OceanBack: Indigenous Kelp Nurseries for Coastal Alaska

Dune Lankard—Eyak name: Jamachakih "Little Bird that screams really loud and won't shut up")—grew up fishing the Copper River and Prince William Sound—waters his family had known for generations. In 1989, the Exxon Valdez spilled into those same waters. And in 2019, the ocean heated to 76 degrees for three weeks. Billions of krill died. Kelp forests collapsed. Whole salmon floated by, dead, because the spawning grounds had no oxygen left. Dune sat down with his family and said: “This is not how it ends. This is how it begins. We need to learn how to grow things from the sea.”

What we're doing

This project supports two community kelp seed nurseries—one in Cordova, in Prince William Sound, and one deploying to the village of Kake in Southeast Alaska this July. These nurseries are the starting point for everything: without local seed, there are no kelp farms. Without farms, there are few jobs. Without jobs, people leave their villages.

A kelp seed nursery is a containerized system—a 40-foot conex outfitted with tanks, seawater pumps, and temperature controls—that allows communities to cultivate kelp seed locally from wild parent stock harvested nearby. State regulations require seed to be sourced within close proximity to farm sites, but until we built these nurseries, there was almost no seed production infrastructure in the regions where our farmers work. Communities were dependent on outside operators who controlled pricing and access. We changed that.

Ma Earth funding will support the seeding and nursing cycles at both sites. In Cordova, we'll run a full production cycle through our established nursery—collecting wild sorus from local kelp beds, cultivating seed string, and nursing it through to outplanting readiness. In Kake, we're deploying a nursery to the community for the first time. Seeding begins in August, with nursing continuing through the fall and winter until the seed is ready to go into the water on local farms.

Why kelp, and why now

The Tribes we work with came to kelp farming for three reasons. First, to help heal and restore the ocean. Second, to grow a traditional food source that Alaska Native people have harvested for thousands of years. Third, to build a place-based regenerative economy they could be proud of during these climate-changing times.

In some of the villages we serve, unemployment runs as high as 85%. Many families sold their fishing permits years ago. The seafood processors controlled the price, and fishermen were always price takers, never price makers. Kelp farming changes that because it's seasonal work that fills the winter gap when fishing is idle, it puts people back on the water as stewards of their own ancestral waters, and through the Indigenous Mariculture Cooperative we're building, farmers will have collective power over their own pricing and markets for the first time.

Kelp doesn't need to be fed, fertilized, or watered. You don't have to chase it. It grows in cold, nutrient-rich 7water that Alaska has in abundance. And it creates habitat; a single kelp farm provides cover for over 200 juvenile marine species and contributes to carbon cycling in nearshore ecosystems. Every farm we seed is restoration and food production at the same time.

Who's doing the work

This project is led by Indigenous community members in Cordova and Kake. Lance Kompkoff (Aleut) is our lead team member from Native Conservancy dedicated to ensuring the success of the nurseries. Lance has more than 30 years of hands-on maritime experience and his background includes 15 years in oil spill response, and extensive work running seine skiffs and working on salmon tenders. Lance works with a team of nursery technicians trained through NC's workforce development program who have learned kelp bed mapping, ocean-diving seed collection, seed string production, water quality monitoring, nursery management, and outplanting. Fourteen Indigenous divers are now certified to harvest kelp spores. The people running these nurseries are the same people who fish these waters, gather traditional foods from these shores, and are raising their families in these communities. 

We've worked with 32 Tribal communities across coastal Alaska to get here. It took five years of sitting with Tribal councils, listening, adapting, and building trust village by village. Every community is different. Every relationship takes time. This is the work.