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.

A lot of fishermen wanted to become “spillionaires” by getting their boats on the cleanup by Exxon, and some of them actually did make millions of dollars. They also were looking at how to diversify and buy into other fishing areas and buy permits and bigger fishing boats.

At the time of the nation’s worst oil spill in Alaska, local Native Corporations decided to start clear-cutting our homelands. In Alaska, we have Native Corporations in which we received fee simple title to our land in exchange for the government extinguishing our aboriginal rights. These Native Corporations are supposedly governed by the Securities Exchange Commission and the State of Alaska. All of the bylaws, articles and proxies were foreign to us Indigenous people and we had to learn Robert’s Rules of Order and a whole different corporate culture in order to survive in our homelands. I started reading all this stuff and somehow, understanding it.

I decided that I would put my fishing boats and permits away and figure out how to help preserve our wild salmon subsistence and commercial fishing way of life. I sat down with my friends and family said, “If we don’t slow down and do something to preserve and restore what we have and what we had in the past, then how are we going to make it? And what are we going to leave our children in the future?”

People asked me what I was going to do. I said, “I’m probably going to have to sue my people and we’re going to have to do everything in our power to defend our land.” When I started suing Native Corporations, I was probably the most hated Native person in the state. My friends and family basically abandoned me, and my Native and fellow fishermen shunned me. No foundations would support me for the first six or seven years because they didn’t believe that I could help save hundreds of thousands of acres of land or that Exxon would pay an out-of-court settlement for restoration in the spill zone.

But I realized I had to do it. I ended up suing my Native Corporations and demanding a court-order vote to allow the shareholders to decide between conservation and intrusive development. Eventually, 87 percent of the shareholders voted in favor of conservation, leading the way for 13 additional conservation deals with other Native Corporations, saving more than 750,000 acres in the spill zone from being clear-cut.

Ultimately, I won an Alaska Supreme Court victory that allowed us public litigant status, which led to our case to be heard by the State Superior Court. It was the first time in the history of Native politics that Native shareholders were able to vote on more than just who got elected to the board or how their resources were to be managed. A lot of the work I’ve done over the years is to empower the people to be able to decide their own fate rather than let the corporations or government do that for them.

About that time, I decided to start spending 50 percent of my life in the wilderness enjoying what I was spending the other 50 percent of my life saving. I started subsistence fishing again for salmon and leading wilderness excursions. When you’re out on the ocean, or rafting down the Copper River, or making trips out on the Sound or just being out in the wild, you completely experience the power of place.

Over the years, I’ve found that once I get outdoors and feel the salty air and ocean on my lips and face, it reminds me of the thousands of years of history of who I am and it’s very grounding. Sharing this experience with other people helps them realize that they can reconnect to places in their own homes that need to be preserved or restored. I think that when they spend time here in the wilderness they’re cleansed and they’re able to remember who they are and where they’re from and what they need to do to protect our planet’s remaining wild places.

Right now, we’re planning on building a school in Prince William Sound to focus on five key areas: wild salmon restoration and management, oil spill science and restoration, renewable energy, environmental law and wilderness survival, and a cultural conservation initiative to teach people that conservation is an economy within itself. By having wilderness in areas that have conservation easements in perpetuity, you’re preserving sustainable, renewable economies like wild salmon. As long as habitat exists, wild salmon will keep coming back home.

Our Eyak dream is that when we close our eyes, we see our wild salmon. We talk to Wilghtnee, our salmon goddess. We send our prayers out, hoping that the salmon will find their way home. So when I think about continuing our dream, it’s keeping the “wild” intact and thriving.

Dune Lankard is founder of the Eyak Preservation Council, NATIVE Conservancy Land Trust, co-founder of the FIRE Fund (Fund for Indigenous Rights and the Environment) and a co-founder of REDOIL (Resisting Environmental Destruction on Indigenous Lands). A Time Magazine Hero of the Planet and an Ashoka Fellow, he will be featured in a Bioneers Radio Series interview, from which this essay is adapted. To purchase a CD of "Original Instructions: Perspectives from First Peoples," a 2007 Bioneers workshop featuring Dune Lankard and others, click here.
Photo by Ray Corral.