Brenda Schwartz-Yeager
“I grew up on the Stikine. My family has been there on the Stikine in different capacities for four generations, so my parents took me up there a lot. My dad was the fisheries biologist and game warden for that region for many years. And we recreated, and my family had a homestead up there. I have lots of memories as a little kid playing on the sandbars, and the meadows. There are family pictures of us as babies in buckets on the bottom of boats, because my parents were up there so much, and my grandparents were there. Some of my most vivid, young memories are Stikine River memories.”
—Brenda Schwartz-Yeager, artist, Stikine River tour boat operator, Wrangell resident
“I’ve been really fortunate to grow up in a lot of beautiful wild places. I grew up on commercial fishing boats running over, from Lituya Bay to Dixon Entrance on boats, seeing a vast amount of country. My parents were artists and appreciated beautiful places, and always took the time to acknowledge them.
On the Stikine, I don’t know how you can go up there and not be provoked to take a picture of it, paint it, write a song about it, whatever you do to express your celebration of a place. It’s a place that moves people in a lot of ways.
When I grew up, openings were all summer long. You could take a day off and explore, have a harbor day if the weather was really bad. And there were no devices of entertainment on the boat, other than books. So I started drawing everything I saw as something to do.
I’d often just put a skiff in and go to the beach. Sometimes you just wanted a change in scenery, or some peace and quiet. So pretty much every night, if I had time, I’d put a skiff in, row into a beach, and sketch a creek, or a bear. Whatever was there. I feel a desperate need to capture it and save it, because it’s so amazing, the things that we see here.
My hope for my artwork is that somebody else will say, ‘I’ve been there, and yes, it felt like that.’ Or it reminds them of a moment in time that was a good moment in time for them, or a good place.
We’re so lucky to live where we live, where we have this real connection to the sea here, and to the water, which is the theme that runs through everything that I do. The coastline is so important to us, and how our lives are so tangled up in it. I have endless subject matter.”
—Brenda Schwartz-Yeager, artist, Stikine River tour boat operator, Wrangell resident
“My favorite place to work as an artist is on the banks of the Stikine. My studio is where the river is just starting to expand out into the delta, where the valleys are sprawling open wider, and there are major sands flats that go on for about 8 miles.
That viewshed faces southeast, looking out over the massive delta with thousands of tangled trees that have washed down the river, and the towering mountains around it. It’s a glimpse down toward the more expansive, spacious grass flats, with the bigger, towering mountains at your back. It’s a perfect place.
One of the great things about that location is you’re just right at the edge of the area a lot of migratory birds are using. Even if I’m working at my studio there are lots of ducks, geese, shorebirds, swans, other birds. Sometimes I’ll sit on the porch with a cup of coffee and there will be swans during the hooligan run in March and April, cruising the middle arm of the river, eating the hooligan run by the thousands. I don’t even think they could fly if they tried, afterwards, they eat so much.”
—Brenda Schwartz-Yeager, artist, Stikine River tour boat operator, Wrangell resident
“When I wanted to start a family I really didn’t want to give up my work outdoors. I loved being on boats but commercial fishing was difficult for being a mom, because you had to be gone for weeks at a time. So one of my buddies said, “you know, you can get your captain's license, run charters, and be home every night.”
So I did that 33 years ago — I started a little charter company. Initially I did a lot of sportfishing charters and things like that, because ecotours weren’t really a big deal. Sometimes people would hear about something and want to see it, and we’d get in a boat and I’d take them up there. But it was kind of more like a little extra for the fun of it, not really in any way part of the package.
And it gradually went from driving other people’s jet boats to me having my own.
Funnily enough, In 1962 my dad thought it would be a great idea to run tours on the Stikine. But the problem was they didn't really have jet boats. The boats were open, and slow, and cold, and wet. It was a miserable failure, but I think it was a good idea.
People were, though, running tours on the river on the slower riverboats — these three-day excursions that would run to Telegraph, in a more luxurious fashion. It had been done for quite a while.
All my husband and our five kids have worked in the tourism — in our business or on the boats in some capacity. It’s fifth generation in the family.
The river became a little more of my specialty, because I’m pretty passionate about the place, and can’t really think of anywhere I’d rather be.”
—Brenda Schwartz-Yeager, artist, Stikine River tour boat operator, Wrangell resident
Photo by Colin Arisman
“The Stikine is really the boss. It is a powerful river with powerful weather systems and big mountains, ice. Weather can change rapidly. You could have an unexpected experience almost any day on the river. I’ve had some really interesting, tricky days.
I used to do a lot of transports into Canada for kayakers or groups that were paddling the river. That’s a long trip. You’re running the boat 170 or so miles upstream, in a fast-moving current, and the channels change all the time. You often find yourself taking routes you’ve never even been on before, because the one you went on before is filled with a log jam, and you have to go off and find this new route in these areas of the river where it will braid out into hundreds of different channels, and you have to pick one and hope it comes out somewhere.
Those trips were always ripe with opportunities for pretty much nothing to go right. It’s really exciting and stressful as a professional operator. Because — this is what’s so wonderful about the Stikine — there is really virtually nothing civilization-wise between when you leave Wrangell and arrive in Telegraph Creek, both of which are small places with not a lot of resources. Everything in between is just kind of wilderness, and the mountains are so huge there was no communication prior to sat phone. A lot of these trips I would do were before satellite communication. You’d drop off these kayakers in Telegraph Creek, and ten days or so later they were supposed to spill out somewhere down by Wrangell, and if they didn’t show up, you had to go up there and try to find them. And sometimes they would take a wrong turn and end up down some channel that ended in a log jam, and not be able to paddle the swift current back up, and you would get tangled up in these places where you didn't’ really even know where you were at — you had never been there before.
It’s a great place for a lot of adventure.”
