Listen in on the conversations of strangers right now and, odds are, they’re talking about filling their freezers. How many fish did you catch? Where are the berries? Summer isn’t the only harvest season, but with the salmon running and the snow melted, people are focused on berry-picking, gathering edible plants, fishing, and hunting. Even if you don’t harvest food from the land yourself, you probably know someone who does.

Like most Alaskans, my family took advantage of summer fishing and berry-picking to fill our freezer. First my parents, then just my mom, would trek to Kachemak Bay, along with four kids and a dog, for six to eight weeks, to set crab and shrimp nets. We fished and clammed. We stayed in a cabin with no running water and harvested what we could from the land and the sea. Especially after Mom was widowed, that was how we fed our family.

As a kid, I hated berry-picking. It was a chore. I didn’t appreciate what a unique gift it was — to live in a place where we can walk outside and pluck a pie’s worth of berries straight from the bushes. Eventually, I grew out of my childhood view of berry-picking as a chore. Now it’s one of those seasonal activities that reminds me how lucky we are to live in such a bountiful place.

Living off what the land provides is something we all have in common as Alaskans. But we learned these practices from the people who have occupied and stewarded this land for thousands of years. For Alaska Native peoples, berry-picking, fishing, and foraging are just part of a year-round subsistence way of life that includes hunting, trapping, gathering, and preserving as a measure of survival, as a way to safeguard culture, and as stewards of the land and its resources. Subsistence activities vary, region to region, but the practice unites Alaska Native peoples across the state.

Sharing a place means honoring its traditions. We can do that by respecting the animals and food we harvest, by sharing part of what we take — especially with our elders — and by foraging and fishing in a way that’s sustainable.

It’s summer, and folks are dipping their nets and hunting for the juiciest berries. They’re picking medicinal plants, rendering oil, and canning for the winter. Conversation is turning to the one thing all Alaskans can agree on: filling the freezer. It’s what brings us together.

Thank you for all you do,

Gretchen Guess 
President and CEO