"Twenty-three Alaskan tribesmen broke the law when they overfished king salmon, but they claim their faith gave them no other choice."

"“So there is a black fish swimming up the river, looking for a fish trap to swim into. Cycle of life, right?”

Grant Kashatok was telling me stories the traditional Yup’ik way—his fingers entwined with string, like a child playing cat’s cradle. As he spoke, he looped the string into different shapes: it became a hunter, a mountain, a boat, an oar. “And he came to a fish trap that was broken,” he said, “and some of the fish in it were dead. The black fish poked his head out of the river to see who it was that owned the trap, and he saw that the village was dirty, and that the dogs were not tied up, and the woman came out to throw out the scraps of a fish dinner and he watched the dogs fight over the bones. The fish did not want his bones fought over. So he carried on swimming up river.”"

Adam Weymouth reports for the Atlantic with photos by Loren Holmes June 3, 2014. [2]