Black seaweed – Laak’ásk in Lingít — hasn’t been documented much in the past.
“It’s mentioned everywhere, but it’s a paragraph, a sentence in all these different ethnographic studies about Southeast Alaska and about Northwest Coast cultures. So really important resource, but nobody spent the time to actually document it, and that’s what I was asked to do,” said Dr. Kelly Monteleone, an underwater anthropologist at Sealaska Heritage Institute.
She’s working on a multi-year project, largely funded by a $350,000 National Science Foundation grant, to determine if black seaweed is a cultural keystone species and document its cultural and environmental significance.
Monteleone sees herself as a facilitator for the project. She’s brought together a team, including several Tlingit and Tsimshian researchers, to help her hold community meetings, to shadow field harvests, and conduct interviews in seven communities across Southeast: Sitka, Kake, Hoonah, Hydaburg, Ketchikan, Metlakatla, and Angoon. They’re hoping to include Klawock and Yakutat in the study if they get additional funding.
“We want to make sure we have the documentation, especially with things like the increase in mariculture. Not that we necessarily are thinking that people are going to start growing black seaweed, but as they start putting farms in places, is it going to affect people’s access [to] their existing black seaweed harvest locations?” Monteleone said. “As climate is changing, sea levels are rising, how is that going to affect people’s access to black seaweed? Where’s black seaweed gonna move to?”
In recent years, traditional harvesters in British Columbia and Southeast Alaska say black seaweed has become more difficult to find and has been affected by a green slime. Researchers have linked the disappearance from the intertidal shoreline to an enormous hot water mass in the Northern Pacific known as The Blob that moved from the Gulf of Alaska down to California a little over a decade ago. As temperatures cooled in the following years, British Columbia’s seaweed started to rebound, but not like before.
And both researchers and harvesters remain concerned that as the climate continues to change, the distribution and abundance of black seaweed is being impacted, affecting community wellbeing and food security.
Charlie Skultka Jr., who teaches arts and culture classes in Sitka schools, says he can’t remember a time in his life when he didn’t go out and participate in black seaweed harvesting.
“It’s something that has always been on our table and in our pantry, and it is one of the cornerstone foods to our lifestyle,” Skultka said.
The 62-year-old is Haida, Sioux and Ojibwa. His family migrated to Sitka in the 1950s, and every spring, they would take a boat to large rocks offshore, and harvest the black seaweed’s long, hair-like fronds.
“I have seen many changes,” he said. “I’ve seen a change in climate. I’ve seen a change in abundance, and also in quality. There’s so many factors at play right now that have to do with our ocean harvesting.”
Skultka is concerned that changes in water temperature, increased vessel traffic, and sewage discharge into local waters is starting to affect black seaweed. He says that’s why Monteleone’s research is so important. By talking to harvesters about the changes they’ve seen over the years and documenting local knowledge, communities can get a baseline for what’s going on and make it “abundantly clear” that it’s a resource that people continue to rely on.
“It’s absolutely a keystone species,” Skultka said. “It’s one of the cornerstones of our diet, as is herring and salmon and all these other resources. To recognize it any other way is foolish. It has been going on for thousands of years.”
As costs rise for fuel, rent, and imported groceries across many small communities in Alaska, Skultka says subsistence foods are as important as ever and need to be protected for the future.
“It’s getting to the point now, without doing these things sustainably and being able to practice our subsistence harvesting, pretty soon, no Alaskans will be able to afford to live in Alaska,” he said.
Monteleone says her team will be in Sitka, Kake and Hydaburg this spring to do field harvests and interviews with local harvesters and processors. After the field visits are complete, they will be writing a book, part of their Box of Knowledge series, about the research, which she hopes will be complete by late 2028.
