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Backcountry Hunters & Anglers Podcast & Blast with Hal Herring

BHA Podcast & Blast, Ep. 60: Gwich’in hunter Walter Peter

Backcountry Hunters & Anglers Podcast & Blast with Hal Herring

Zack Williams

Outdoors, Wilderness, Sports, Fishing, Outdoor, Hunting, Sports & Recreation

4.6853 Ratings

🗓️ 1 October 2019

⏱️ 57 minutes

🧾️ Download transcript

Summary

It is 80 miles or so by boat down the intensely braided and ever-changing Yukon River to the village of Fort Yukon, Alaska (at the confluence of the Yukon and the Porcupine), where Hal meets Walter Peter, a Gwich’inhunter, trapper and fisherman – provider for his family and elders and others, taking meat and fish and whatever else the earth will give, eight miles above the Arctic Circle. Their conversation ranges from Native concerns over fish and wildlife management to climate change and opening the coastal plain of the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge – the birthing ground for the caribou herds on which the Gwich’in have depended for thousands of years.

Transcript

Click on a timestamp to play from that location

0:00.0

Hello everybody and welcome back to the backcountry hunters and anglers podcast and blast.

0:05.6

I'm Hal Herring and I've got a little something different today.

0:10.0

It's a podcast we recorded up in Fort Yukon on the Yukon River across from the

0:17.7

confluence of the Porcupine River in Alaska, eight miles north of the Arctic Circle.

0:25.0

I was up there.

0:26.0

We've been working for a year and a half or so on a public lands film.

0:29.6

I've been helping some guys with that, and we flew into Fairbanks, drove the Stysh Highway up three hours or so to

0:38.0

a circle and were picked up on the Yukon River there by a guy who was helping us out from Fort Yukon.

0:45.9

He had a big flat bottom moose boat, 115 every route on it and we went about 75 miles down the Yukon River to the village of Fort

0:56.8

Yukon. That's about 500 people in there sometimes more, sometime less. It's the Guitchin people there. They've been in that country. They're

1:08.2

Athabaskin. People from, they're kin to folks that ended up in New Mexico and Arizona, who were the

1:16.9

Navajo.

1:18.4

But the Gwichen have been in the Yukon and North for thousands of years and as they told us they

1:26.6

plan to be there for thousands of years more.

1:30.6

Fort Yukon, like I said, it was about 500 people that folks circulate in and out along the river there.

1:37.0

And there's a lot of families that trade from two different towns and all.

1:42.0

But we were able to also attend the Arctic Indigenous Climate Summit,

1:48.6

which was being held in Fort Yukon there.

1:51.2

And a lot of the Gwich and hunters were presenters there simply

1:57.0

cataloging the things that they have seen the changes that they have witnessed in

2:01.6

their time out on the river and in the forests there, the Borrell

2:05.6

forest. As hunters and fishermen, this is a place where beef steak costs about 20 bucks.

...

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