Emmonak and other villages in the Yukon Delta have yet to receive any help from Sarah Palin, but some Seattle businessmen are much more compassionate.

Three years ago, Seattle seafood consultant Jon Rowley was drawn to the Yukon River delta by salmon — silver chinook endowed with prodigious amounts of oil that help them swim some 2,000 miles across Alaska to distant Canadian spawning grounds.

With proper handling and marketing, Rowley figured that these fish could gain the same type of celebrity status as the Copper River salmon he began promoting back in the 1980s.
But this winter it's the fishermen, not the fish, that have Rowley's attention.

The fishermen are Yup'ik Eskimos whose villages in western Alaska have been slammed by a dismal salmon season, high fuel prices and recent cold snaps that forced some families to skimp on food as they tried to scrape up enough cash to warm their homes.

Their plight has helped stir an unusual relief effort aimed not at some distant Third World nation but at rural communities in oil-rich Alaska.

Rowley helped launch a monthlong fundraising event that began Sunday at Elliott's Oyster
House at Pier 56 in Seattle, where Yukon chum salmon, marketed as keta, will be on the menu. From 20 to 25 percent of the revenue from each keta plate will be donated to a fuel fund for Alaska villagers.

"These are strong people who are used to enduring hardships," said Rowley. "They do it quietly and are not used to asking for help."

That is very true. What most people fail to realize is that these are proud independent people who felt great shame to have to ask for any help from anybody! Even their very own government.

And as we have seen asking their government did not do them one bit of good anyhow.

But what Nick Tucker's letter did was to enlighten everyday people as to what was happening in Emmonak and other villages.

With the help of Alaskan liberal bloggers, radio hosts, and activists, we were able to get enough help to the village of Emmonak to substantially ease their situation. And that relief started arriving in Emmonak the very day we started raising money.

And now we have this group in Seattle working to provide a long term solution to the problems facing these Alaskans who are essentially living in third world conditions tight here in our state. On behalf of my fellow Alaskans I would like to say thank you Seattle.

My question is why could our government not have helped get a program like this started ten years ago? And why is their NOTHING like this in the planning stage now?

It just makes me sick to my stomach to see my government doing nothing while people from other states come to the aid of my Alaskan brothers and sisters.