Original subtitles

(intense music)

(boat chugging)

(water splashing)

There are very few places which may appear

as pristine as the Yukon Delta

in the southeastern part of Alaska.

A labyrinth of waterways extending out from the Yukon River

which irrigate the landscape like arteries.

Only 25,000 people live in this harsh territory

covering an area similar to that of Greece.

(dancers chanting)

Most of the inhabitants are Yup'ik, native American Indians

related to the Inuit.

Their named translates as person, the real, or genuine one.

The Yup'ik concentrate their sustenance activities

based on hunting and fishing

on the banks of the Yukon River.

(haunting music)

Alaska is situated in the northernmost part

of the American continent between Canada

and the Bering Sea, close to Russia.

Our journey starts at the entrance to the delta

near the village of Russian Mission.

The metal boat speeding over the Yukon River

is piloted by Daniel Askawak, a Yup'ik hunter.

It's from the river that the hunters track their prey:

elk, also known as moose.

The many branches of the Yukon

make it possible to approach them.

It's also the only way in and out.

We are so remote that we don't have access to roads

like in the cities.

The rivers and the creeks, this is our access

to these remote places.

In this isolated region,

nature provides the most reliable larder.

Here, the hunting season starts in August.

The young elk born in the spring

reach maturity at that time,

and the females are less protective.

The elk is the world's largest member of the deer family

and can reach up to three meters in length.

Its diet mainly consists of bushes, grass,

and aquatic plants which it can graze with its head

entirely submerged below the water.

Predators fly over the river ahead of Daniel's boat.

They're the white-headed sea eagles also known as osprey.

These majestic birds of prey

are the symbol of the United States.

Being out here is a wonderful experience.

Like in the city, you do everything by time.

Well, out here it's more of a relaxed, yet hands-on.

A lot of our time in a short summer season

that we do have here in Alaska,

a lot of it is spending time gathering,

not only a heat source, wood,

but fish and meat for the winter.

Today, Daniel is out spotting.

He prefers to wait until the animals fatten up more

before starting the hunt because every Yup'ik family

is entitled to kill two elk each year only.

Mike.

Yeah.

There's a meadow right there.

Any area that we go to, when we enter that area,

we always have to be cautious of our surroundings.

There may be bears, wolves, predators in the area.

We call moose various ways.

We make the sounds, we grunt like a bull moose.

We rake the trees.

We hit the trees just as they would do.

And they would think that we are a moose in their area,

their territory.

(Daniel calling moose)

Moose.

Thanks to its feeding habits, the elk,

a solitary and independent animal,

makes a significant contribution

to maintaining wetland areas,

and therefore the ecosystem of the delta.

At the same time,

these cervids have a high reproductive potential,

and overpopulation can occur quickly

if they are not restricted by predation and hunting.

The moose is very important to subsistence living

because it yields up to a thousand pounds of meat,

and it could last a family up to a year.

Another animal maintains the riversides: the beaver.

This semi-aquatic rodent spent its time building small dams

while feeding on the bark of the trees it cuts down.

These small lagoons enable great biodiversity

and favor the growth of the elk's favorite grass.

The banks are lined with many dead trees

washed up by the powerful river.

This delta, which is where the Yup'ik settled,

was the principal migration route

for the first inhabitants of North America,

according to some paleontologists.

This was 50,000 years ago.

The first village founded at the mouth of the delta

is near to Daniel Askawak's hunting site.

Russian Mission is a community of some 300 inhabitants

nestled between the hills.

In summer, the few streets,

which meander between the wooden huts,

are swathed in dust from the quad bikes

and their constant coming and going

between river and village.

Here, the climate is very capricious

with summer days of 30 degrees,

quickly giving way to a harsh winter

with temperatures approaching 50 degrees below zero.

(dog barking)

It's the time to gather the provisions for the winter.

In the village, hunters have killed a first animal.

In Alaska 6,000 to 8,000 elk are killed every year.

For the Yup'ik, the summer serves as preparation

for the winter, and Daniel, too,

takes this opportunity to service his snowmobile.

In Russian Mission stands an old, dilapidated wooden chapel.

Church services are held in another building.

In the mid-19th century,

the village was an important fur trading post

run by the Russians,

well before the time Alaska became the 51st American state.

The Orthodox faith is still very much alive in this village.

(priest and congregation singing)

Traces of it can be found on the cemetery cross

which stands over the Yukon.

After Russian Mission, moving downstream

there are few traces of human settlements.

(grass rustling)

There is merely this hamlet, which was abandoned

after a tuberculosis epidemic.

Two-thirds of the residents were wiped out in a few weeks.

The survivors left everything

to join another village community.

