When offered dried fish with seal oil at camp in Old Harbor, a little girl visiting from Nebraska squirmed and hesitated. Melissa Berns’s nine-year-old niece quickly set her straight.
“Fish is LIFE!” she exclaimed with confidence and strength. “If you’re going to be here, you need to learn this!”
Melissa laughs while telling this story. As a young leader in her home of Old Harbor, Melissa knows how important fish are to her people.
“There was no culture camp growing up, it was something that you simply lived,” Melissa said. “We didn’t have traditional dancing. Language wasn’t taught in the school. When we did something culture related, it was usually once a year in our Alutiiq week. We joke about it now, why were we only allowed to be Alutiiq for one week? That’s who we are. Myself and other community leaders have made it a priority to have culture a part of our daily lives.”
Melissa spent several years away from her village, working and living the city life. But something felt off, so she returned.
“I just felt so disconnected with nature and what was really important in life,” she said. “Even now when I leave home, I feel this void and I need to come back to being grounded.”
Home continues to exist because of what Melissa calls the lifeblood — a constant source of physical, emotional and cultural sustenance — salmon.
Nowadays, Melissa is a Jane of all trades in Old Harbor. She teaches traditional food preparation in the local school. She runs the local Alutiiq traditional dance group. She started a culture camp. From herding buffalo to collaring bear, from building smokehouses to teaching children how to provide for those unable to fish, Melissa approaches each task with humbleness and fortitude, determined to enhance her community.
Melissa desperately wants her own two children—and all the other young people she’s mentored in Old Harbor—to feel grounded.
She wants them to be proud of their place in life. And that place is naturally tied to their home.
“People are deeply rooted here and you can tell,” she said. “Even the people that don’t live here any longer, you ask them where home is and, whether they’ve lived in Washington for 20-30 years, Old Harbor is still home.”
And that home continues to exist because of what Melissa calls the lifeblood, a constant source of physical, emotional and cultural sustenance: salmon.
“If our ancestors were able to live off the land here, there’s no reason why we shouldn’t be able to either.”
“I was raised with a subsistence lifestyle from my mom’s side. It’s very important for our rural communities in Alaska, extremely important to the town of Old Harbor. If something were to happen to the salmon industry, I think it would have detrimental effects on us. Salmon has been our primary food source for so long. Without it, we really go through some hardship. Whenever they are late or we have fear of them not returning, it hurts us. It hurts our freezers but it also raises a lot of concerns about the environment and the bigger picture of what’s going on in the world to affect this.”
She is proud of the fact that her ancestors were able to live on a remote corner of a remote island for 7,500 years, providing for themselves without outside influences, without having to go to the grocery store.
“If our ancestors were able to live off the land here, there’s no reason why we shouldn’t be able to either,” she added.
Melissa already lives with the land, wrapping her salmon in large Cow Parsnip leaves and spending summer moments collecting beach greens that are such an ingrained part of her family’s cooking tradition, she can’t even recall their English name.
“I use our traditional herbs in all our seafood dishes because it adds that local flavor that you yearn for, that reminds you of summer and being on the beach. I even put it in my jarred fish. The flavor is amazing.”
Canned, fresh, frozen, cold smoked, hot smoked. She has learned how to save and share her fish many ways to feed those she loves year round. But there is one method that is closest to her heart.
Tamuuq, or dried salmon, the food that sustains her community. As the easiest processing method and one that would holdover during winter months, Tamuuq was the primary staple for the Alutiiq people.
“The role that salmon plays in our lives is one that you can’t even put into words."
“I remember in my grandma’s shed when I was a little girl… they dried all their fish outside, then they would have racks in the shed and it was lined with dried fish. You would just go over and grab one out and everyone would sit around and eat it. Everyone around the table would talk and tell stories and share. You’d learn about your history, you’d learn about things that happened in the past, you’d learn about your family, your heritage.”
“Dried fish is always one of those things that pulled people together,” Melissa laughs. “And it still does. Whenever I pull out dried fish, everyone will come to the table, get out the seal oil and the onions and sit there and visit with some hot tea. It’s something I remember when I was little, it was a part of our life and we still do it here.”
To Melissa, salmon is life. Her lifeblood. Her community. Her voice shakes when she tries to explain.
“The role that salmon plays in our lives is one that you can’t even put into words. We’ve relied on them. If we want them to continue to come back year after year, then we need to honor them and take care of them, just as much as they’ve taken care of us. I think that people take their presence for granted and we’re starting to see changes in the environment that are really scary.”
Melissa pauses. “I want my kids to be able to have the upbringing that I did and I want their kids to have the same thing. If we don’t make changes, then we risk not having that.”
