Three Alaskans Receive Bristol Bay Corp.’s ‘Fish First’ Awards

The Indigenous-owned, Anchorage-based Bristol Bay Native Corporation (BBNC) honored three Alaskans recently during the seventh Bristol Bay Wild Salmon celebration in Washington, D.C.

The Fish First honors announced Sept. 16 were for those who support and champion Bristol Bay and its wild salmon. This year’s honors went to Tim Troll, Triston Chaney and the late Mary Olympic.

Troll is the executive director of the Bristol Bay Heritage Land Trust, which he helped create in 1999 to preserve places of cultural and biological importance in the Bristol Bay region. Chaney is a flyfishing guide from Dillingham who has fished commercially with his family to help pay his way through college.

Olympic, who died in 2015, was a respected Aleut/Yup’ik elder from Igiugig, whose life represented a subsistence culture of thousands of years that continues today, according to the BBNC.

“Recognizing these amazing individuals is our way of saying ‘thank you’ for all that they have done to support salmon and advocate for Bristol Bay and our way of life, though we all know there is still much work to do,” BBNC President and CEO Jason Metrokin said.

The event brought together board members and staff of BBNC, Alaska’s congressional delegation and others to celebrate and eat wild Bristol Bay salmon.

The first Wild Salmon Celebration took place in 2017.

BBNC officials said that it has been a year of action for the Bristol Bay region. Just before the start of the summer sockeye salmon run Rep. Mary Peltola, D-Alaska, a 2023 Fish First award recipient, introduced the Bristol Bay Protection Act in Congress. The legislation would codify in federal law the regulatory protections the Environmental Protection Agency placed over large portions of important salmon habitat in the agency’s 2023 Bristol Bay Final Determination.

BBNC also noted that during Bristol Bay Salmon Week several Washington D.C. area restaurants featured wild Bristol Bay sockeye salmon on their menus.