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Every election is important - and voting is an excellent way to advocate for the conservation of wild salmon habitat and the way of life our salmon rivers support! There are a number of ways to safely vote this year, including Early Voting and Vote by Mail. If you are registered to vote in Alaska... Early Voting started on October 19 in dozens of locations across Alaska. Early Voting is an easy way to ensure you can safely cast your ballot and make sure your vote counts no matter what happens on Election Day. You can also still apply for an Absentee Ballot if you would like to Vote by Mail. You have until October 24th to apply. If you have any questions or problems please don’t hesitate to reach out to us or contact the Division of Elections at (907)465-4611 or elections@alaska.gov. If you are registered to vote somewhere else in the United States... There are a number of ways to safely vote this year, including Early Voting and Vote by Mail. Early Voting has already begun in some states, click here to find information about Early Voting in your state. You can also apply for an Absentee ballot. We encourage you to do this as soon as possible. To apply for your absentee ballot just go to this website and follow the instructions. If you have any questions or problems please don’t hesitate to reach out to us or contact your state election office. Thank you so much for your commitment to voting. Sincerely, The Salmon Beyond Borders Team 
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Every election is important - and voting is an excellent way to advocate for the conservation of wild salmon habitat and the way of life our salmon rivers support! There are a number of ways to safely vote in the B.C. election this year. Early Voting starts on Thursday, October 15, and goes until Wednesday, October 21 in certain locations throughout B.C. If you ordered a vote by mail package, completed vote-by-mail packages must be received by Elections BC before 8 p.m. (Pacific time) on Saturday, October 24. Click here for more info on Voting by Mail. For information about voting on Election Day, Saturday, October 24th, click here. For more information on where and how you can cast your vote this year, visit the B.C. Election website, here. If you have any questions or problems please don’t hesitate to reach out to us or contact B.C. Elections at 1-800-661-8683 or by email at electionsbc@elections.bc.ca. Thank you so much for your commitment to voting. Sincerely, The Salmon Beyond Borders Team   Happy World Rivers Day, Wild Salmon Supporters! Salmon Beyond Borders is celebrating World Rivers Day all week long! Celebrating our rivers may look different for many of us than in past years. Instead of joining community events to celebrate our rivers, clean water, wild salmon, jobs, and the ways of life they support, most of us are hunkering down at home. But don’t worry! We still have a few ways to commemorate World Rivers Day. 1. RSVP for our digital panel discussion! Join Salmon Beyond Borders and Conservation Northwest Wednesday, September 30, at 5:00 - 6:30 PM AKST / 6:00 - 7:30 PM PT for a digital panel discussion about protecting transboundary rivers from British Columbia's irresponsibly regulated mines. We’re looking forward to hearing from representatives of the Upper Skagit Tribe, Lower Similkameen Indian Band, Colville Confederated Tribes, Skagit Environmental Endowment Commission, the science community and other important stakeholders during the panel. View the full list of panelists and register today: bit.ly/BeyondTheSkagit 2. TAKE ACTION Join hundreds of people from around the Alaska - British Columbia transboundary region who are telling B.C. - NO MORE toxic mine waste dams in salmon rivers! Click here to take action today. 3. Watch When the Salmon Spoke, a digital production that will transport you to the Stikine River. When the Salmon Spoke, presented by Southeast Alaska Indigenous Transboundary Commission and Ping Chong+Company, in collaboration with Skeena Wild Conservation Trust and Salmon Beyond Borders, premiered online on May 31, 2020. Featuring captivating life stories from community members of the Stikine River, stunning cinematic imagery, indigenous music, and visual art, this production connects coastal Tlingit and Haida communities and inland Tahltan communities of Alaska and British Columbia. Click here to watch When the Salmon Spoke and learn more! Stay tuned on social media and watch your inboxes this month - we’ll continue to share more information about mine waste dams and ways to take action to defend our transboundary salmon rivers, jobs, and ways of life. As always, your continued engagement is what makes our collective efforts possible. Reach out to us anytime. All of our voices from British Columbia to Alaska, Washington, Idaho, and Montana are needed to defend and sustain the wild rivers of the Salmon Coast. Be healthy and well - With Gratitude, The Salmon Beyond Borders Team Jill, Heather, Mary Catharine, and Bre    By MARY CATHARINE MARTIN, SALMON BEYOND BORDERS
