Inside the Indigenous Fight to Save Alaska’s Bristol Bay – Inside Climate News

From our collaborating partner “Living on Earth,” public radio’s environmental news magazine, an interview by host Steve Curwood with Alannah Hurley, executive director of the United Tribes of Bristol Bay.

In 2001, a Canadian mining company proposed a massive gold and copper mine at the headwaters of Bristol Bay, a pristine water system on the coast of the Alaska Peninsula that’s home to the largest sockeye salmon run in the world. The salmon support a thriving ecosystem and are a cultural and economic lifeblood for native Alaskans, who have stewarded the land and water for thousands of years. 

As the company moved ahead with plans to build the largest open-pit mine in North America, those Indigenous communities joined together to bring it to a halt. In 2023, they secured a rare “EPA veto” of the proposed Pebble Mine, and the 2026 Goldman Environmental Prize for North America recognizes an Indigenous leader in this fight.

Alannah Hurley is the executive director of the United Tribes of Bristol Bay. Her Yup’ik name is Acaq, her great-grandmother’s name. She is the winner of the 2026 Goldman Environmental Prize for North America. This interview has been edited for length and clarity. 

STEVE CURWOOD: Before we start talking about your work protecting Bristol Bay, paint us a picture of the bay. What makes this such a special place?

ALANNAH HURLEY: Bristol Bay is an extremely special place. It has all the different types of terrain in Alaska, in one place. Where I live, at the mouth of the Nushagak and Wood River, we have everything from tundra and wetlands to mountains, freshwater lakes, freshwater rivers, the muddy waters of Nushagak Bay, [and] the beautiful, crystal-clear ocean waters as you go west towards Togiak and Twin Hills. It’s really untouched, pristine beauty—all of Alaska’s majesty in one place. It’s so pristine you can still hunt and fish and pick berries and eat them straight from the land. You can drink right out of the lake and rivers. It’s paradise. 

CURWOOD: Bristol Bay has huge environmental significance, but it’s also important to many human communities. I had been told that it produces more than $2 billion of annual revenue from sockeye salmon fishing alone, it’s also an important food source and cultural site for Indigenous communities, First Alaskans. Talk to me about what the bay means to the people in the area.

HURLEY: There are three different Indigenous groups in Bristol Bay—the Yup’ik people, the Dena’ina people, and the Alutiiq people. Our homeland has been stewarded by our people for thousands and thousands of years. They’ve taken care of this place and entrusted it to us. Our lands, our water, and everything that that entails—the salmon, the moose, the caribou, the bears, us, our freshwater fish, our berries, our plants, our medicines—we very much view it as all very connected. Anything that happens to our lands and waters happens to us. It is everything to us. It is the health of our people, physically, culturally, spiritually. It sustains us. It nourishes us. We’re so blessed to be able to live in the ways that our ancestors have lived. That kind of foundation is really critical in understanding our perspective and wanting to protect our home. 

CURWOOD: In 2001, the Northern Dynasty Minerals mining company proposed the development of what’s called the Pebble Mine. It would have been the largest open-pit mine on the continent, one of the biggest, I guess, in the whole world. What would have been the environmental impact of such a project?

HURLEY: The environmental impact of the Pebble project would have been devastation. If you look at a map of Bristol Bay, there are two major river systems, the Nushagak and the Kvichak. The Pebble Mine would be located at the connected headwaters of both. You literally could not have picked a poorer location, and in my opinion, it’s [the] creator’s test to the people: What are you going to choose? But you could not have picked a worse location to put a low-grade acid-generating project that would have to store tens of billions of tons of toxic waste in perpetuity. 

That picture is not a question of if something will happen, but when, especially in an earthquake-prone zone, and in a very hydrologically interconnected place. They’re like the veins of the bay—all of that water is connected. Our people, very early on, came out opposed to the project, because we knew that it would mean the utter devastation of our watershed, our fishery and our people.

CURWOOD: Some say that there are literally hundreds of billions of dollars worth of copper and gold and other minerals in the area for the Pebble Mine. Sounds like a lot of money, but you didn’t see this as good news for your community if this got developed.

HURLEY: No, we did not. Early on, before we learned about what type of ore it was, where it was located, what it would mean, what the tilings would mean, people were actually excited for some type of diversification of the economy. Fisheries can be pretty volatile, and that’s how a lot of people would survive in the cash economy as commercial fishermen. 

But it did not take long to learn about those things, the dangers and the threat and the risk that that would cause to our people, and very early on, the vast majority of Bristol Bay’s people said, “No way, this is not worth the risk.” You cannot put a price tag on our water and what salmon mean to us as a people. This would be an existential threat to our ability to continue to be Indigenous people in this region, and we will not stop fighting until it is stopped.

CURWOOD: My understanding of Alaskan politics is that at the state level, there wasn’t a huge amount of pushback against this Pebble Mine proposal.

HURLEY: Our people’s concerns were really falling on deaf ears at the state level. We saw the state rewrite our area management plan illegally, without proper input or public process or consultation with our tribes. We saw the governor at the time try to pave the way for a mining district, and we’re still working to rectify some of those issues in that rewritten management plan to this day. And we’re still having issues with the state government pushing a project on Bristol Bay and Alaskans that they’ve proven for the last 20 years that they just do not support. 

