AlexAnna Salmon, Tribal President

This transcript has been lightly edited for clarity.

ALEXANNA SALMON: It's said very often that Igiugig is a place where you don't live in fear. We are stewarding 81 miles of sockeye salmon stream, but once they leave for the ocean, we have no control over what happens to them: being trawled, being overfished, the warming of the oceans. And we have to pray that they will come back, but we have to be ready to accept that they do not come back, and this really matters for governance.

ANNA SALE: This is People Trying, the interview series where we get to know people working close to land, water, and nature as we're all adapting to change. I'm Anna Sale. And I'm excited for you to meet AlexAnna Salmon. She's the tribal president of the Igiugig Village Council in Alaska. The community she lives in is alongside a river that flows out of a lake that has these incredible salmon populations, and they are now figuring out how to generate renewable energy from the river currents without disrupting the salmon migrations.

And we talk about that. We talk about the need for them to adapt because they're seeing the effects of climate change, and how the ideas for some of this renewable energy started when her father was tribal president. He tragically died in a plane crash when AlexAnna was just finishing college. She thought she was going to go adventure, teach elsewhere, and instead, in her early 20s, she came home to Alaska and joined tribal leadership.

And it's now been 20 years. She's in her early 40s, and she describes the way they make decisions as a community, with consensus-based decision-making that includes all members of the community, from the oldest to the youngest, and how they create a long-term vision together. And she sees that that's actually enabled them to take really big swings that other people might not, because they have this buy-in on what they're after together, and then they pivot as needed. I really enjoyed talking with her about her leadership, about what they've done together as a community, and the values that drive them.

Hi, AlexAnna Salmon.

ALEXANNA: Good morning, Anna.

ANNA: Where is your village? How do you describe it to people who aren't familiar with Alaskan geography?

ALEXANNA: Igiugig comes from the Yup'ik word igyaraq, which literally means a throat, like the way of swallowing water. So anytime you had a lake, at that mouth part, that's an igyaraq. So that's how our village ended up with this name. We're located right at the outlet of Alaska's largest lake, Lake Iliamna. And it flows into Bristol Bay, which is the last wild sockeye salmon fishery, producing over 50% of the world's wild sockeye.

ANNA: Wow. So I'm picturing your home as where a lake turns into a throat, as if you're drinking the lake water, and that's becoming the river that sustains this incredible salmon fishery.

ALEXANNA: Yes. And in our lake, there are five genetically distinct species of sockeye salmon alone, and 100% of them have to travel through the throat. And so I really look at our work as being the voice for our lands and waters.

ANNA: Oh, because they're swimming up, so you're amplifying their voice as they swim up through your village. Is that how I should think of it?

ALEXANNA: Or when they escape. There's a lot of the world after these same fish, and we're getting the world to value that this is a global responsibility. There are only 70 of us that live here at the mouth, and we've been here for thousands and thousands of years. In fact, the salmon moved in at the last Ice Age, and it allowed us to live in place ever since. We call it Ak'a tamaani, since time immemorial. And it's over the last 250 years of watching different rules and regulations from the outside alienate us from our own homeland that we're seeking to speak for this region again, the First Peoples doing the speaking.

ANNA: You sent a video of what your home looks like, what this land and water look like. Can we look at it together?

ALEXANNA: Okay, we're flying in on a 207 from the north. This north river is all owned by outsiders, outside lodges. But as you come in, that's the mouth, the igyaraq. And we're flying directly to the cultural center. All of our ancient villages had a kasrik, or a community center, and it was said that you were not a real village until you had one. And so for the last 20 years, that's the project we've been working on. It'll be finished this December. The airport is just behind it, so we were coming in for a landing.

ANNA: I want to ask you specifically about the renewable energy project with the river. Your community initiated and put in place this technology that allows you to harness the power of the river currents to create energy without disrupting the river's flow or the salmon migrations. So unlike a dam, this is technology that sinks to the bottom of the river, and then as the water moves through it, it creates energy. Is that correct?

ALEXANNA: So the tribe applied for a Renewable Energy Fund grant to pursue hydrokinetic energy, and that was my father's project as the tribal administrator. And then he died in a tragic plane crash in February of 2008. I graduated from college that year. So instead of doing Teach For America or anything, I just came straight home, because I understood his vision. I came straight home and saw this hydro project, and I really relied on the Alaska Energy Authority to guide what to do, because it was $750,000. It was the largest sum of money I had seen at the tribe. In comparison, our governance funding to run all of the government out here, and we are the only government, is less than $180,000 a year.

ANNA: Oh, wow. It's a big bucket of money.