—Brenda Schwartz-Yeager, artist, Stikine River tour boat operator, Wrangell resident
“The Stikine is a very valuable resource for my family. We try to live a subsistence lifestyle a lot, and the Stikine is extremely bountiful. Much of our subsistence hunting and gathering takes place there, too. It is very woven into our souls, the river is. Because we use it for our livelihood, but even more so for a huge contribution to our subsistence lifestyle.
One of my favorite times — for as long as I can remember, we have done a fish camp. As all Alaskans know, summer days are super valuable, because you're trying to do everything all at once. Make a living, cut all your firewood, gather all your food. But we take a few days off at the end of June and we go to our cabins, where we are allowed to fish, as rural residents, for salmon. At our cabin, we process them, smoke them and can them, all while we’re trying to get the garden in. It’s usually maybe twenty people, several families, participating in this work. It’s a big campout, and everyone is working cooperatively to process all this fish and get it on the shelf and in the freezer. It still is one of my favorite times of year. When my kids were young, they would complain about it. But now, if they were going to come back at any time of year for a visit, they would most likely set fish camp aside as the favorite time of year to be home for.”
—Brenda Schwartz-Yeager, artist, Stikine River tour boat operator, Wrangell resident
“I spend a lot of time in Shakes Lake. It has a glacier that terminates in the other end of it, and it’s in a deep kind of punch bowl valley beneath some of the 7,000 or 8,000-foot transboundary mountains. It’s very shaded, very cold, right at the edge of the coastal Boundary Range mountains. It’s glaciated on three sides of it, so it’s really only thawed out from mid-June until the end of October. So everything’s on fast forward.
It has beautiful wildflowers. A lot of things that would look almost alpine, because of its very short season and harsh climate. And the lake is filled with all these beautiful icebergs. And I love how even though I sometimes I go there day after day, it’s like this whole new kaleidoscope of changing scenery with different icebergs that have arrived, or rolled over. And the flowers, the plants have to move so fast there, because it’s such a short season, with a tremendous amount of snowfall. Typically there would be 20-some feet of snow there in the winter. It’s just remarkably changing. I love it there.”
—Brenda Schwartz-Yeager, artist, Stikine River tour boat operator, Wrangell resident
“The community of Wrangell is a jumping off place of the Stikine, because of the richness and bounty of the Stikine — both to Indigenous peoples, and later comers to the land. It’s still perfectly situated, because it’s right at the mouth of the river, where all this bounty flows. It’s this conveyor belt of bountiful resources running by the door. We’re very lucky that our side of the Stikine is dedicated wilderness.
It was easy to give testimony recently in support of the Stikine, and a resolution to defend our transboundary rivers, at the Wrangell Assembly meeting. I looked around the room and most people in Wrangell, whether they know it or not — whether they’re commercial fishermen, or part of the visitor industry — everything we do has a little bit to do with the bounty of that river. Not unlike the Taku, it’s such a big contributor to the region. Even if the fish you caught that day wasn’t a Stikine River salmon, probably something it ate was. Or some nutrients that contributed to it in some way. The whole economic fabric of the region, not to mention people’s lives, subsistence-wise, recreation-wise, are very tied to that place. I don't think we completely understand how interconnected everything is. And if we were to be so unfortunate as to have one of these large rivers devastated, the outlying effects even far from that river would be profound, and would probably take us many decades to even understand the impacts.
But I also feel like it’s easy for people here, nestled in the shadow of these huge mountains that are separating us from these mines — we don’t see them. I feel like if people were driving by them every day and looking at them, they would say ‘Whoah.’ But they’re so kind of out of sight and out of mind. And unfortunately, everything is fine until it’s not. Life will go on normally until there’s potentially some catastrophic event, at which point you can’t undo it. It’s a tricky thing to plan for, and manage for, and to get people’s attention about, because at this moment in time, maybe everything is okay. And these mines are a long ways from anybody, and nobody hardly knows they’re there.”
—Brenda Schwartz-Yeager, artist, Stikine River tour boat operator, Wrangell resident
Stikine River Watershed. Photo by Colin Arisman
“I would love to see us value our wild places for their more wild status. I’m not particularly against some use of resources, but I think it should be done very mindfully and sustainably. I’d love to see the Tongass as a whole take a position of trying to manage its resources for more long-term — to value just the wildness of the place, and its pristine untouchedness, as a resource, as well as the fish, and the trees, minerals, and things like that. I’d like us to have a longer-term, more insightful, and protective approach to how we manage these places.
Because we are so at risk downstream of these mines, I really do feel like we deserve to have some say in them. I’m not saying don’t extract any resources, but I am saying we have to do it very carefully and mindfully of the long-term impacts. I’d like to see everybody be allowed to have a seat at the table. Even if it costs a lot more to extract minerals, because we have to be careful with what we do with the tailings — if it costs more, that is the cost of doing business. We need to be willing to shoulder those costs to not do irreparable harm.
I do feel like salmon, because they are such a keystone species in Southeast Alaska, get a lot of attention, but there are so many other species that are foundationally just as important, like the hooligan, that we don't even understand their tolerance to pollution in these large systems. So that should be reason to proceed with the utmost caution.”
—Brenda Schwartz-Yeager, artist, Stikine River tour boat operator, Wrangell resident
“I always encourage everybody to get outside and go see these big rivers that are shaping our whole life up and down the coast here. There are lots of ways people can experience them, whether they fly over them, or paddle down them.
I don’t know what to do. I don’t know how to get everybody’s attention. But it's hard for me to believe that anybody couldn’t go to one of these big transboundary rivers or even look at any salmon spawning stream and not be overwhelmed with the magic of it all.”
—Brenda Schwartz-Yeager, artist, Stikine River tour boat operator, Wrangell resident