot of that oil is just subsurface now.

(DL): Any of the protected bays where the Exxon Valdez oil landed on the beaches that doesn't have a lot of weather or tidal action, you can dig down three inches to two feet and there's oil. So, the oil is still prevalent in different areas in Prince William Sound, there's still dead zones.

And so, what happened with our herring, which plummeted from 200, 000 ton of Pacific herring returning to Prince William Sound annually, dropped down to as low as 4, 000 ton returning. And the problem was that they were no longer reproducing. And if they weren't spawning, then there was going to be a new run of herring.

And so, what was happening was the herring had lacerations and lesions, meaning they were bleeding underneath their scales and had some sort of a disease from the Exxon Valdez oil spill. So, with oil seepage still coming out of some of the beaches and going out into the water and onto some of those kelp forests that are out there near the intertidal zone, those herring weren't reproducing.

But herring are smarter than us humans. They decided to move out onto the eastern delta and start spawning in clear, cleaner waters. And now the numbers are up around 20, 000 ton. 

(DH): That’s still 10 percent of what they were before the spill 35 years ago.

(DL): Exactly. And it's not nearly enough to warrant a fishery yet. But what I believe, is that when the herring recover, all the critters impacted by the Exxon Valdez oil spill, which was 27 different species, will also recover as well as the humans.  Because it was devastating to lose that herring economy because it was 50 percent of our annual income. We made 50 percent of our money from the ocean before we caught our first salmon. And so when that fishery was stripped from us and not compensated by Exxon.  We lost a huge income and then when the prices of salmon plummeted along with permit prices in boats, it was tough to make a living here for 25 years.

(DH): And one of the things you did was create the Native Conservancy, which was the first of its kind.   Tell me what inspired you, when you did that and why. 

(DL): When the Exxon Valdez Trustee Council was formed after we were able to wrangle a billion dollars from Exxon, 900 million in an out of court settlement for restoration in the spill zone with an additional 100 million that would pay out based on the science from 1989 to the present if it showed that more restoration was needed.  Then we'd get that last 100 million, which Exxon never paid because the government never pursued it.

But out of the 900 million We felt that the best restoration that could possibly happen was to stop the clear cutting that the Native corporations had engaged in along a parallel path of the Exxon oil spill.  So, I sat down with my family and friends and said, ‘We're gonna end up like California, Oregon and Washington, where the fishermen in their off season were logging and killed both industries at the same time.  Because what people don't realize is salmon are actually forest animals. They're born in the forest. They come down out of the lakes into the rivers, go out to sea, and go on their world tour for two to seven years, depending on their species. And when they come back, there has to be a temperate rainforest that keeps that water cool so they can spawn.

And if it's been clear cut, the water heats up, and so the salmon spawn closer to the ocean. And when they spawn closer to the ocean, they're susceptible to monsoons and winds and weather and big tides. And if the eggs get washed out, then the mortality increases. Rises, just skyrockets. And so, it's not rocket scientist to figure this out.  That we have to protect the habitat and protect the home of the salmon so they have a home to come home to when it's time to do the wild thing. 

(DH) And you've managed to protect a million and a half acres with it. 

A million. What happened was we were able to preserve 650, 000 acres for about $420 million with the Exxon Valdez oil spill trustee council funding.

And then since then I've protected an additional 350, 000 acres and we’re about ready to save some more land on the Delta. 

(DH): This was done through the Native Conservancy? 

(DL): The reason I started the Native Conservancy was because when we were doing the Exxon Valdez deals, government and some of the environmentalists demanded fee simple title for our native lands and we fought so hard and so long and received the Alaska Native Claims Settlement Act to retain some of our 380 million acres that we owned.  And we only retained 44 million acres, approximately 11 percent of our original land base. And now we were forced to sell it for conservation purposes?   I felt it was too high of a price to pay for conservation.  So, I started the Native Conservancy to do two things. One, figure out how we were going to stop selling Fee Simple Title.  And then figure out how we could do cultural easements along with conservation easements that guaranteed the right of access for Indian people. 

(DH): So basically, Alaskan native people have done very good fish and wildlife management for thousands of years. So, the idea is conservation easements that allow for everything that's traditional and historically useful for the tribes.

(DL): Yes, the conservation and the cultural easements put forth a co-management agreement on how the resources are going to be managed. And the native peoples never took more than they needed. Once the commercial fishery was turned into a commodity during limited entry in 1973, it changed. the management of the fishery because it put a value on each fish and that fishing permit, the right to fish.

And so, prior to limited entry across the state of Alaska, probably 90 percent of the fisher people were native community members. And then after limited entry in 1973, when it turned into a commodity, over 90 percent of those permits are now held by non-native people who are from California, Oregon, and Washington, who mismanaged their fisheries.

(DH): So now the Conservancy's established, I was just out with Robert, who's one of your hunters and guides collecting wild meats and you're collecting fishes that go to the elders of the community.

(DL): Yeah. We realized that saving the land and protecting and preserving the land wasn't enough, that we had to figure out how to preserve and enhance our subsistence way of life. And so when COVID broke out a number of elders just weren't out on the water or on the land getting their traditional food because everyone was worried about being around other humans and contracting this disease and dying.