ALEXANNA: So you can imagine, this little tribe with that amount, and maybe it was my age, but I also thought, "Oh, this will be transitioned." But it turns out, because of our productive fishery, the permitting expectation was so costly that the only thing we could do with this funding was permitting.

ANNA: So just to get the permission to create this energy cost that much money.

ALEXANNA: Yeah. And so this is an example of where we could have scrapped the plan, but we said, let's come back to the drawing board. What can we do? Okay, let us work in partnership with all of these permitting agencies, do bathymetric profiling, really understand the whole upper Kvichak. We love science anyway. The more knowledge, the better. And let's open it up to be a test site for any hydrokinetic company that the state of Alaska vets to come out.

And so at one point in time, I had a plane load of 17 people arrive in the village, and each company got to pitch their project. They all showcased this river and all that we did. And I remember telling them, "Use layman's terms when you talk about your science." And our community sat there for hours, even as they talked about thalwegs and this and that. And I thought, this community is invested. All the ages were there to meet them.

Two device companies ended up receiving their own funding through the state to come and pilot in our community. And we got experience as a tribe dealing with two companies that had different approaches to local environmental projects. One respected deep Indigenous knowledge and our local knowledge of our river, and the other really thought they knew their equipment, and that it was fine to put in any environment.

ANNA: So I'm guessing you preferred working with the former more than the latter. Is that right?

ALEXANNA: Well, the latter almost died in their project. They almost died on the job, and then they left without even paying their bills. And so we signed a sole-source agreement to work with Ocean Renewable Power Company. And there's a lot I can talk about here, coming from Maine, and the Maine and Alaska connections.

ANNA: They were a Maine-based company?

ALEXANNA: Yes. And the values that company had... Our own engineers were asked, "How would you build the anchor? How would you deploy this?" And I got to watch, year after year, this incredible local knowledge and expertise of our own people combined with a far-off global company, and the two united to bring this technology from emerging to proven. We chose a technology that was not proven anywhere in the world, and we thought, "If we can prove it here, it should work anywhere, especially if we can retire the risk to the smolt and the salmon."

ANNA: You took a big swing. It hadn't been proven elsewhere.

ALEXANNA: Yes, and the results of that were fascinating, because what they learned was that consensus-based governance takes longer in the beginning to build, but in the end you can operate. And we work across generations, not administrations. We got funding to complete our comprehensive energy plan, and it is to reduce our amount of diesel used for electrical energy by 50% by 2030. Well, we're set to actually exceed that.

We knew that we couldn't be single-source dependent, so hydropower alone wouldn't be enough. The diesel generators alone are not enough. With wind power, the state did mapping and said we were not a wind resource. We knew locally that we are a wind resource, and it's actually increasing. So we did our own studies, found our own partners, and now we have a large grant for an entire solar array and a wind array. So we're actually going to have multiple technologies, and that was important too, for every company. You're not out here working on your singular project. You are out here for energy sovereignty for the entire tribe.

It's been a long learning process in the meantime, but with that combination of deep Indigenous knowledge, our own local engineers, our own companies, and having run our utility since the day it became diesel, from seal oil lamps to diesel, we knew we could do this. So it's hard to really appreciate the power that the RivGen is providing, but we've brought it to proven. We are retiring risk as much as humanly possible, because at the end of the day, as a tribe, we want to say when it will turn off and when it will turn on.

ANNA: I like how you say "retiring risk." I know that can be sort of an accountant's term, but it also says: what decisions can we make today to manage the uncertainty that the next generations have coming at them? We know uncertainty is going to be a part of their lives, but what part of that uncertainty can we help manage by making clear decisions right now? That's how I hear that term, "retire risk."

ALEXANNA: Yes. And I keep my seal oil lamp on my windowsill, because it's a reminder that power can still go out. We can't totally depend on electricity all the time. We can't abandon the old days. We should have an outhouse, a wood stove, and a seal oil lamp.

ANNA: Just in case.

ALEXANNA: Yes.

ANNA: I want to go back to when you left your community to go to college at Dartmouth. You didn't know whether you were going to make your career back at home. You started looking at other options. You looked at Teach For America, where you could teach children in very different communities. And then your father unexpectedly died in a plane crash. Can you go back to that time for me, when you were thinking about where your purpose was, what you were going to do with your life? What was that period like, where you thought you might go one way, and then you were pulled back home?

ALEXANNA: I would say the elders imbued this responsibility in me, and so I never wondered where I needed to be. In fact, one of my mottos in life is, you've always been at the right place at the right time. You just always have. I really feel I'm on this ancestral path, and I'm finally brave enough to talk about it, but it was happening my whole life. I just didn't realize it.

