Word: eyak
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...takes a special kind of courage to stand up against your friends and neighbors--especially if you're a member of Alaska's proud Eyak Indian tribe. But that's what Glen ("Dune") Lankard, 39, had to do to help preserve the last remaining coastal temperate rain forest in North America...
...time, Lankard was a commercial fisherman who sat on the board of the Eyak Corp., which administered the tribe's land rights. He had grown up fishing for salmon and herring in Cordova and never identified with environmentalists. "I used to call them 'granolas,'" he says with a laugh. But he had become concerned about how runoff from logging operations was polluting the streams fish use to spawn...
When he first proposed the idea of forest protection to the Eyak Corp., his fellow board members voted him down, 8 to 1. "They called me a greenie and a tree hugger," he recalls. Undeterred, Lankard gave up his fishing business, set up the Eyak Rainforest Preservation Fund and began lobbying politicians and native Alaskans throughout the state. "Indigenous people have thousands of years of being preservationists," he would argue. "We need to become stewards of the land again." In Lankard's view, not only the trees and streams were endangered; so were the native cultures that depended on them...
Lankard took his fight all the way to Washington, where lawmakers would oversee the land deals. He became a familiar sight in the Capitol with his battered leather backpack, laptop computer and a small, smooth stone from his beloved Copper River that he always carried. The chief of the Eyak tribe renamed him Jamachakih. Translation: "little bird that screams really loud and won't shut...
...much of a win-win situation 150 miles away in the town of Cordova, a tight-knit community on Prince William Sound of some 2,000 fishermen, artists and Eyak natives. "There may be a miniboom in Anchorage, but there is a major bust still going on in Cordova," says Torie Baker, a board member of the Cordova District Fishermen United. This year, for the second spring in a row, the town's 900 fishermen set out for herring and came / up empty; normally they would haul a catch worth somewhere around $10 million. Yes, a smattering of herring...
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