Cindy Wagner: An Alaska Elder on the Unuk River, the Savior Fish, and the dangerous of the mines upstream

What happens when the first fresh fish your people have eaten for ten thousand years stops coming up the river? And what do you lose when an entire generation grows up never tasting it?

Cindy Wagner has lived on the Annette Island Reserve in Metlakatla, Alaska for 56 years, the only Native reserve in the state and the only one in the world sitting entirely on an island. Her husband Louie is known as the hooligan man. She is the Grease Lady. Together they have spent their lives on the Unuk River, teaching children, grandchildren and now great grandchildren how to live off the land.

In this episode, Cindy explains what the hooligan is and why people once called it the savior fish, lining up four blocks deep for eight hours to get a single bucket. She describes finding oil drums and pallets thirty miles up a river that only Canada sits above, watching two natural lakes fill with mine tailings until blood red water spills over the top with every rainfall, and losing the marbled blue glacier water where the best trout used to hold. She walks through what it takes to render pure hooligan grease, why the Unuk is the only river in Alaska closed to the very people whose inherent right it is to fish it, and what is coming next: a proposed tailings dam 780 feet tall, five thousand workers, fifty five years.

This is for anyone who wants to understand what a mine upstream actually does to the people downstream, told by someone who has watched it happen for a lifetime.

What You'll Discover:

• Why the hooligan is called the savior fish, and what makes it different from salmon
• How hooligan send scouts ahead, and why Cindy believes they can never go extinct
• What abandoned mine tailings look like twenty years later in a temperate rainforest that gets 14 feet of rain a year
• How to render hooligan grease, and why it is treated like truffles
• What one five gallon bucket per household per year means for a community that is 90 percent Native
• Why a closed fishery costs more than food, and what happens when a generation never learns the work
• The connection Cindy draws between mining, the herring collapse, and the last wild salmon runs on the continent
• What she says the Canadian government has to do, and what listeners anywhere can do

Resources:

• Southeast Alaska Indigenous Transboundary Commission (SEITC): https://www.seitc.org/
• B.C. mining in the Unuk watershed, from Salmon Beyond Borders: https://salmonbeyondborders.org/bc-mining-unuk
• ICT reporting on the transboundary mining boom, featuring Cindy and Louie Wagner: https://ictnews.org/news/modern-day-gold-rush-mining-projects-opposed-by-alaska-tribes-get-boost-from-canada-british-columbia-and-first-nation/

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Topics: Unuk River, hooligan, eulachon, ooligan grease, Metlakatla, Annette Island Reserve, Southeast Alaska, transboundary mining, tailings dams, wild salmon, subsistence rights, Indigenous food sovereignty, SEITC, water protection