ANNA: If your father had lived, would you have come back immediately after college?

ALEXANNA: Oh, no. I would have enjoyed my best life doing Teach For America, and I would have enjoyed traveling the world. I knew that when I settled down and had kids, I would move back here, because this is the only place that kids should ever be raised. So I knew that was inevitable, but the rate at which it happened, I'm still reflecting on. It was as though that was meant to be. That was just the hardship we had to go through, because I would never have been here with this vision that is so achievable in my lifetime.

When you study Native American studies and anthropology, it's like having a degree in understanding your own genocide. It's so dark, so depressing. But to come out of that with so much hope and optimism, that's what fuels me today. And so I have this bittersweet understanding that it just had to happen.

ANNA: Do you mind telling me a little more about that dream you had where you were in the plane with your father?

ALEXANNA: Yes. I had dreams all of my life, but I wasn't paying attention to them until my senior year, when it felt very much like a message was being sent. My dad and I were flying, and it was a beautiful day. Alaska has a million lakes and ponds; we're just a water world. But for whatever reason, the propeller stopped working, and I knew the plane was falling. In the dream, I could even feel my stomach turning, and the fear and the panic. And then all of a sudden, the most overwhelming peace you could ever feel washed over me. I was with the man I trusted most in the whole world, who I felt the safest with. And nothing in this living world mattered anymore. Not the thesis I was trying to finish, not my computer that had crashed on me, not the bills and making ends meet. None of that mattered. And I knew that when we hit, we would be gone. And so all there was left to do was to pray. When we landed, we landed in water, and we survived.

It was just right after that that he did crash, and there is no explanation. The plane report didn't really bring up anything. We thought he might have had a massive heart attack, but that didn't reveal any answers.

ANNA: I want to understand a little bit about your daily life. What were the last three photos you took on your phone?

ALEXANNA: Oh, this morning I held up dry fish to the sun. In the morning you greet the sun, and you give it thanks. You face the east, and the sun was just streaming in through the window. And I was so thankful for a beautiful day. I've made dry fish, and the first two are done, so I held one up to the window to let the light stream right through it like red glass. And I just marveled at how blessed we are and how lucky we are to live this way of life still today, in 2026, after everything we have been through and after everything those fish have been through. It's a miracle of life, and we get to live it every summer. And so that's how I started my day, taking pictures of fish.

ANNA: And it's red glass because it's dried salmon. It's a beautiful red color.

ALEXANNA: It's smoked dried salmon.

ANNA: What time were you greeting the sun? It's summertime in Alaska. What time was that?

ALEXANNA: Oh, the sun was still up when I went to bed at 1:30 in the morning. Because we live around the fish this time of year, you just keep going and going. And then I was up at 7:00 and the light was already streaming in, so it must have gone down at some point. And I love to have coffee in the smokehouse. That's very meditative. So I got my Starbucks instant coffee and went out to the smokehouse and got it smoking, and you do a lot of inspecting. And I also had a whole conversation in the smokehouse with my husband, because he needed to go shopping at Costco and wherever else. He's coming in this afternoon, and it's my last call for groceries. So I did all that.

ALEXANNA (VIDEO): Cama-i from inside my smokehouse. Checking on the fire, making sure it's not too hot and that it's smoking. These are the dry fish we split yesterday, sockeye salmon, and these ones will be made into canned half-smoked.

ANNA: The smokehouse. Who shares the smokehouse?

ALEXANNA: Well, that's a big change. That's a climate change and land issue, and this is partly why the cultural center is so important to me. We grew up with fish camp, the real fish camp, where you live there and stay there. When they built the airport, they pulled rock from the point, which had created a natural barrier. This was before my time, and I can't find evidence of this, but it must be true, because of the storms, the warming temperatures that we've had, and the later falls where the ground isn't freezing. All of our permafrost has melted in my lifetime. And all of that, with those fall storms, creates major erosion events. At one time, the whole bulk fuel farm almost eroded into the river. The fish camp was wiped out in one night.

And so at that point, my gram moved her fish camp to the top of the hill, and it's much smaller. She's no longer alive, but that's the site where the cultural center will be, at the mouth, at this fish camp, and it will preserve access to this most productive fishery left in the world for all of our future generations. That food security, food sovereignty, is so important, and fish camp teaches that whole work ethic of everybody having a role. Nowadays, we all do fish on the beach together, and then we take them to our respective homes. But when this center is done and really built out, we'll have community fish camps again.

