As an Eyak Athabascan born into a fishing family on Alaska’s Prince William Sound, Dune Lankard spent decades at work as a subsistence and commercial seafood harvester.

Then after the Exxon Valdez oil spill disaster of 1989, which devastated the environment, his goal became protecting the lands and waters of Prince William Sound. His mission, as he sees it, is feeding people, restoring the ocean and building a regenerative economy.

“Being a fisherman, I always felt that I was a provider and that everyone has their roles in their community, and especially in tribal communities,” Lankard said. “I felt that ocean farming, both kelp and mariculture, could not only have a different importance of not only feeding our people, but helping heal and restore the ocean in the process.”

Lankard’s passion for Indigenous ocean farming, food sovereignty and ocean restoration won him accolades this summer in the form of a James Beard Foundation Impact Award for his lifelong leadership in food security, food sovereignty, sharing traditional foods and his passion for ocean farming.

According to his LinkedIn profile, his Eyak name, Jamachakih, means “Little Bird that screams really loud and won’t shut up.”

Through the Native Conservancy in Cordova, of which he is a co-founder, Lankard has helped lead food deliveries to communities and the elderly, host kelp farmer training in Kake and Metlakatla, and develop a community kelp seed nursery and the Native Sea Trust to promote long-term mariculture access and co-management rights for Alaska Native communities.

It’s development of kelp farming that he sees as key.

In 2017, a marine heat wave known as the “blob” resulted in an abnormally calm and sunny summer, with sea surface temperatures up to 7 degrees Fahrenheit above the seasonal average. The prolonged temperature rise, a continuation of a larger “blob” phenomenon that began in 2013 and lasted until 2016, disrupted the marine ecosystem and its food web.

The impact persisted in the subsurface water column through 2017 and 2018. The warm water increased juvenile Pacific cod mortality, weakened adult cod and disrupted the food web, leading to a 79% biomass drop in the Pacific cod populations, especially in the Gulf of Alaska.

“When the ocean heats up the oxygen in the tidal zone is gone and whatever is in there is cooked to death,” Lankard said. “I saw (dead) salmon and birds floating around.”

Over the next couple of years he wants to add labs to learn how to create kelp that can thrive in such temperatures, to acclimate kelp that will grow differently in different regions.

“We are working with science groups to learn how to grow the kelp and how to scale up,” he said. “A lot of tribes are looking at the ocean a little differently. If you took all the aquaculture and mariculture species and add them all together, 50% of the weight of what is being grown is kelp. It’s just a matter of figuring out what will grow where.”

He knows it won’t be easy.

“The reality is that things are going to get harder before they get easier,” he warns in one of several videos online promoting the future of kelp farming. “But if we as the human race collectively use our energy and our intelligence and find the courage that we need to actually build regenerative economies that are helpful and restorative for our planet rather than continue to take from the planet, then we may have a chance to survive.

Over the past year, the Native Conservancy hosted kelp farmer immersion trainings in Kake and Metlakatla, a collaborative effort of tribal members, scientists, certified divers and mariculture practitioners with a focus on strengthening Indigenous leadership knowledge and furthering Alaska’s growing seaweed economy.

The Kake training in August focused on ocean habitat, hatchery operations, cooperative business development and science blending technical learning with traditional, ecological and Indigenous knowledge.

Training in Metlakatla in October emphasized kelp farm design, processing and market readiness tailored to the needs of Southeast Alaska’s Indigenous kelp farmers.

That work is being funded by the Exxon Valdez Oil Spill Trustee Council, Southeast Conference and others, Lankard said.

The Native Conservancy is talking with companies that want to make a variety of foods and other products out of kelp. “It has been an interesting time for us,” he said. “We have gone from test sites to pilot programs to now we want to get the processing and value adding done so we can scale up.”

The nonprofit organization has completed a new double-wide, 40-foot-long Community Kelp Seed Nursery connex system in Cordova, built by Keolani Booth, director of the Native Sea Trust.

The seed nursery is part of Native Conservancy’s broader effort to create a network of portable and affordable connex container kelp seed nurseries for remote Alaska communities.

Testing innovative hatchery and filter designs and contamination-control protocols are being implemented to ensure the highest quality seed production. The plan is to distribute spools of nursery-grown kelp to ocean farmers across Alaska, helping to strengthen the rapidly emerging mariculture economy, according to the Native Conservancy report.

Meanwhile the organization’s Native Sea Trust is working to secure kelp ocean farm permits for Southeast Alaska tribes, to ensure that Indigenous people can access, reclaim and steward their ancestral ocean waters.

“Who farms in the ocean does matter and the reason I say that is because the Indigenous peoples who have been the original guardians and stewards for thousands of years are the ones who should be farming,” said Lankard in one of his online videos promoting ocean farming.

“It’s not going to happen because we are lucky. It’s going to happen because we actually care and we do something about it.”