Articles written by Mary Catharine Martin


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  • A healing center for Kake

    Mary Catharine Martin, The Salmon State|Jul 10, 2025

    For years now, Organized Village of Kake President Joel Jackson has had a dream: a cultural healing center that can reintroduce people looking to heal from alcohol and drug addictions and intergenerational trauma to their culture. For the last couple of years, that dream has been moving toward reality. Fifty-two miles from Kake and twelve miles from Petersburg, in Portage Bay, is an old Forest Service administration bunkhouse. For decades, it has sat empty. The first time he saw it, Jackson...

  • Find an unknown salmon creek and earn $100

    Mary Catharine Martin - The Salmon State|Jun 15, 2023

    Up until last year, Southeast Alaska’s Mitkof Island was home to a creek with some unique salmon: They only turned left. Officially, anyway. There is a fork in Ohmer Creek, on Mitkof Island. On the west side, the state’s Anadromous Waters Catalog, or AWC, reported the presence of all five species of wild Alaska salmon, as well as Dolly Varden and cutthroat trout. On the east side of the fork, according to the AWC, there were only steelhead. One afternoon last summer, U.S. Forest Service fish biologist Eric Castro, of the Petersburg Ranger Dis...

  • GUEST COLUMN: Growing "giant pumpkins" and fish habitat in Petersburg

    Mary Catharine Martin - The Salmon State|Oct 20, 2022

    PETERSBURG, AK-At East Ohmer Creek, 22 miles south of Petersburg, Alaska, is a tree believed to be the largest left on Mitkof Island. Forest Service Fish Biologist Eric Castro said foresters estimate the tree, which grew on a once-rich floodplain, is around 600 years old. "Those giant pumpkins are what used to grow in this type of environment," Castro said. That tree stands in contrast to those that have grown around it over the last 60 years, which have reached four to eight inches in diameter...