OPINION: It’s time to defend the rivers that feed us

You don’t forget your first salmon. I fought the first one I ever caught for 45 minutes at the north end of Gravina Island here in Southeast Alaska, way back in the early 1980s. Catching and killing that magnificent creature, a beautiful 41-pound king, was a truly transformative experience for me — heartrending, proud and sad at the same moment and yet oh so delicious. Around that time, I realized that there was a new meaning to my name: Ray Troll. To troll — to fish with a hook and a line. And “ray” is a kind of fish, a stingray. It feels like some sort of weird destiny that 40 years after that first king salmon, I’ve made a living as an Alaska artist specializing in wild salmon and the landscapes that nurture them.

The land I’m on right now is the ancestral home of the Tongass Tribe — part of the Tlingit Nation. It’s truly a privilege to live here in this incredible place where the mountains and forest meet the sea. Just upstream and out of sight, however, Southeast Alaska communities face a looming threat that endangers one of the last wild runs of king salmon that have returned to this region for eons.

Nearly 90% of the Unuk River, a wild transboundary river that flows from British Columbia, Canada, into Alaska’s Misty Fjords National Monument, is staked with Canadian mineral claims, including Seabridge Gold’s massive, proposed Kerr-Sulphurets-Mitchell (KSM) gold mine just 19 miles from the U.S.-Canada border. Mining Intelligence recently listed KSM as the world’s largest gold mine project in terms of the estimated resource size — larger than the proposed Pebble and Donlin mines! Two additional B.C. mines in the Unuk watershed – Seabridge Gold’s Snowfield gold project and Tudor Gold’s Treaty Creek project are ranked as the world’s seventh and tenth largest proposed gold mines, respectively. Altogether, more than 30 enormous gold mines are in some stage of development in the wild region just over the border line in the Taku, Stikine and Unuk river systems.

Alaskans, tribes, fishermen, businesses and individuals have not had a meaningful say in any of it, which is why 15 tribes and municipalities recently passed resolutions urging President Joe Biden to demand a permanent ban on failure-prone mine waste dams in Alaska-B.C. transboundary rivers systems, as well as a temporary halt on new mining activity along these rivers, until all of us who will be impacted by mining have a seat at the table.

How we manage the forests and the rivers that sustain us will have repercussions for hundreds and thousands of years. I’m not blanketly opposed to development, but it has to be done in a responsible way. Putting a road through a wilderness changes it forever. Putting toxic chemicals, failure-prone mine waste dams, or 30 of them, in our wild salmon river systems? I don’t even want to think about what that could do. Why are our elected leaders allowing B.C. to proceed with the development and operation of mines and mine waste dams that will inevitably fail someday in our last remaining wild salmon systems?

Fish are a slippery slope. You slip on those fish and down you go. For decades now, I’ve been delighted that I slipped down the fishing hole with that first king salmon all those years ago.

Each year, wild salmon cross from protected Southeast Alaska lands and waters over the Alaska-Canada border — and into an increasingly industrialized, contaminated landscape. It just doesn’t have to be that way.

It’s my hope that, in our wild transboundary rivers, the Unuk, the Stikine and Taku, that our congressional delegation and federal officials will listen to the people of this region, to tribes and municipalities — and defend these rivers that feed us all.

Ray Troll is a Ketchikan-based artist.

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