Almost a century ago , a 14-year-old Tahltan girl traveled down the Stikine River to marry the Tlingit Chief Shakes VII of Wrangell. At the time, arranged marriages were common practice: the Stikine has long served as a corridor for the different peoples who live along it. Colonization and the resulting border between the U.S. and Canada, however, changed the way the Indigenous peoples traveled up and down the river. Decades later, the great-granddaughter of that arranged marriage, Tis Peterman, has been connecting with long-lost family in Canada. Once more, the Stikine River — which brought her great-grandparents together so many years ago — are sparking relationships. Tis is the executive director of the Southeast Alaska Indigenous Transboundary Commission (SEITC), which represents 15 of the 19 federally recognized tribes in Southeast Alaska, and works to defend the salmon-rich transboundary rivers of the Salmon Coast: the Taku, Stikine and Unuk, all threatened by British Columbia’s recklessly regulated large-scale open-pit mines and their toxic mining waste dumps. British Columbia mining along the transboundary rivers of the Salmon Coast is a concern many of her newfound Tahltan relatives and friends in B.C. share, and which has brought them together. It’s even helped her learn more about her great-grandmother. Before any of that, for Tis, though, came a love of the river and the region she has called home her entire life. Growing up on the Stikine “My earliest memory is being on a beach at 5:30 in the morning digging cockles,” Tis told us. “We didn’t know we were poor growing up, because we always had jarred deer.” Tis’ mother, Mae Dailey, was a Raven and a member of the Kaach.adi clan. Her father, Marc Dailey, was a Kik.sadi Eagle. She and her family foraged for beach asparagus. Her father went up the Stikine and hunted ducks. They harvested herring eggs in the spring. They ate hooligan, and salmon. Her father ran a seine boat, and was also a gillnetter and a pile driver, doing whatever he could to feed the family. “We were always out in the woods doing something,” she said. “We grew up in a small house on Main Street, and the woods were our playground, basically.” They also traded for food: the Wrangell sawmill was across from them, and her father traded Japanese sailors on the boats collecting the cut trees fish for gallon jugs of soy sauce and 25 pound bags of rice. In spite of their time outdoors, Tis and her siblings weren’t brought up traditionally. Her mother was one of those known as the Lost Generation, forbidden to speak Tlingit from a very young age. “When I was younger, there was one neighbor lady that they’d speak Tlingit together,” she said of her mother. At the kitchen table they’d talk English until they wanted to talk about something and they didn’t want me to hear it, and then they would switch to Tlingit. Later on, she didn’t have anyone to speak it with.” To her great grandfather, Chief Shakes, a Western education was the ticket into the future. “He saw education as the way out — a way of survival for us,” she said. Later in life, Tis got involved with the Tribe — the Wrangell Cooperative Association — and helped renovate the Shakes House, the clan house on Shakes Island. One thing led to another, and she soon found herself representing the Tribe at transboundary meetings. She didn’t yet know it would change her whole outlook. Changing a way of thinking Tis was attending the Prince of Wales Mining Symposium in 2014 when she was taken aback by the attitude of the mining company presenting, Seabridge Gold, she said. Seabridge Gold is proposing to build what would be the largest open-pit mine in North America just miles from the American border in the Unuk/Nass watershed, which flows into Alaska near Ketchikan. “The attitude was that they’re going to educate us on how wonderful they’re going to be,” she said. As Seabridge representatives continued to speak, the dissent in the room began to grow. “Several Native people were basically calling these people liars,” she said. “You could hear people starting to say ‘No. No. No. And it was getting louder in the crowd.” That moment was a game-changer for her, she said. “It’s really strange, because — I’ve thought about this a lot — over the years, I learned to be one of ‘the good Indians.’ You do things right. You’re on time. You’re not appearing to be slacking. That’s how I was raised. So sitting in that room full of Natives, and then responding to these corporate, non-Indigenous people, I was sort of surprised. I thought ‘We’re not being good Indians.’ Refusing to believe what the corporate world was telling us. It’s changed me from a nontraditional way of thinking to a more Indigenous way of thinking over the years… in six years, my whole mentality has changed. And I appreciate and embrace the Indigenous part of me. It made me be a little bit more introspective on what’s important, and how important it is to save our land now, for the generations out. Because I knew this was there. I knew the mines were there. But before, it was distant — very distant.” Tis also organizes summits of Indigenous leaders and representatives from all up and down the Salmon Coast. The last time the Tribes and First Nations met, in October of last year, they declared a salmon emergency, due in large part to threats from British Columbia mines, as well as declining salmon populations across the coast. Different nations and different Tribes have different priorities, but “everybody on both sides of the border can agree: Clean water is everything,” she said. When the Salmon Spoke Now, Tis is working with Salmon Beyond Borders, First Nation leaders in B.C. and the theatre company Ping Chong + Co. on a storytelling project connecting peoples along the Stikine, on both sides of the border. As part of that project, last year she was in B.C. speaking with Tahltan artist, elder and leader Allen Edzerza about her great-grandmother. “I was telling him the story about my great-grandmother being brought down the river when she was 14,” Tis said. “And her arranged marriage to Chief Shakes. We always called her Grandma Suzy. I was telling him how she couldn’t speak Tlingit, and we never knew her last name. He turned around, and looked at me, and said ‘Her last name was Quock.’” Though her travels up the Stikine are paused due to the COVID-19 pandemic, she knows the journey will continue. “When we get through this craziness,” she said, “I’m going to travel up to Telegraph Creek, tell my story, and see who I’m related to. We have stories to tell and stories I don’t know what they are yet. There’s so much to tell that nobody knows.” To learn more about Tis, and her most recent project,When the Salmon Spoke, click here. Tis Peterman is retiring from her position as Executive Director at Southeast Alaska Indigenous Transboundary Commission at the end of June 2020. It has been an honor for those of us at Salmon Beyond Borders to work alongside Tis, in the efforts to defend and sustain our shared, transboundary salmon rivers. Dear Wild Salmon Supporter,
We hope this message finds you and your loved ones healthy and safe. The past few months have been full of uncertainty for many of us, with the COVID-19 global pandemic as the new, abnormal backdrop to our daily lives. May is our favorite time of year at the Salmon Beyond Borders campaign - daylight grows longer, the salmon return, and we all get ready for long days outside and on the water. It is also this time of year when we get to see a lot of you for our annual summer kickoff BBQ in Juneau - and after last year’s incredible celebration with more than 150 people, our team was really looking forward to doing it again this year. With heavy hearts, the Salmon Beyond Borders team has decided that we are not going to host any in-person events or visit communities throughout the transboundary region as we normally would during the summer months. While we will deeply miss the opportunity to visit our favorite places and gather with you and the rest of our salmon community in person, we know this is the right choice. We might not be able to gather in person this month, but we do have two very exciting, virtual events planned for May that we are really looking forward to! In this webinar, members of the U.S. - Canada International Joint Commission will provide an overview of the Boundary Waters Treaty of 1909 and the mandate of the International Joint Commission. Following this overview, Indigenous leadership and key stakeholders will provide perspectives on the U.S.-B.C. transboundary mining issue, and dialogue with each other and the Commissioners on perspectives, challenges, and opportunities. Register for the webinar here. For more information visit our website here. Panelists include: President Richard Peterson - Central Council Tlingit Haida Indian Tribes of Alaska, Chairwoman Shelly Fyant - Confederated Salish Kootenai Tribe of Montana, Chairman Gary Aitken Jr. - Kootenai Tribe of Idaho, Commissioner Rob Sisson - International Joint Commission, U.S. Section, Commissioner Merrell-Ann Phare - International Joint Commission, Canada Section, Jill Weitz - director, Salmon Beyond Borders, Erin Sexton - senior scientist, University of Montana, Allen Edzerza - First Nations Energy and Mining Council.
We hope to see you online this month! Now more than ever, we are grateful to live and work along the wild rivers of the Salmon Coast. As always, your continued engagement is what makes our collective efforts to defend and sustain our transboundary rivers possible. Please reach out to us anytime. Be healthy and well - With Gratitude, The Salmon Beyond Borders Team Jill, Heather, Mary Catharine, and Bre |
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