“Growing up I spent a lot of time on the water fishing with my dad and my grandpa in the waters around Juneau. I have a lot of memories of time spent on the boat waiting for a fish to bite, getting seasick, and processing fish. As I got older and in my teenage years I didn’t have as much interest in fishing, but continued to spend a lot of time on boating adventures with family and running around with cousins casting and setting crab pots.”

“I grew up in Port Townsend, Washington. My parents weren’t fishermen, but my maternal grandparents were. They lived in Port Angeles, on the Olympic Peninsula about an hour away from where we grew up. Summers, my parents would take us to our grandparents’ house and drop us off for 10 days at a time.”

"I am so grateful for the way I was raised— we were completely off grid. We didn’t have TV, didn’t have internet, and the bears would chew through the phone cables, so sometimes we didn’t even have a phone.”

“I grew up on the Stikine. My family has been there on the Stikine in different capacities for four generations, so my parents took me up there a lot. My dad was the fisheries biologist and game warden for that region for many years. And we recreated, and my family had a homestead up there. I have lots of memories as a little kid playing on the sandbars, and the meadows. There are family pictures of us as babies in buckets on the bottom of boats, because my parents were up there so much, and my grandparents were there.

Some of my most vivid, young memories are Stikine River memories.”

“I come from a family of nine children. Our life pretty much revolved around salmon, because we commercial fished. Growing up, we didn’t have a car, but when we got older and my dad wasn’t fishing, we would drive around in my car and look at all the fish in the different creeks between Ketchikan and Wrangell, wherever we’d go.”

“I started hearing about transboundary mines over 30 years ago. There was a young man on the Stikine River, I believe it was. He was from Canada — the headwaters. He was kayaking through Southeast Alaska, spreading the word. And he stopped in here because he wanted to let people know about the mines that were being planned way back then. And how it would affect the rivers. “

“There’s a place we call Scotty’s garden, just south of Kake. They came across poles in the sides of the river. Fish traps. They did a carbon test on the poles in that stream, and those poles came out to be 3,000 years old. And so obviously that tells you how we survived on the land, and how important fishing is to our people.”

“My first time up the Taku was a goat hunt when I was 18, with my brother and a buddy. The mountain was super brushy and it was a long hike, but once you got up there, it was unreal looking around at all the different drainages, and how wild and pristine it was. There were the most rugged, beautiful mountains in every direction, and glaciers to the north.”

"I remember going over to the north arm of Farragut Bay. There’s a smaller river that goes up into the mountains, where the watershed could be affected by mines in the future. And the other river I’m concerned about is the Whiting River. Both of those rivers have hooligan in them. And like any other fish species, they are very sensitive to the minerals fingerprint. “

“I caught my first king salmon on the Kenai River on my eighth birthday. It was kind of funny, because my folks were there with their friends, and hanging out around the fire, and I was so fired up to go fishing that I wanted to go at 5:30 in the morning. I was ready. But they said their friend whose boat they were on told them ‘Salmon here don’t even bite until 8:00, so you don’t have to worry about it. We can just hang out.’ “

“I grew up power-trolling with my dad in the Cross Sound area and fell in love with the fishery at a young age. I was inspired to buy a permit at 21 and fished with my boyfriend for two years before taking the plunge into buying the F/V Pacific Dream.”

“In 1970 I was 17, and I thought I was on my way to Vietnam. I wanted to see Southeast Alaska before Southeast Asia. So I saved up $262 and bought a standby ticket to Petersburg, to visit my sister and brother-in-law. After that visit, I planned to join the Navy before I turned 18 and got drafted. I had a lot of friends who went to Vietnam and came back not in one piece, or not at all. “