The Yukon's broad river bed

also facilitates fish migration.

Every spring in the delta, millions of salmon arrive

from the depths of the Bering Sea to reproduce in the rivers

and cold lakes where they were born.

This incredible wild salmon journey

extends over 2,000 kilometers.

All kinds of predators sometimes lay in wait for the salmon.

(bear bellowing)

Bears and wolves take advantage of the low water levels

in some channels of the delta to help themselves.

(fish splashing)

(intense music)

Moving along the delta we reach the Pilot Station

scientific base at the junction between the Yukon River

and the Andreafsky River, a crucial loop for observing fish.

This is where the river is at its widest.

To ensure good salmon numbers,

strict fishing regulations have been established

by the Department of Fish and Game.

Scientists spend the whole summer at Pilot Station

to study and record the salmon migration.

Lindsey Dreese is one of the biologists at the station.

She has just finished her degree

at the University of Alaska, Fairbanks.

Every day she checks the functioning of the sonars

submerged in the Yukon.

So the purpose of Pilot Station sonar

is to get passage estimates of the number of salmon

and other fish species that pass by this section of river

and travel on up all the way, some of them go to Canada.

And those passage estimates are used by managers

to make decisions about commercial fishing openers,

as well as subsistence fishing openers

for the people of both Pilot Station

and other communities on the river.

(sonar beeping)

So split-beam sonar is sort of like,

think of down-looking sonar on a ship.

We take that and shoot it across the water column.

It sends out a ping of sound

that runs into the water column, hits the fish,

and comes back to the receiver, or the transducer face.

And based on where the fish are in the water column,

and where the sound hits them, we get a return.

And so that translates on screen as a squiggle, essentially.

It's a red to blue squiggle, and we consider those to be,

they're called traces or targets.

We generally consider those to be fish.

Once the figures have been analyzed,

the scientists, with the agreement of the state department,

can announce the fishing opening times.

It's a matter of regulating this

so as not to undermine or weaken a particular species.

Commercial fishing will be open for one period

in district two from 3:00 p.m. until 9:00 p.m.,

Wednesday, August 23.

St Mary's and Mountain Village buying stations

will be operating during this period.

The sale of Chinook salmon is prohibited

when retained from commercial gillnet gear must be recorded

on a fish ticket.

From my observation as an outsider coming to a community

on the Yukon, life can be rough,

especially when fish passages aren't very good.

They're really trying to get their fish to put away

for the winter so they can subsist on them.

They still preserve some of their traditions out here.

You still see fish racks full of fish drying,

and smoke houses going.

They still hold Eskimo dance nights in town.

So it's cool to see that culture being preserved

despite all of the technological advances we keep seeing.

When the information is given

by the amateur radio transceivers,

the fishermen of St. Mary's, like Norbert Biens,

hurry towards the fish holes.

I've been fishing in the Yukon Delta

since I was 14 years old.

Now I'm 62.

I started going out with my papa when I was very young.

And I think a lot of the dads, grandparents, grandfathers

try to pass that on to their boys.

Even the ladies are sometimes better fishermen than the men.

Yes.

More power to our Eskimo women. (chuckling)

A lot of the fishermen now they have their gear,

their boat, their motor,

and their gear a lot more advanced than they were

like when I was a young boy, young man.

Now they have these depth finders.

A lot of it's technical.

They have depth finders telling you how deep the water is.

And they will show, sometimes, they will show

there's a fish under there.

They like drifting, fishing alongside sandbars,

and along the beach.

Sometimes close to the beach, sometimes in deep water.

But the depths of the net,

you don't wanna be out there too deep.

From what I can see,

this year has been a good year for king salmon.

I think there was escapement.

People were able to get their king salmon

for their subsistence and got put away for the winter.

It subsidizes their income.

And with that income they're able to buy gasoline

for moose hunting, and what have you.

They're able to buy heating fuel and food,

and get ready for the winter.

In this open countryside,

it's difficult to imagine

the ruggedness of the winter in the delta,

a time when everything is locked in a snowy and icy grip.

It's in the interest of the residents

to take advantage of this very brief summer to stock up.

At the prescribed time, the commercial fishermen gather

at the port of St. Mary's

in order to get their harvest of fish weighed.

The fact that Alaska salmon is so appreciated

with its soft and fatty flesh,

is because it takes a longer migration route

than any other salmon in the world.

Anthropologists have demonstrated that the indigenous people

of North America were already benefiting from fish migration

to catch and consume salmon over 11,000 years ago.

The Yukon Delta is now demarcated

into several large commercial fishing zones.

Fishermen from one community are not permitted to go

and fish in a zone belonging to another.

