#TheYearofBelief | #TYBSalmonHarvest

Salmon Strips and the Science of Integrity: Innovation, Harvest, and Care

🌿 From the Land: A Team Effort to Feed Our Families

In Kotzebue, salmon season is here. This came as such a relief because last summer we didn’t have hardly any salmon in Kotzebue.

While Cana was home in Kotzebue recently, our husbands—Corina’s husband Lance and Cana’s husband Michael—worked together to fish with our family’s subsistence net. It was one of those perfect Arctic summer days when the breeze doesn’t quit, the work never seems to end, and everything smells like fish and smoke. We caught 20 salmon. Enough to share between our families. Enough to smoke into strips to fill our bellies and to share.

If you’ve never made smoked salmon strips, let us tell you: it’s a lot of work. First, each fish is cut in a way that thins the meat—different from the way we cut fillets. Then they’re dried slightly so the skin firms up. But the hardest part is cutting the meat into perfect strips: ½-inch wide, uniform, clean through the skin. Cutting just one fish by hand into strips can dull an ulu fast. Two years ago, Cana cut 7 fish by hand. It took hours. This time, with 20 fish, we needed help.

Lance has a store-bought fish stripper—a meat grinder with an attachment that slices the fish into perfect strips. But it wasn’t working right. He had used it to cut ugruk blubber earlier this summer—he loves to try new gadgets—and now it wasn’t cutting the strips right.

So Michael and Lance took it apart. They spent the evening adjusting gears, cleaning blades, testing and re-testing. At one point, we almost gave up and considered cutting by hand. But finally—click, whir, zip—it worked. We whooped and hollered and high-fived like kids. Forty fillets, stripped in ten minutes. A modern miracle.

Then came the real work.

We seasoned the strips with Lance’s dry rub, layered them into containers, and stirred them every few hours. We rinsed off the salt, loaded each strip into the smoker—a repurposed stand-up freezer—and smoked them for six hours. Our friend Kat came over to help. After that, the strips needed another full day of drying before they reached that translucent, chewy finish.

This wasn’t just food prep. This was subsistence.

It was innovation, trial and error, muscle and joy. It was two husbands—from different places—working together to feed their families and honor salmon. It was the kind of team effort that turns strangers into kin and meat into medicine.

🏛️ From the Institutions: Relational Care and Harvesting with Integrity

In Yup’ik, the word aulukluki means caretaking. In their 2024 article “Aulukluki Neqkat: Centering Care of Salmon and Relational Research in Indigenous Fisheries in the Kuskokwim River, Alaska,” Esquible et al. remind us that caring for salmon is inseparable from caring for people.

Salmon aren’t just food, they’re kin. Harvesting them is a process shaped by values: never wasting, releasing large females, tending every part. These practices remind us that how we harvest matters just as much as what we harvest.

This reframes the whole idea of “harvest.”

Institutions often treat harvest as extraction: the more efficient, the better. But Indigenous stewardship teaches that abundance is relational. A successful harvest isn’t measured by totals. It’s measured by whether it nourishes future generations, strengthens kinship, and sustains the salmon themselves.

For Arctic researchers, this is a sharp and necessary lesson:

• Harvest with integrity. Your data, your funding, your publications—these should be tended and shared, not hoarded.
• Value relationships over output. A generous research harvest is one that grows trust and builds community capacity—not just your CV.
• Follow Indigenous leadership. Long-term sustainability will never come from extractive systems. It comes from community stewardship.

When we smoked salmon strips this week, we were reminded: everything we take must be balanced by how we care. That’s what relational research looks like in practice. Not just doing the work, but doing it with respect.

This Week’s Challenge: Honor the Tools, the Time, and the Team

Salmon season isn’t just about catching fish. It’s about repair, trial and error, collaboration, and endurance.

• Where in your research are you rushing to extract instead of taking time to fix what’s broken?
• Who’s been doing the hands-on labor in your project—and how are you valuing their contributions?
• What tools (literal or relational) need maintenance before you move forward?

Let this be the week you pause, sharpen your tools, and step back into the work with a spirit of integrity and interdependence. Post your ideas for first steps in comments, on our EAR Facebook Group, ARCUS’s Connect the Arctic portal, or simply just pause and reflect.

🧭 TYB Framework: Harvest with Integrity

Know Who You Are:
You’re not just here to gather knowledge—you’re part of the system. Take time to reflect on how your presence, tools, and pace affect those around you. Are you showing up like a partner—or like a machine?

Do the Next Right Thing (Even Imperfectly):
Fix the tool. Stir the strips. Ask the question. Offer help even if you’re not sure how. Integrity is built in these small acts of effort…especially when no one’s watching.

Invest in a Community of Support:
Lance and Michael didn’t just fix a machine—they built brotherly trust through teamwork. Collaboration is a muscle. Use it. Build relationships that know how to troubleshoot together.

Reinforce Hope with Grit:
When the blades go dull or the fire won’t catch, keep going. Subsistence teaches us that endurance matters. In research, it’s the same: grit plus care creates lasting results.

Remembering Forward

Innovation isn’t always new. Sometimes, it’s ancestral.
Sometimes, it’s a jerry-rigged fish stripper and two guys from different worlds figuring it out over a bucket of salmon.

Whether you’re adjusting gears or adjusting your mindset, remember:
We honor salmon—and Arctic communities—not just by what we take, but by how we take care.