The commercial fishing season in Kotzebue came to a close Friday, ... and this was the third best harvest in over 25 years in the Kotzebue fishery,” said Alaska Department of the Fish and Game ...

We were sitting on the frozen sound of Kotzebue, Alaska, our breaths mingling in the still air. It was March, and the first time in 21 years that Tiffany and I had been in Alaska’s Arctic together.

Alaska Natives, who make up about three-quarters of Kotzebue’s population, pull hundreds of kilograms of food out of the sea every year. “We’re ocean people,” Schaeffer tells me.

Kotzebue sits about 40 kilometers north of the Arctic Circle, on Alaska’s western coastline. Before the Russian explorer Otto von Kotzebue had his name attached to the place in the 1800s, the ...