So, we decided to ramp up our food sovereignty and food security program to actually start harvesting some of these traditional customary foods. We realized that we had to go out and do this for our elders. And at one point, we were up to harvesting 16 different species of traditional foods and processing them, packaging them, blast freezing them in our freezer system and delivering them to all of our elders. And they loved it and they still do. 

(DH): Moose and deer and duck and goose and the famous copper river salmon.

(DL): And an occasional black bear. 

(DH): For sausage. Yeah.  Speaking of traditional foods, you're probably best known for the kelp farms that you're developing. And how did that come about? And how did the Native Conservancy come to be part of this kelp farming expansion?

(DL): In 2017 only 45, 000 sockeye salmon were harvested on the Copper River, which normally if normally is even a word anymore, we would harvest a million to 2 million sockeyes, which is a lot of red salmon annually.

(DH): So that was a huge collapse. 

(DL): Huge collapse. Only 45, 000 sockeyes harvested in 2017.  2018, only 90, 000 sockeyes were harvested on the Copper River. And then the following year in 2019, the ocean heated up to 76 degrees for three weeks down the 20 feet below the surface.   

(DH): Geez, and just to reiterate, we're in Alaska and the water temperature was 76 degrees. 

(DL): Exactly. So literally across the state, millions of krill that the salmon feed on, millions of mussels wild kelp forests, salmon and birds perished because there was no oxygen in the water.

Anytime you have that fast of a heat up of temperature, then there's no oxygen (Cold water holds more dissolved oxygen). And so, what happens is those salmon going to spawn in the lakes or the rivers or tributaries, they’re going to spawn in the inner tidal zone where it's cooler and hope that they don't get cooked to death.

And at the same time, they're susceptible to fall monsoon storms that could wash out those eggs if there's too many that spawn in the intertidal zone. And I felt like 2019 was pivotable and that I needed to figure out how we were going to learn how to grow things from the land and the sea and do it differently and do it now.  And I'd been watching what was happening with kelp and mariculture across the world for a while. And so, we decided to do a test program and create a couple of pilot programs to figure out what we could grow in Prince William Sound.

So we were the first ones to grow kelp. all three species, ribbon, bull, and sugar in one year in our first year. But what we realized was that there was no infrastructure in this industry, there were no markets in place, there was no processing in place, and there was all these huge barriers to entry.  So the Native Conservancy decided to focus on everything from how to do your landscape analysis to figure out what could grow where, to figuring out how to write a business plan, how to get your workman's comp, how to get your insurance how to get a boat, how to build a (rope and buoy farm) array, how to source your wild seed.

We even held diver certification classes so we could train divers how to go down and get the kelp themselves. And then we started talking to different people on how best to build these different arrays, how to deploy them. How to grow the seed. We didn't know where to grow the seed. We didn't know how to get the seed.

(DH): This is a huge industry in Asia where people have been eating kelp for thousands of years But it’s new to the U.S. I've just been to Maine where it's very commercial. You, the Native Conservancy, have a different perspective. You say you have three key reasons to be growing kelp.

(DL): First, native people they have thousands of years of harvesting kelp and enjoying it themselves. So, kelp isn't new for them. 

(DH): Like you were saying, a herring roe on kelp.

(DL): Yeah, exactly. And so indigenous peoples, what I realized was that they wanted to get into kelp farming for three reasons in this order;

One, to help heal and restore the ocean.  Number two, to grow a traditional food source that they have harvested and enjoyed for thousands of years. And thirdly, they wanted to be part of a regenerative economy that wasn't based on more natural resource extraction. And this industry, this regenerative industry, could be based on mitigation, restoration, and preservation.

And so indigenous peoples could enjoy this right off their front yards in their oceans near their villages. 

(DH): What's the relationship of this growing industry of kelp for food and for alginates and other processes and wild kelp. How do they relate? 

(DL): One of the things that I think people need to realize is that the wild old growth kelp forests are actually the mother seed that is needed to start this rapidly emerging, kelp farming industry.

And so there should be permanent protection of all the wild kelp forests right now. And what we need to do is when we build these kelp seed nurseries and hatcheries, they have to double as laboratories to build, excuse me, to grow climate change resilient species. We need to be thinking about this now, because if the ocean is already heating up in different places around the world, then if it gets too hot, then you're not going to be able to grow these kelp species.

And what I'm concerned about, if we're going to spend millions and millions of dollars to get this new ocean farming industry off the ground, then we actually have to have a plan. We have to have a vision. We have to have a mariculture plan. And right now, I don't see one in Alaska. I don't see one in America.  And I certainly don't see one for the world.

And what people also need to realize is that the wild kelp forests are actually cover and habitat for about two to three hundred juvenile species of sea critters that hide in that kelp and are safe and can grow bigger and stronger before they go out into the wild, including young salmon and herring.

I just feel like there just needs to be more education and more understanding. And I feel that if things don't change with wild harvesters, then indigenous peoples are going to have to call for a ban of wild harvest of the kelp forest to not only protect the habitat that those sea critters need, but to protect that mother seed that we need to get this industry off the ground.