ANNA: So you're describing what was once a communal space that, because of the way land and water have changed around your village, the erosion, fell away. It was destroyed because of the way our climate is changing. And so now, what was once a place of gathering, people have their own smokehouses next to their own houses, and the intent is to have another gathering place to do this together.

ANNA: When was the last time you scrapped a plan and tried a new approach?

ALEXANNA: Honestly, I really could not think of one. When something doesn't seem to be working, we pivot and make fine-tuned adjustments. But a lot of our projects and a lot of this work have been thought out for generations. We operate on 20-year strategic plans, with 100% community consensus and buy-in. And so it's hard to think of an example where we just tried something and walked away. When we really want something, we just keep working at it and working at it.

ANNA: How does 100% community buy-in and consensus work in a community of 70 people? How do you do that as a leader?

ALEXANNA: Well, we have our annual meeting in December, and we treat it as a Christmas party. You need three-fourths of your tribal citizenship in order to run an election, and that's when our elections are. And so instead of having just a dry election in a meeting, it's a celebration. We report out all that we've done over the year, and we provide a whole lot of gifts for everybody's attendance, and we have a big potluck. Every department head reflects on their highlights, and then we recognize citizens of the year, the families that have really gone above and beyond, or the individuals that have committed to our community. And we often give a Friend of Igiugig Award to an upstanding person who is dedicated or committed to any of our causes and shined in an exceptional way that year. And so our people who run for governance do not have to campaign. Their work speaks for itself.

We have pretty simple elections. And then we allow a lot of voting. Often I'll put capital improvement projects on the wall and say it's time to update our priority list. So we make 20-year plans, and then every year we adjust the priority projects, and that's something I inherited from the leadership before me. Their guiding question in 1998 was, "What kind of tribal government do we need to operate in order for our youth to remain?" The trend before our age group was to leave: go into the military, or commercial fishing, or go to trade school, but just leave, because the opportunities were elsewhere. And we needed to keep 10 students in school in order to keep the school open, so it's always been a population struggle. When I was little, there were only 35 people.

What a lot of people don't understand is that the 1919 pandemic, brought to us by the commercial fishery, decimated our original populations. We only had three survivors. So we've always been small, but 70 is just right. What I say is that our community has always used deep Indigenous planning methods, and even with modern governance, and even with the written record now, we have preserved that. And that's what we're modeling for the world: that there is deep-rooted Indigenous governance that's a far better model for quality of life out here.

And it's said very often that Igiugig is a place where you don't live in fear. I just thought that was so beautiful. And then when I returned after I graduated from college, they said, "With your education, you'll be able to speak to people from the outside," and they put me in the president position.

ANNA: To do what you're doing right now. To speak to people.

ALEXANNA: Yes. And I knew I had a plan.

ANNA: I want to follow up on a few of those threads. So in 1998, the tribal members articulated a vision of how to keep young people, your generation, from leaving and not coming back. What was their idea for keeping you from leaving?

ALEXANNA: For us to dream our own future. At eight years old or at 12 years old or at 20, whatever age you were, what did you want this village to be? There was a six-year-old who drew an apple orchard and a berry patch in her drawing, and 20 years later, my brother-in-law brought home an apple tree grafted specifically for our Alaskan conditions. The weather has warmed enough for us to support an apple orchard, and this is our third year. We have 40 trees out here. And when you look at our apple orchard, and the berry bushes that I didn't even know came with them, it is her drawing. At six years old! I even said, when I put that together, that our youth can see farther than us.

ANNA: You mentioned another principle, the idea of not living in fear. Do you think of not living in fear as a choice? How do you not live in fear?

ALEXANNA: There's a Yup'ik word that I think of a lot. I took my gram to her homelands, which had been usurped as part of Katmai National Park and Preserve, the preserve lands. She was a reindeer herder over there.

ANNA: Wow.

ALEXANNA: And when I took her there, all her senses were alive. I saw her eyes scanning for all the trails, and I saw her observing all the climatic differences, and she was reminiscing so deeply. While I observed that, I didn't actually pay attention until I listened to the recording later. She looked out and she said, "Nunaka." I was learning the grammar of Yup'ik, and so I looked it up, and it means my homeland, my birthplace, my place of being. There is no English translation for it.

ANNA: Wow.

ALEXANNA: And later on, I learned a Yup'ik dance, Nunaiqva. So our word for happiness, our word for land, our word for beauty, they're the same. They're from the same root word. And so I came away with nunaiq, happiness. If you really look into that word, to my understanding, it means to know who you are, to know where you're from, to know where you belong. You're so content. And it could be this entire homeland; that's how we feel in our homeland. If people don't understand or have that connection, imagine how you feel when you return to your own room, even if that's a dorm room. You're in your own space. You know it.