When commercial fishing has ended,

the Yup'ik can pursue their subsistence fishing

to ensure they have the food they need for winter.

To do so they organize fishing camps in the summer.

There they can slice and smoke the salmon

as Sylvia Nerby does with her family.

(women conversing quietly)

Fish camp is where we go during the summer

to gather our salmon harvest.

And we chose to bring our fish camp to by the river

so we have easy access to wash our fish

to make sure it's clean.

Then we hang it up.

It takes about, depends on the wind, two or three days

until it dries on the fish rack,

and then we move it into the smoke house

for the drying process and the smoking process.

It takes about three weeks to have the fish smoked,

and then after that, we put them away.

(children laughing and chattering)

You have to take very good care of them, watch them closely,

make sure the blue flies don't fly on them and ruin them.

What are you making?

I'm hanging the (speaking foreign language).

Why?

So we can dry them before they go into the smoke house.

Stop it, Ruben.

'Cause it takes a lot of work to catch the fish

wash the fish, cut the fish, hang the fish,

move the fish from the fish rack to the smoke house,

from the smoke house into the freezer.

And that's when we're able to stop.

(fire crackling)

(child giggling)

When I was young, we had a fish camp

that was about six miles downriver on the Yukon.

And then we had a little cabin house,

a fish rack, a smokehouse.

And it was like a little community.

There was about five families that lived down there,

and we were all related.

Nowadays, my children don't know about that,

the reason being, because we moved it up here

due to the cost of gas.

Traveling down there to go and work

and get our fish was costworthy,

and we need to save that money for the winter

where we could use it for our snow machines

and four-wheelers

to go out to gather other subsistence needs.

It's time for the whole family

to head off salmon fishing, the delta's pink gold.

Slowly, the river leads us towards the Bering Sea.

Just before Emmonak it splits into two arms.

Here the only food supplies are in the waters of the river.

In this part of the delta, seal hunts are sometimes held.

They are still permitted for the Yup'ik community.

At the river mouth, at one time,

the seal was the only animal people could live on.

In order to carry on this traditional hunting practice,

spearing is also entrusted to the young teenagers.

On that day, the seal proved more agile than its hunters.

It must be said that the Yup'ik are less dogged

than they once were.

Hunting is more a game than a vital necessity.

Up until around 100 years ago,

the seal was the biggest fat reserve for the Yup'ik,

a safe and reliable way to obtain heat in winter.

In nearby Emmonak, barges and tugboats provide supplies,

which they offload at the Kwik'pak Fishery.

In the Yup'ik language, Kwik'pak means abundant river.

We can understand this name better

when we get inside the factory ship.

This fish processing plant plays an essential role

in this far-flung region of the globe.

Here jobs are scarce and seasonal.

Fishing has been overseen by Ragnar Alstrom

for the past 30 years.

The fishes that come in from the Bering Sea

are always bright.

So you wanna catch them when they're bright.

As they migrate up up the Yukon,

they're gonna start getting closer to spawning,

they're gonna start getting blush, or changing colors.

And the flesh degrades as they get closer.

They quit eating as they come in.

So the flesh is gonna to start degrading,

and they're at their best here at the mouth.

You go back a hundred years,

that's why the commercial fisheries started (mumbling).

(intense music)

We have markets in the Netherlands.

A large supply goes into England and Japan,

and there's the domestic market, also.

The river has been the sustenance of the folks out there,

the river and what feeds into it.

That's why folks settled here is to get the fish

that the river provides,

and the sloughs provide the feeding.

(gulls calling)

Emmonak is like a gold rush town, wild and transient.

As soon as the salmon run is over,

it becomes a ghost town once again, caught in the ice.

Dismantling of this temporary factory has to be carried out

by seasoned tugboat drivers like Nick Nichols.

Salmon season's almost over,

and so they move a lot of stuff out of here.

Everything has to be winterized.

It's a really huge job.

It takes them month, six weeks to mobilize and demobilize.

So that's what we'll be doing is assisting in that.

I think we're taking some stuff over to another town,

Kotlik, or Auk over here.

And so that's what we'll be doing for a little bit.

It's been a wonderful experience working on the Yukon.

I've sailed a few rivers, in Louisiana, primarily.

I have worked in Alaska, but not on rivers.

This river is a pretty massive river.

It's a huge river, and it changes daily.

You have to be real careful not to catch sandbars.

And actually with that vessel there,

we do catch sandbars all the time.

All this dismantling work has to be completed

before the first snow in September,

before the countryside is locked into a long winter.

As nature is so powerful and seemingly unchanging,

man can only build makeshift structures.

(motor purring)

Students venture into the tundra.