Because our concerns were falling on deaf ears at the state level, our tribal governments saw the federal government as the place to put some energy, and that was where the petition to the EPA came from, because the state was not listening. They were doing the exact opposite, to really grease the skids for the company to move forward.

CURWOOD: How did the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency respond?

HURLEY: The tribes petitioned in 2010 to prohibit all mines like Pebble within the Bristol Bay watershed. The EPA came back and said, “We’re not going to act on a prohibition immediately under our authority under the Clean Water Act, but we are going to study Bristol Bay. We want to do an assessment. And we want to ask, is this place really unique, and what does this fishery mean to the state and people? If this type of development, large-scale hard rock mining, were to move forward, what kind of impact could that have on the waters and people?” 

They took three years to do a bunch of studies. They were in a lot of different communities. There was a lot of peer review to answer those questions, and after that very long, drawn-out assessment, they determined what our people had been saying all along: that this type of development would devastate the water and everyone who was sustained by that water, and so that was really the basis for their action that came later. 

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CURWOOD: At the end of the day, how did things turn out with the EPA?

HURLEY: It was a bit of a roller coaster between the different administrations, but it’s really a testament to the dedication of our people and our region that regardless of the administration, regardless of winning and losing court cases, they did not give up. And so the EPA, in January 2023, finalized protections to stop the project.

CURWOOD: What’s the risk that the Trump administration number two could reverse all of that?

HURLEY: There is very much still a risk that that could happen. The company,Northern Dynasty, the state of Alaska and a few others have challenged the EPA protections in court, which we anticipated they would. 

So far, the Trump administration has continued to defend [the] EPA’s action in court, but that is ongoing litigation, and we’re not putting all of our eggs in that basket with how unpredictable this administration has been in other arenas. We’re definitely remaining extremely vigilant. And we’re continuing to defend the protections in court, and we also are working on legislation that would address the other 20 active mining claims throughout the watershed. 

While we’ve made great progress, unfortunately, Pebble isn’t the only mining claim in the region, and so we’re working really hard to put this type of development to bed for good, so that our kids aren’t destined to fight project by project, now into eternity.

CURWOOD: As executive director of the United Tribes of Bristol Bay, how important would you say tribal cooperation has been during this fight?

HURLEY: Tribal unity and cooperation has been absolutely critical. I think in any instance where a coalition is working to protect a place, having Indigenous people leading and center of the effort is absolutely critical. Local people need to be at the forefront of these fights, and without that unity in the bay, there’s no way we would be where we’re at today.

CURWOOD: You were involved in building that coalition, including Native Alaskans, but also other political constituencies, the commercial fisherpeople and such. What was it like to build a coalition like that?

HURLEY: In the case of United Tribes of Bristol Bay, it was really about centering and amplifying the tribal voice and holding the government accountable for government-to-government consultation. There was real unity in that. 

I think anytime you’re building a coalition, it can be challenging. I mean, it’s hard to get five people to agree to where you’re going to go to dinner, let alone 15 tribal governments from different cultural backgrounds who historically didn’t always get along, coming together to fight a common enemy for our continued existence as Indigenous people. That threat really brought us all together in ways that we had never seen before, and that also translated out to non-native groups, commercial fishermen, the conservation community. These aren’t people who usually get along. We’re used to fighting over fish, not working together to protect them, and so anytime you bring different groups together, there’s going to be bumps in the road. 

At the end of the day, the connections between people, the relationships and the commitment to work [got us] through hard moments—and there were a lot of hard moments. A commitment, especially by non-native folks, to be in a respectful relationship with native people and us having that requirement that if we are going to be partners, this is how we expect to engage, helped lay the groundwork for a successful coalition. That’s never easy, it’s never pretty, but it was really the people-to-people relationships, those connections, that held us together even in the hard times. 

CURWOOD: You’ve spoken about your grandmother’s influence and the values that propelled you through this journey. What lessons have you learned that have motivated you to keep going?

HURLEY: My grandmother was Mancuaq; I was raised with her in Clark’s Point in Bristol Bay. And it’s hard for me not to get emotional talking about her, because even now, even in all the different experiences in my life, everything important, the most important things that have helped me navigate life in a way that has been good and, you know, really grounded in love and respect and kindness came from her. Also the ability to persevere when things are tough. She passed away in 2019. 

I obviously still miss her a lot. She provided me with the foundation of values, of how to move forward and live in this world in a good way. Our people have had those teachings for centuries—timeless, timeless teachings of what it means to be a good, real human being on the planet. And that foundation has helped me in life in invaluable and countless ways, and it continues to do so every day.

CURWOOD: What do you see for the future of Bristol Bay? 

HURLEY: The future of Bristol Bay is beautiful. We are still struggling with the impacts of colonization, but we have only begun our healing, our reclamation, our revitalization of who we are as Indigenous people. 

We have been so lucky that even through all of those challenges, our people have been able to remember and retain and still pass on our values and way of life. I feel like the potential to be a model of sustainability for the world led by Indigenous communities in modern society is boundless, and I’m really excited and hopeful that our region can shift from having to put our energy in defense of our homelands, to now help build something beautiful and tackle some of the tough issues that we’re facing.