In Metlakatla, Salmonberries Speak and Tell Time

Throughout the Berry Futures project, it became clear: Berries gather people, as much as people gather berries.

Alaska CASC Science Communicator Lia Ferguson contributed reporting to this piece.

In Metlakatla, some of the best berry-picking shrubs aren’t where you might expect. 

Just to the side of the town’s main roads, a few steps away from where trucks and cars noisily trundle, salmonberries, red hawthorns, and cloudberries abound. 

Though these aren’t the most scenic locations on Annette Island to harvest fruits — many more grow at higher elevations, overlooking the sea and mountains in the offing — the roadside berries are some of the community’s most important. Found on relatively flat ground near the town center, just a short drive away and walkable for many, they are the most accessible berries. Thanks to these plants, Elders and other community members are able to practice the subsistence harvests that have sustained them for generations. 

“We’ve been gathering berries for as long as I can remember,” says Naomi Leask, a subsistence practitioner and educator who grew up in Metlakatla. “This has always been part of my life. One of the biggest lessons we were taught is to leave more than enough berries for Elders, or someone who can’t get around so well anymore.”

These roadside berries are so important that the community’s Climate Change Adaptation Plan, in many ways, revolves around their health. Genelle Winter, a co-author of the plan and the Metlakatla Indian Community’s special projects director and grant coordinator, says that other management decisions — such as those addressing the spread of non-native plant species, the usage of herbicide, and even road maintenance — are sometimes based on how they will affect the berries located downtown and on easily accessible trails. 

“For some people, picking berries is therapeutic,” Winter says. “They just love it. And for other folks, there’s a human health aspect to collecting and preserving their own foods. They rely on being able to harvest their own resources as a support mechanism for their families.”

This subsistence relationship is woven inextricably into the Tsimshian community’s keeping of language and time. The Sm’algyax words for calendar months, Leask says, describe the harvests that traditionally occur within them. What the Western world calls May, on Annette Island, is Ha’li’la̱x siła̱’a̱sk: “the time when seaweed harvests begin.” November, Ha’lila̱x sits’a̱’a̱x, translates to: “the time for people to dig clams.” 

For most of Leask’s life, September — Ha’lila̱x simaay, “the time to pick berries” — has been spent surrounded by family. She grew up harvesting salmonberries, blueberries, thunder berries, and laughing berries alongside her grandparents, aunties, uncles, and cousins. She recalls her brothers and several cousins eating, with squeamish expressions on their faces, soapberries — their bitter, palette-cleansing taste barely edible for some, even with copious amounts of added sugar or fireweed syrup. Berry leather, a recipe she enjoys sharing with others, was a much more delicious treat that lasted into the winter. And when she became a mother, Leask carried her daughter on her back as she picked berries, passing down her knowledge of fruits and traditional medicines.

But in Metlakatla, a changing climate is disrupting the linguistic ties between kitchen tables and calendars. The names of months no longer reliably describe themselves. Warm ocean waters have negatively affected the quantity, quality, and timing of harvestable springtime seaweed. November clams, increasingly impacted by paralytic shellfish poisoning, can be toxic when eaten. 

The “time to pick berries,” which has traditionally occurred in September, Leask says, is now a late-July or early-August affair.

Similar changes to berry health and harvest times have been detailed in dozens of Tribal climate adaptation plans all across Alaska. But Metlakatla’s most recent plan, released in 2017, is one of only two to cite a Western scientific study — a 2015 paper written by a plant ecologist at UAF, Katie Spellman — about this trend. 

Spellman, along with Christa Mulder, also a professor of plant ecology at the University of Alaska Fairbanks and a co-author of that 2015 study, wanted to make sure that the science and knowledge on berries was more accessible and shared across communities who were concerned about berries in a changing climate. Existing scientific studies, they say, are hard to read and interpret for non-scientists, which limits their usefulness to communities or individuals who might benefit from them. And not all berries had been studied equally. 

“Everything that Western scientists know and have learned about how plants are acting in climate change — the plants people care about a lot — is not making it into these climate adaptation plans, because there is an obvious missing link in the communication of berry science across Alaska,” Mulder said. “The first goal was to get what was already known about these berry species out to communities, but a second goal was to identify gaps in our knowledge.”

Beginning in 2021, Spellman and Mulder began work on the Alaska CASC-funded “Berry Futures” project, which sought “to provide current knowledge about northern berry species, expose gaps in our knowledge, and inform Alaskans about how we can plan for changing berry resources,” according to the project’s website. 

They chose to focus their efforts on Alaska’s five most popular berries: salmonberries, bog blueberries, cloudberries, lowbush cranberries, and crowberries.

Laying Down Roots

Over the winter of 2022, Krista Heeringa, Megan Pittas, and Malinda Chase of The Alaska CASC’S Tribal Resilience Learning Network helped Spellman and Mulder lead three listening sessions for people to share their experiences and observations of shifting seasons, varying berry health, and weather anomalies. Subsistence gatherers and berry enthusiasts from more than 40 communities across Alaska attended.