(bird singing)

The marshes of the Yukon Delta are not widely exploited

by the men who are aware of the dangers.

And yet, this tundra landscape, adorned through the seasons

in tones of green, orange or chestnut brown,

is bursting with resources and beneficial properties.

Lillian and Marcia Biens, two teachers,

regularly organize a nature outing

with the children from the village to pass on to them

the knowledge of the elders

Hey, you kids, come, come see.

Look at this.

Come look, we find medicine.

You have to stay in place to carry.

See what Marcia's picking?

Tundra tea.

You could even burn it and bless your house.

So you have to drink just a tiny bit, a little bit.

Not much.

And you could even burn it.

Good medicine.

Good medicine.

Connor, if you're on the tundra, you're walking,

and you have no drinking water,

you come to a spot like this,

you just can put your hand down, push it in,

and there, you have water, drinking water.

Push, push, push way down.

Way down.

Hey, there's your water.

These trees, these are plants.

Some are medicine.

You take the branches.

It's gotta be a young tree.

You take the branches.

And after you boil them, you drink them

if you have a really bad cold, your chest,

your lungs are really stuffed, you're sick,

and you can't get better, you hurt.

And then you drink it.

But you can't drink lots.

You just have to have a little bit.

Little bit, only a little bit.

What'll happen if you drink too much?

If you drink too much then it's gonna clog your blood.

It's going to your veins.

Yeah, so you can't drink lots.

You just have to drink a little bit.

When you come in the sloughs, you'll find more of them

than if you're out in the river.

(ethereal music)

For the Yup'ik, the marsh is a territory

which they have to learn to tame from an early age.

This transfer of knowledge is no longer a matter of course

since even the young themselves

are starting to lose contact with nature.

(motor droning)

This is why Kyra, 13 years old, is to go out today

in the boat with her dad, Daniel Askawak,

the hunter from Russian Mission.

I'm teaching my children the very basics

of how to live out here.

How to survive.

Teach not only hunting, not only fishing,

but the areas out here, and the how to survive out here.

If something goes wrong out here

we cannot get on the phone and call 911.

We have to be able to problem-solve,

and fix that and get ourselves home.

Here in Alaska, the weather tells us we're going to do.

Some days the winds are too high.

It's raining a lot, and the river gets too rough.

And on those days, it's a good idea to stay home.

Go right over here in this point right here

Keep your eyes out.

Might see some geese.

Might see some and hear some.

Daniel does not want his daughter to hunt,

but rather, to learn to find her way in nature,

to scan the sky and understand the behavior of the birds.

(Daniel using bird call)

Where are they coming from?

They're about a mile down below us.

They're gonna be coming into the wind,

so we're upwind from them.

So we'll make sure that we don't move around

so they don't see us.

I'm gonna try calling again.

The geese do come back here every year.

So they come here and they feed before they migrate.

So we get them when they are here,

when they start flocking up,

and that's a sign that they're getting ready to migrate.

Tundra swans, geese, or spectacled eider,

the birds have all used the same route since the ice age.

The Yukon Delta is a corridor for avian life

from the entire American continent.

This flat region without any insurmountable barriers

offers easy passage.

Nowadays it's hard to predict

when the waterfowl are gonna migrate

because some years it gets cold quick,

and some years it stays warm a long time.

So because of climate change, it's very hard to predict

how long we're going to be having the waterfowl here.

(gun firing)

Daniel can remember flocks of birds

which he saw as a child in the sky above the delta.

Geese are now not as common as they once were.

Climate change affects migratory birds

which might lose their summer habitat.

It would also result in the disappearance

of entire reproduction sites in the Arctic.

Migratory birds over long distances, which do not stop off

in the Delta are even more vulnerable to disturbances

caused by warmer temperatures.

With climate change, it's gotten so much different.

Yep, it has.

Even with it being warmer,

more warmer that our trees, there's more trees.

And a long time ago, when we were small,

we'd come up on the tundra and it would be more flatter,

but now there's more trees.

More trees and thicker.

And you know, when we were little, it was much colder.

And we had lots of snow.

Lots of snow.

Lots of shoveling and lots of, and the roofs, too.

We had to clean off the snow.

And the sloughs were more safer

because the ice was thicker.

And now with the weather being warmer,

it's kind of dangerous to travel.

Yeah, and with the spring and summertime

there's more grasses, and they're longer,

and taller, and more.

More thicker.

Not like how we were when we were younger.

Different.

Ways of life and landscapes

are changing rapidly.

(children chattering)

(dancers chanting)

To thank the sky and nature

for the benefits they bring,

the Yup'ik dance dressed in traditional costumes.