So it's that we know, if the fish don't run, what other foods we have here. We know that wildfire is our biggest threat to living here, so how do we get ready to combat wildfire, with massive climate change? When we're not allowed to hunt our caribou, where are the moose? Really knowing your home feeds into a sense of security that is irreplaceable.

ANNA: I wonder if you could describe for me, AlexAnna... You describe your gram taking in the changes in the landscape as she's thinking about her connection to this place. For some, noticing change, noticing an acceleration of storms, an acceleration of weather pattern changes, absolutely leads to fear and angst and overwhelm and paralysis and a feeling of powerlessness. And you're describing almost an in-syncness that lets in the change, and that also deepens that feeling of intentedness. Do you see a sort of tension there, in acknowledging the change in our climate?

ALEXANNA: Yes, there is anxiety. We do have a lot more anxiety as a general population. For us out here, it's more that we are stewarding 81 miles of sockeye salmon stream, but once they leave for the ocean, we have no control over what happens to them: being trawled, being overfished, the warming of the oceans. And we have to pray that they will come back. But we have to be ready to accept that they do not come back, and this really matters for governance.

They say that in starvation times, people start acting differently. And so what I tell our people today is that starvation is here. It just looks different, because now we're in a capitalistic society, so literally you can starve if you don't have a cash economy. For us, it was always about food security, and also knowing that people change, their character changes, and that adds into the stealing, or how people behave when they're in need. Our community right now has a quality of life where we still have our way of life, and we still have our fish, and we still have our language. But our wildlife populations are diminishing. The ancient stories even talk about double winters, or things happening. So we come from a deep oral tradition that talks about a lot of things that could happen.

And I think about it like this: Yup'ik people are very into a pathway, clearing the path, this is the path. Here's the path to the stars. Always the path. And I thought, over thousands of years, we have walked a lot of paths. There are a lot of paths, a lot of options. But when a lot of people come out here, they see a completely intact, pristine landscape, and they think, "This needs to be saved just the way it is," without realizing that we've lived in balance with this. The reason you can't see our evidence is because we were very aware of our carbon footprint and our pathway. And so even as a 2026 society, we can reduce our carbon footprint. We can be aware of the same values. So I really attribute it to values-based governance: taking those ancient values that allowed for survival in this homeland in the harshest conditions, and then thriving communities.

ANNA: This series is called People Trying, and the idea is that something like adapting to the changes in our climate can be so overwhelming. It can make people feel so powerless. I think many of us can sort of pull away, stop looking, feel hopeless, feel overwhelmed, and the intention with this project is to talk to people who may feel those feelings sometimes, and also keep trying. And I wonder if you could talk about, on a day where you feel discouraged and not sure what the next step is, what do you return to for the next day's work, to figure out how to face it?

ALEXANNA: I turn to the river, the Kvichak River, every single time I need clarity and thought. No matter what I'm feeling and what I'm doing, if I go on the Kvichak River, I will refresh. There is some energy there. It will seep into every cell, and I will just be ready to do it again, or to try differently. And I really do believe in putting it out to the universe.

I get really overwhelmed with the warming. Not too long ago we landed in Denver and drove through Utah, and then we came home, and everywhere we had been was just on fire, and the drought and the pollution. And it just feels so daunting and exhausting. But I think to myself, we take every day for granted, but that's why greeting the sun is important. It is not guaranteed to rise. For some reason, humans think it's going to come every day. There could be any number of things. We need to be mindful, intentional, prayerful. We're taking things for granted every moment that we have this safety and security.

And I thought to myself, putting all this fish away, that I hope my kids get that natural drive to know that you can't expect there to be a store. Just because there is one there today doesn't mean it'll be there tomorrow. And this world is going to grow more chaotic. That's for certain. It is growing. We are going to have shortages of everything. That is guaranteed. And so it's always getting ready, always getting ready in your own personal lifestyle to be ready to grab on to whatever is going to come your way, as well as always getting the village ready.

And then, who do you need to work with? For this lake, I have to work with six tribes. Meeting person to person, seeing the truth live on the ground. So that these inspiring stories can still be out there. Because you come to Igiugig, you get a dose of good medicine: what good leadership, what good community, what good environment, what good is left in the world. That good medicine can be found here. And it renews your hope in the whole world. That's what I feel when I come home. And I take a lot of visitors through here, because people need to feel it themselves. And then you will go home believing that it is possible.

ANNA: It's been such a pleasure talking with you and meeting you. Thank you for your time.

ALEXANNA: Thank you.