An economics research project is looking at what happened to the Bristol Bay salmon fishing permits initially issued to watershed residents.
When the Bristol Bay salmon fishery was limited, about half the permits were issued to watershed residents. In the decades since, some have stayed in with residents, and others have left.
University of Washington researcher Jennifer Meredith came to Bristol Bay this spring to study permits in the salmon fishery. After seeing 10 communities and talking to hundreds of residents, she wishes they could visit more.
"Because the stories are so different everywhere," she said. "I do think the thing that all the places have in common is people are really committed to the salmon fishery. And there's a lot of really tragic stories of the way that the permit system affected people out here, but there's a lot of really empowering stories, families that have been fishing for 12 generations now, that rely on the resource and intend to bequeath the permit to their descendants who can continue to rely on the resource."
Meredith and her team of research assistants have visited Aleknagik, Newhalen, Iliamna, Togiak, Nakenek, King Salmon, South Naknek, Koliganek, Manokotak and Dillingham. By visiting a wide range of towns in terms of size, local economy and other issues, Meredith wants to get a sense of how different communities have fared differently in the past couple of decades.
In each town, Meredith and her colleagues set out to find out what happened to randomly selected permit holders. Different strategies worked best in different communities. They hired locals to help understand the community and family trees, and offered Subway sandwiches, coffee gift cards and a fuel raffle to get respondents to show up. And then they interviewed permit holders, or people who knew permit holders, and heard many, many stories.
"We loved just hearing the stories," Meredith said. "That's really the way we start every survey. Where are you from? Where was your family from? What brought them here? So we got to hear lots of great stories about people moving from volcanic eruptions and flu epidemics. We're going way, way back with some of these original permit holders and hearing about the original founders and pioneers and then, a lot of the history of the native peoples and where they located and what brought them into settlements and that kind of thing. I think the nature of the project was surprising to me, how many stories it brought out of people."
But one thing that hasn't happened is people moving among communities. Meredith said the team found about 80 percent of the permits they had randomly selected to survey, and for about half of those, they found the actual person it was issued to and they were looking for. For those permits where they couldn't find the original issuee, the team talked to the closest living relative about 20 percent and a community leader or someone else who knew them about 10 percent of the time.
In places where permits have been sold, they found a long list of factors that play into the decision to fish a permit or sell it: markets and processors and price, access to other support resources like community development quota programs, even whether they had family to pass it on to.
"There are people that sold permits and invested the money into a different type of enterprise, and there are people that sold permits because they really felt like they had to, to pay their bills and they got in a tough spot," she said. "There's all different reasons. I wouldn't say there's one thread, but I'm looking forward to analyzing the data and seeing what we find."
Meredith said they also heard a wide range of stories about who got permits and what they did with them, particularly women applying for setnet permits based on a history of fishing, and younger family members, whose older siblings got a permit but didn't necessarily get one themselves.
As for the impact of the CDQ program, Meredith said she found that people outside the nationally-set boundaries were more likely to have a permit but not a boat, and partner on someone else's boat.
And, they found that some communities have not lost permits.
"Some communities have lost very few permits," she said. "We were up in Koliganek, and very few permits have been sold up there. So it was important to us to have a variety of situations. There's definitely a misconception on the part of people down here closer to the bay that the people from up in Lake District have sold more permits than them, but in terms of actual numbers, it's pretty equivalent."
They also asked people for ideas about helpful policies, and heard two main responses: higher fish prices would help, and that the business side of commercial fishing is hard, and where people need the most help.
Meredith is an economist. She's hoping to turn all those stories into a robust picture of why people keep permits, why they sell them, and what happens in either case.
"The perception I've come away with is, there's five sides to every coin," she said. "… It's tough to be a local person and be in the fishery. You have to be a good business person and a good harvester. … I'm interested to see what comes out of the data as far as what policies might help moving forward, and I'm hopeful that we might get some real rigorous results using all these control groups for what happens when a permit is sold, as far as what are the consequences for the descendants, in terms of where they live, what their occupation is and what their assets look like later on," she said.
The analysis will start with a lot of data entry, and then she'll turn all the narratives into numbers.
"You can count the number of permits in the direct family tree. We can code sister, brother, etc. So matching all the individual surveys that we did with their relatives in the larger family is how we'll do that. People out here are great storytellers and they have great narratives of where they lived — that still allows me for every date to assign a location and for every date to assign a reason for being there. Just hearing the narrative of why people move around, you can turn it into data."
This story first appeared in The Bristol Bay Times/Dutch Harbor Fisherman and is republished here with permission.