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A River and Its People

Meagan Krupa interprets the lessons of Ship Creek
Ingenuity Stewardship
mindfulnesscommitmentRespectcarepartnershipleadershipcreativeimaginativesustainsolutiondreamresponsibility

Only one downtown in the world offers a place to catch king salmon on your lunch break. For Dr. Meagan Krupa, who has spent years studying this fishing hole, catching kings in a city is pretty amazing. But the fish that swim past skyscrapers today don’t tell the whole story.

Ship Creek in downtown Anchorage has evolved. The first tent sites for the railroad marked the location where the biggest city in Alaska would eventually grow. Only one hundred years ago when the city was new, all five species of Pacific salmon lived in Ship Creek. With wonder in her voice, Meagan reveals details learned while working toward her PhD dissertation about this ancestral home of salmon.

The sockeye run went up to Ship Lake.

Now the sockeye run is gone, extinct.

It’s unknown if there are any wild kings or silvers or pinks or chums, but now it’s primarily a hatchery fishery.

Over the years, it was dammed, straightened, channelized, all of the things that were done in the lower 48 that led to salmon loss.

We have juveniles dying in Alaska because the water is warming up.

Meagan pauses. She’s worried.

"We have the capability to Ship Creek the entire state."

“We are doing all of the same things. It’s not on the same scale as everywhere else, but we have the capability to Ship Creek the entire state. If we don’t put out the intention that that’s not what we want, it could happen,” she said.

Discovering these realities in her backyard inspired Meagan to fight for salmon, to follow her passion for stewardship of what she calls Alaska’s iconic species.

“I think conserving salmon is really important. Salmon are a tough species; they can really put up with a lot of human impact and so when the salmon population starts to decline, or when the juveniles start to die, that’s going to be a shift in Alaska,” she said.

Growing up in the Midwest, Meagan has been fascinated with rivers and the fish that live there since she was a girl. Her family spent summer vacations sleeping next to a riverbed at night and floating down the river by day.

“We’re water people,” she said. “That’s what we always say. My family. We’re water people.”

Living near the water inspired her education. Meagan left the saturated Great Lakes region to attend school in the deserts of Arizona. Her conservation biology research then led her to Montana where she saw the magic of salmon for the first time.

“I just couldn’t believe salmon; it was so impressive,” she said. “Growing up somewhere where fish were poisonous and threatened, to go to this area where it’s teeming with salmon was pretty cool.”

One summer, while collecting research on a shrimp boat off the coast of Baja California, it hit her. Social implications matter.

We know what salmon need from their environment. But what do salmon need from us?

“Salmon have a people problem,” Liz Medicine Crow, President of First Alaskans Institute, said.

And that’s just it. While Meagan believes it’s important to understand salmon biology, she believes the real heart of caring for salmon as a species and preserving their natural rhythms is working on the social issues surrounding the fish.

Economics. Politics. Management. It all boils down to choices we make that impact salmon and could change their presence in Alaska for future generations. As a social scientist, Meagan admits her work can be fluid. “It’s not easy,” she said. “There are a lot of days where I joke with my colleagues—I’m ready to go and just count fish!—It’s easier than what I do, which is super complicated and messy and really challenging a lot of times.”

But then she remembers Ship Creek. And she keeps looking at preserving salmon from a people perspective. We’re not as developed as the lower 48. We’ve got the clock on our side. Meagan remains hopeful that we could learn from how salmon disappeared in the Columbia River and other places down south. Wise management will save salmon for future generations. Meagan keeps working every day to help determine what exactly that wise management looks like.

In the meantime, Meagan is busy raising a new generation of water people in her family – her two children, ages 4 and 7. They spend most of their water time at the edge of rivers, looking at bugs and dipping their toes in the shallows. Meagan and her husband hand the children rods and help them pull in their fish. This summer, they’ll take their first family Alaskan float trip, a vacation Meagan’s been dreaming about since she became a mother.

“They like the water, whether it’s the ocean or one of the rivers. I think I passed on the water gene. We’re breaking them in,” she said.

Much like she’s breaking in Alaskans who might not realize the urgency of setting our collective intentions on keep salmon populations strong and healthy. By ensuring people know how to live and grow with their beloved fish, Meagan is optimistic that we can maintain wild salmon in Alaska.

By ensuring people know how to live and grow with their beloved fish, Meagan is optimistic that we can maintain wild salmon in Alaska.

But Meagan thinks we need more salmon stories. More people need to hear about the changes that have happened at Ship Creek. And Alaskans need to come together.

“It’s going to take a lot of hard work and intention to sustain the salmon,” she said. “But, there are a lot of talented people in Alaska with the potential for collaboration to come up with some creative ideas and start to work toward salmon communities. That gives me hope.”

"There are a lot of talented people in Alaska with the potential for collaboration to come up with some creative ideas and start to work toward salmon communities. That gives me hope."
Ingenuity Stewardship
mindfulnesscommitmentRespectcarepartnership
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