They like to depict a past era now being lost to modernity.

Originally the potlatch, the exchanging of gifts,

fosters a protective link between the gods

and the residents of the delta.

In the interweaving network that makes up the delta

soon appears Kotlik, the village closest to the Bering Sea.

(serene music)

From above, Kotlik is no more than a jumble of plank roads.

The village was built in the 1960s

to bring together the population of other communities

which were in the process of disappearing

under the rising water levels.

As a precaution, they built homes here on stilts

and elevated roadways.

10, 20, 30, 40.

A team of hydrologists

aims to monitor the erosion of the coastline

and prevent flooding risks.

10, 20, 30-

Ryan Toohey is here to monitor the permafrost,

this permanently frozen soil.

With a rise in temperatures,

the permafrost might thaw partially

and create serious problems for the vegetation

and the local populations.

One of the main things you'll notice about Kotlik

is that there's boardwalks everywhere.

And so it's in a very low-lying area.

We're just a couple of meters above sea level here.

The groundwater table is very shallow here.

And so that affects being able to get around

during the summertime because every year

this area freezes and thaws,

and then there's a layer of permafrost underneath.

And a lot of these buildings are built on that permafrost.

So if we start to see tilts in your building,

tilts in the boardwalk, and all of that

makes it a lot more difficult to get around.

And then it causes problems with water pipes

and all that type of thing, too.

More of the Arctic sea ice is going away,

and the shore ice is as not as big or as thick

as it has been in the past.

And so when that goes away,

Kotlik loses some of the buffering capacity

to protect it from the ongoing waves.

So you have waves that are traveling longer

from farther out in the ocean,

and they're coming up and flooding this area, again,

because we're in a kind of a depression here

and that's why the boardwalks are here.

So it's very susceptible to these increasing Arctic storms

that are mainly happening because the sea ice

has been so low the past number of years.

The Yukon Delta is first to feel the effects

of the issue of global warming.

At the end of the summer, the women of Kotlik

perform the traditional harvest of the wild berries,

the cranberries.

These berries, which grow in the tundra.

are an essential food for the community.

They are the only fruit

which can develop at these latitudes.

They have a lot of benefits.

Cranberries, they're for you can squash them,

like when you have a bad cold, you can squash them up

and add them in water and have a teaspoon.

And for babies that have sore mouth,

you can crush them up and let them put some in their mouth

and it'll heal the thrush.

Parasites have started to appear

over the past few years,

and they are altering the appearance of the only sweet treat

which makes it possible to face the winter.

(quiet drum music)

This year, and the last few years,

have been a lot more salmonberries, blueberries,

but they're small compared to what they were

like 30 years ago, or 40 years ago.

It's been a very cold spring.

And if it was warmer in spring,

the permafrost would have thawed out,

but it was a long spring.

I've been trying to figure out

what's been going on with the berries.

They're unusually small.

And I don't know what's going on.

I'm trying to figure out what's happening.

I know we're having climate change,

and it's probably being affected through this weather,

climate change that we're having.

Berries are very important to us because our children,

our family, we live on what we pick.

And because money-wise, it's hard for us

to buy a can of fruit, and this is our fruit.

It's important to us.

What for these women

amounts to a simple observation could be a warning signal

for the planet and its climate.

Fishermen have even seen the first iceberg

approaching the village.

Ryan Toohey comes regularly

to analyze the chemical composition of the delta,

close to its mouth.

See the water temperature is about 14 degrees Celsius.

We have a good DO, dissolved oxygen,

is how much oxygen is in the water for the fish.

With climate change

and the melting of the permafrost,

the Yukon has built up different levels

of temperature, calcium, and magnesium.

Changes in the chemistry of the oceans,

and in particular, the Arctic Ocean, might lead to changes

in currents and meteorological conditions across the globe.

The first animals affected would be the belugas,

which spawn at the mouth of the delta.

Preferring cold waters,

these large white whales are therefore sensitive

to the warming of the surface water.

(whales calling)

The Yukon River is one of the six big Arctic rivers.

There's other rivers in Russia, like the Lena,

and the Ob River, the Mackenzie in Canada,

and all of those rivers act as kind of a buffer

on the Arctic Ocean.

So the Arctic Ocean has a certain amount of things

that are dissolved in it, and temperatures,

and that all drives the currents,

which drives the global system of currents,

and weather, and all that.

The sea ice is the main determinant

of how all those currents flow

and those types of things.

Rivers act like a nice buffer to that system

and give it some space to breathe when we see.

In the Yukon Delta,

the scientists and the Yup'ik are the sentinels

of a world that is changing faster

than we could have ever imagined.

(serene music)