These conversations were carried into dozens of events, news articles, and radio coverage, including a standing-room-only packed house at the Alaska Forum on the Environment and interviews on local (KYUK) and national radio (NPR).

Perhaps the most important outcome of these listening sessions was hearing the concerns of berry pickers, and the exchange of ideas across communities for mitigating or adapting to changing conditions for berries. 

“We were able to hear these concerns and then review what is known in the scientific literature to identify important research gaps on berries in Alaska,” Spellman says. “These are highlighted in the booklets and have already started to generate momentum from scientists, in and out of Alaska, to help address these gaps.” 

During these listening sessions, many communities shared the innovative approaches for sustaining berries that they were already trying. Planting food forests, pruning berry plants to increase yield, and manipulating shrub cover to alleviate the lack of snowpack in certain areas have been three common approaches. In Kotzebue, observers found potential inspiration for future initiatives when they saw cloudberries growing beneath solar panels — trapped winter snow helped delay flowering until later in the spring, when weather conditions are better, and provided summer shade, “which is key to reducing heat stress for cloudberries in this warmer world,” Spellman says.

And in Metlakatla, recommended strategies for berry adaptation include protecting certain berry patches that show potential for natural migration and population growth, and gifting different seeds to trusted community members — especially children — for planting.

“If you want to implement change in a community, you have to start in the school system,” Winter says.

Building Booklets

For each species, the team filled booklets, ranging from 16 to 24 pages, with botanical illustrations, biological explanations, a summary of knowledge gaps, projections for how future climate regimes may impact their growth, and ideas to reduce the negative impacts.

Though pinpointing common trends and threats for all five species was difficult, the team found that research identifying how plants are responding to their physical environment — including increased fire frequency and warmer temperatures — was relatively robust. Conversely, the need for a greater understanding of how other species, especially insects and fungus, interact with berries, was clear.

“There’s really not that much known about pollinators and their responses to climate change in particular,” Mulder says. “There hasn’t been much research into timing. What happens if plants are flowering earlier, before pollinators arrive, or vice versa? There is also very little information on what diseases and herbivores are found on wild berries, and essentially nothing on how those might change due to climate change.”

Spellman also noted that variations in snowpack and rainfall across the state — likely to continue in the coming years — will have certain effects, though to unknown degrees, on all five species. When the team began to publish the booklets one-by-one, beginning with cloudberry in 2023, the feedback they received from communities caused them to focus, increasingly, on adaptation strategies. 

Super Berries

Though Mulder spent decades researching circumboreal plants prior to this project, she works now with a new appreciation for each species’ unique attributes — the territorial nature of crowberries, the resiliency of low-lying cloudberries, the way blueberries respond en force after wildfire, to name a few. And when sharing video calls discussing the booklets, she uses a laptop decorated with berry stickers, each designed specifically for the project.

“Each berry has its own strength, and thinking of them as characters was really fun,” Mulder says. “They each have their own superpower.”

Hannah Foss, an illustrator, animator, and science communicator at UAF’s Geophysical Institute, created the cloudberry images and helped to edit the cranberry booklet. Months after the project is complete, she hopes her artwork helps communicate each plant’s adaptation mechanisms.

“There was a particular kind of web-like texture on the leaves that was the most difficult to capture,” she says. “The cloudberry drupelets have a pink all-over glow and a yellow within it. If one part of the reproductive flower isn’t pollinated, then that drupelet won’t develop.”

Lauren Bird, another artist with the project who focused primarily on blueberry illustrations and research, reflected on the booklets as the first large-scale effort to identify what is and isn’t known about the state’s berries, amidst seasons of great change. 

“It’s remarkable how much has to go right for a plant to produce fruit,” Bird says. “That there are enough of these berries for every Alaskan to go out picking, and bring them home, is amazing.”

Berries Speak

One berry superpower, known intimately in Metlakatla, is their role as a crucial indicator species for forest, plant, and human health. Around 2015, Winter began noticing the community’s salmonberries — ma̱g̱ooxs — acting strangely.

“They were doing a weird thing of putting out flowers before they had foliage and trying to fruit multiple times over the summer,” she says. “It was because they were under such pressure. That’s plant psychology. If they think they’re dying, they’re going to hurry up and reproduce.”

The suffering, smaller-than-normal salmonberries were communicating the early signs of what, several years later, was officially declared a regional drought by the National Weather Service — between 20 and 30 fewer inches of rain fell compared to historic averages, while parts of the greater Southeast region experienced their driest summers in roughly 40 years.

While no berry species will be going extinct, Spellman says, warming temperatures and changing conditions are influencing the timing, location, and size of harvests.

As is detailed in the salmonberry booklet, June water availability in the region is projected to decrease by another 10 percent over the next 75 years. Changes to precipitation have been identified as one of the fruit’s greatest threats.

Because fruits like salmonberries and laughing berries are perennials, “it’s more evident earlier in the season that something is going wrong, and that you need to be watching it throughout the summer,” Winter says.

If we listen, she says, the berries tell us this themselves.