This is no longer a Bristol Bay Fishery”: Fisheries dispossession and colonial violence in Bristol Bay, Alaska

Throughout Alaska, Indigenous fishing communities have been disproportionately and negatively impacted by policies that privatize access rights to the commercial fisheries. While the deleterious impacts of fisheries privatization on Alaska Native and rural Alaskans’ cultural lifeways, family systems, household economies, and community health have been extensively documented, the ways in which the dispossession of commercial fishing rights has contributed to colonial violence is less understood. Drawing on a community-based participatory study examining the colonial roots of sexual and domestic violence in Bristol Bay, Alaska, this paper explores Alaska Native survivors’ experiences with the shifts in commercial fisheries management systems, their perspectives of cultural and community changes brought on by fisheries privatization, and connection between those changes and colonial violence. The findings show that privatization processes—which have been commonly heralded as an economic and environmental solution to fisheries management—have profound socio-cultural effects that contribute to broader social ills of violence against women and substance abuse that are endemic to many of Alaska’s rural hubs and villages. These findings inform a broader social and political mandate for Indigenous Ocean justice to advance Tribal sovereignty and self-determination in fisheries management.