Article written by Simon Friday, pictured above.
Every week like clockwork, a ship from the outside world comes into our ports and delivers what everyone needs to survive: food. It is a day many look forward to, because it means more of their favorite items will be back on the shelves and families can make the meals they planned without missing a key ingredient. We usually run out of fresh staples like fruit, bread, milk and eggs rather quickly, but the next shipment always seems to make it into the community just in time. It’s an imperfect system, but one that we have grown accustomed to by the US Government, despite some of its drawbacks.
But what happens when that system breaks? What happens if the deliveries stop coming and shelves run empty? What I am describing is a problem that became a reality for our small town of Kake, Alaska, a remote island community of 500 people in the heart of Southeast Alaska.
During the start of the pandemic and the panic buying that followed, our one and only store began seeing essential food items disappear. We were faced with a shortage of meats, dairy products, eggs, fruits and vegetables. Yes, we have our traditional foods and the community responded by quickly mobilizing emergency deer and moose hunts, but we were not prepared for the immediate scarcity we experienced in the early days of COVID-19. It was an eye-opening experience for our community, as we realized that we needed to find ways to strengthen our community food security to ensure our town has sufficient food, even in times of crisis.
Just as our ancestors did in times of hardship, we gathered and talked about the many ways we could better provide for the people in our community. The idea that stuck was to create a shellfish garden.
Photo courtesy of Bethany Goodrich.
A shellfish garden provides a reliable source of food, an Indigenous practice that has existed for thousands of years. To establish a new one would not require any sort of expensive farming equipment or a crazy amount of resources. It would simply take some rock and someone to lead the charge. Enter, yours truly.
When the Organized Villages of Kake position for a Shellfish Gardens Expansion Supervisor was brought to my attention, I had no idea what a shellfish garden was. Thankfully, that was not a prerequisite for the position. After getting the job, and moving home to Kake, I began to learn a lot about what shellfish gardens are and how they were utilized by our ancestors. If you are unfamiliar with shellfish gardens, like I was, then today is your lucky day as I will explain what they look like and how they function.
Shellfish gardens — or clam gardens, as they are more commonly referred to — are typically constructed with rock walls at the intertidal zone on a suitable beach. The dimensions of the walls vary. A common type of wall is 2 feet high, 4 feet wide, and roughly 100-200 feet long. The shellfish garden works with the tide: as it rises and falls, the wall traps a lot of the sediment on the beach on the inside of the wall, slowly leveling the slope of the beach over time.
The reason that slope and sedimentation are important is because clams like a certain zone on the beach, and beaches with steep slopes shorten that favorable zone. By reducing the slope of the beach with the rock wall terrace, the clams happy zone is extended. Additionally, shellfish gardens change the drainage of the beach and allow for still water to stay on the surface of the beach for longer, which allows for more phytoplankton to bloom and thereby give the clams more food. With more food and habitat to live in, the clams grow bigger at a faster rate and are able to reproduce more successfully. The rock walls also offer some protection against erosion on the beach when storms hit which also protects the clams.
Just as with any garden, shellfish gardens need tending and upkeep in order to keep them functioning at optimal productivity. Activities such as removing obstructions and raking the beach help aerate the sediment for the clams. Regular aeration keeps the beach from becoming anaerobic — which is a state of dark, smelly sediment that produces foul tasting clams. Something none of us want.
Photo courtesy of Shaelene Moler.
In summer 2023, our Kake community made a lot of progress on our own “demonstration” garden. As a demonstration garden, its purpose is to observe changes such as productivity, and use it as an educational tool to show the community what a shellfish garden is, what it takes to construct one, and how to maintain it. This learning step is bringing the knowledge back to the community so we will be familiar with the process and know how to maintain a food-producing shellfish garden for the future.
During our most recent rock moving event, we were able to transform the shellfish garden from what previously looked like random piles of rocks to lay most of the foundation for the rock wall and give the garden its shape. We have the direction and momentum to further build out the shellfish garden in coming events. You can learn more about the event here.
In a clam shell, what I have described to you today is the pinnacle of solving modern challenges with traditional practices. Our reliance on outside sources for nourishment has opened our eyes to the inherent risks that we take when placing all our eggs in a single basket of today’s capitalism and the federal government’s FDA-approved foods, in our case, commercial foods shipped in once per week. Yet, with the construction of shellfish gardens, we are taking our eggs (so-to-speak) back and putting some of the eggs in a place where they will never be broken: back in our clam beaches, and back in our own hands.
Photo courtesy of Bethany Goodrich.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR: Simon Friday is a recent graduate from the University of Alaska Fairbanks with a bachelor’s degree in psychology. He is passionate about mental health and helping his people, which is why he plans on going back to school for his doctoral degree. He is currently working with the Alaska Native Tribal Health Consortium in Anchorage, Alaska as a Behavioral Health Aide I. Simon is also a participant in the Indigenous Aquaculture Collaborative Network, and joined other leaders from the Organized Villages of Kake in knowledge exchanges with the Swinomish Tribal Community in caretaking their clam garden.