My people, the Eyak, an Athabaskan tribe, live along the Copper River Delta in south central Alaska. Our ancestral homeland is a 300-mile stretch of the Gulf of Alaska and it’s absolutely stunning. We have inhabited this thin green strip of Hemlock and Sitka Spruce forest along the coast for the last 3,500 years.

When the Exxon Valdez oil spill happened in 1989 and the ocean died, something inside me came to life. I was a commercial fisherman in Prince William Sound and the Copper River Delta when I realized that I had to do everything I possibly could to save the forests and our wild salmon.