Our people have subsistence-fished for halibut long before the Russian expedition sailed to Alaska in 1741, and also long before the United States purchased Alaska from Russia. This heritage explains why the halibut fishery has irreplaceable social and cultural value. It is not just what we do, but who we are. The Unangan (Aleut) people have utilized halibut as subsistence food for millennia. Our community’s life depends on the ability to live off the Bering Sea; this is the main reason we live here, as no other industries can sustain our culture on the Pribilof Islands. And yet, today our families and communities face a grave threat to the fishery, a threat wholly man-made and the direct result of wasteful and environmentally disastrous policies.

Trawlers and factory ships prowl the Bering Sea, wastefully catching and killing over 6 million pounds of halibut each year. The trawlers’ large nets drag up tons of fish, indiscriminately killing halibut as bycatch while they target other lower value fish — think “industrial fish products.”

The killed halibut are discarded, dumped overboard or disposed of in port. These bycatch halibut are typically younger juvenile fish that are needed to grow and sustain the fishery throughout the Bering Sea and the Pacific Ocean. The fishery has seen such dramatic declines that the allowed catch of those of us actually harvesting our regulated halibut quota-shares has dropped by 64 percent since 2010.