Ciisquq Crystal Leonetti, a Curyung tribal citizen with ties to Dillingham and Anchor Point, has been named director of the Office of Subsistence Management (OSM).
Leonetti was acting director of the office for six months before she officially assumed the role on Jan. 6. She says it’s both a challenging and exciting time for subsistence in Alaska.
“I just think that there’s potential to increase a cultural understanding of what subsistence is,” said Leonetti. “It is so much more than food or nutrition. It is deeply spiritual and cultural. We can’t lose that.”
The office oversees the Federal Subsistence Management Program, a multiagency program to preserve subsistence and conserve natural resources on Alaska’s roughly 222 million acres of federal land, about two-thirds of the state’s total land. The program was established under a provision of the Alaska Native Interest Lands Conservation Act.
Under the umbrella of OSM is the Federal Subsistence Board, made up of heads of federal agencies such as the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service and the Bureau of Land Management, as well as three public members—two representing rural subsistence users.
In her new role, Leonetti will also work with the state’s 10 regional subsistence boards that vote and provide input to the Federal Subsistence Board on subsistence management proposals, like a current Bristol Bay proposal to allow subsistence users to take fish within 300 feet of a stream mouth.
Leonetti was born and raised in Anchor Point and says she visited Dillingham in the summers to fish with her family in Bristol Bay.
She brings three decades of federal conservation experience to the position. Her resume includes work with the U.S. Department of Agriculture’s Natural Resources Conservation Service in Kenai, Fairbanks, and Bethel. For the last 14 years, she served as the Alaska Native Affairs specialist and Native American Liaison for the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service, the first Indigenous woman to ever hold the position.
She says that subsistence management faces growing challenges due to climate change. Regulations are historically made on a two-year cycle, but with rapidly changing weather, migration patterns, and population numbers, a lot can happen in that time.
“Salmon populations across the state have been changing very quickly. Caribou populations and sheep populations have been changing,” said Leonetti. “That means that the subsistence program has to be more flexible and adaptable to be able to implement changes even within the season instead of working within the two-year cycle.”
According to an order from Interior Secretary Deb Haaland, the office physically and administratively moved from the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service to the Office of Assistant Secretary for Policy, Management, and Budget last June. The move was, in part, aimed to centralize resources and make the office more efficient in addressing the needs of Alaska Native communities and subsistence users, which Leonetti says is happening.
“It’s in a location where the regulations and correspondence can happen more efficiently,” said Leonetti. “We are finding ourselves getting on schedule or ahead of schedule on many things that used to kind of fall behind schedule.”
Leonetti says the new location also gets more foot traffic from federal agencies and national lawmakers, which she hopes will increase exposure and discourse between the Office of Subsistence and those who may not be familiar with subsistence practices.
She says along with nurturing strong relationships between OSM and tribes, the state, and the boards they oversee, it’s important to demonstrate the importance of subsistence as a cultural, economic, and social practice to the bosses in Washington D.C.
“I want to get them here, get them out on a boat experiencing when people are harvesting fish,” said Leonetti. “Or even on the Yukon and the Kuskokwim, where those fish camps are empty, and how that impacts people and the generations who are not able to learn thousands of year-old tradition and culture.”
Meanwhile, the next Federal Subsistence Board meeting on fish and shellfish regulations for the 2025-2027 cycle will be held in Anchorage in early February.