ST. PAUL The Trident Seafoods plant tucked inside this island’s small port is the largest snow crab processor in the nation. On a cold clear day in January, three Trident workers, within the hold of the Seattle-based Pinnacle, grabbed bunches of the shellfish, and placed them in an enormous brailer basket for their brief trip across a dock. The crab were fed into a hopper to be butchered, cooked, brined and frozen. Few of the 360 people who live on St. Paul, largest of the four Pribilof Islands, have opted to work in the plant. Instead jobs are filled with recruits from elsewhere. But the plant still remains a financial underpinning of this Aleut community. Trident pays taxes that help bankroll the expansive services of a city government, which rents apartments, leases construction equipment and even provides plumbers and electricians to make repairs.
At the end of last year, the council went into a closed door meeting and when it emerged, it had eliminated two seats on its key advisory panel: Ernie Weiss of Anchorage who had reached his cap for reappointment on the panel and, Natasha Hayden of Kodiak, a vocal advocate for smaller vessels and Alaska Natives, who had been seeking reappointment.
The blowback of Hayden s ouster was immediate, especially among stakeholders advocating for Indigenous voices in fisheries management.
At the council s February meeting, more than 20 people from conservation council representatives, to well established commercial fishermen, to policy directors at Native non-profits provided public testimony calling for Hayden s reappointment.
Key Federal Fisheries Advisory Panel Loses Alaska Native Voice kucb.org - get the latest breaking news, showbiz & celebrity photos, sport news & rumours, viral videos and top stories from kucb.org Daily Mail and Mail on Sunday newspapers.