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Full Interview

Malani Towle

Cordova, Alaska

My name is Malani Towle and I am 27 years old.  I grew up in Cordova, Alaska, since I was, I think we moved here full time when I was about 5 years old.  Before that, we spent the winters in a cabin up on the old Glenn Highway.

I was four years old when the oil spill happened, and I turned five in May so my memories of the spill itself and that year is kind like this general like sense of trauma.  My mom and dad both left town – I don’t know if they went to go fly over [the spill] or what – but I have this image of them leaving and us just like reaching out for them.  They didn’t work on the spill, but I think that they were just going over to see what was happening, and, actually, I think they fished that year because the pink salmon didn’t crash until two years later.  They were going fishing to try and salvage the season since they had just bought a boat. I have this memory of reaching out for my parents and they both were leaving to go.  It was just this overall sense of trauma.

My parents had bought into seining the year of the oil spill and you know at that point in time all 300 permits were fishing and they had to write to every single permit-holder to find one.  And then by the time I was – I don’t know when they actually had to sell out, but they had to sell out for basically nothing, you know.  So it financially affected our lives; my mom started a real estate business to keep us from going bankrupt.  She worked my whole childhood and my dad fished for other people because when I was in second grade, our boat burned down.  He seined with other people but it really just wasn’t a very lucrative business at the time.  It was kind of more of a hobby really after the spill, there just wasn’t any way to make it work.

I had a really happy childhood and luckily for us, my mom was able to do real estate and make that work.  And growing up, my brother is all about fishing and always was, but it was never really something that I ever considered doing for a living because I watched my parents and fishing wasn’t a way to make a living – it was a way to lose a lot of money essentially. 

It is so funny what you notice as a child versus as an adult and truthfully, my world was a pretty happy one and I wasn’t really aware of a lot of different things that were going on.  But I know now that there were a lot of people that had to leave town, a lot of divorces, a lot of even suicides, and a lot of people that just sold out of the fishery. 

Other than that, I have all these – well they’re not really memories because I don’t really remember being there, but I remember seeing the pictures and hearing the stories over and over again.  The big town meetings, the promises, and the lies and how hard that was for everybody to go through.  Twenty years of litigation and there is constantly something else around the corner that everybody has to get together and stop. 

My Godmother is Riki Ott, who has been super involved with the aftermath of the spill and all sorts of the damages and effects and all of that, so it was a very big part of my childhood growing up.  Whenever Riki would come back to town, we would hear all sorts of stories. Because Riki was so involved, I felt like we were doing something about it.  It wasn’t this sort of victim’s stance where “it just happened to us and now our whole lives are ruined.” It was this battle that was being fought, and we were I guess David. I grew up just knowing a lot about what was going on with that.  It was quite an education really into how the corporate world works and especially different environmental issues and how you would go about sort of fighting for what you believe is right or you know.

Right before the tenth anniversary of the spill, there was kind of a community meeting saying “Okay, this is going to be our window to say our piece to the world again and what do we want to focus on and what is it that we want to communicate?”  I attended all of those meetings and was, gosh, I think fourteen at the time, thirteen or fourteen, and I was really kind of shocked at how traumatic it was for so many people to talk about still, ten years later.  I went home and I wrote a song about it, perhaps from the perspective of my mother or other people her age when the spill happened.  The song is called “What Exxon Means” and it was just sort of talking about what it must have felt like for them to see this happen to their community and wonder, “that is my whole livelihood, how am I going to raise a family now?” So I wrote that song, and then I actually ended up going up to Anchorage for the candlelight vigil and the press meetings and everything and played the song there.  Then I went to the fifteenth anniversary and I met up with Riki and some other Cordovans that went to D.C. and again, we met with press and senators and all of that. 

I’ve done a lot of talking to different people about the spill, film crews and people have used my song multiple times.  I’m happy to talk about it and share, and hopefully it can help people, especially down in the Gulf.  You know, they are going to look at a long, long recovery. 

For a long time, there was less than full participation [in the Prince William Sound salmon seine fishery], and now there is still not full participation fishing in the seine fishery, but we are getting a lot closer.  It is great to see.

My first year fishing was 2007.  I went out seining with my father and the man that he was working with and another guy who is now one of my best friends and it was just this awesome experience and it ruined me for everything else.  But it also made me really sad because I realized that I could have been doing this my whole life; I could have been going out on the boat and I could have been fishing as a lifestyle.  Now I’ve chosen that lifestyle, but it has just been a long road to get back to where that is an option.

My husband and I just bought a [Prince William Sound salmon] gillnet permit last fall.  Our first summer, we bought a boat and fished with a leased permit. It was a really hard decision to make because I had lived through the crash of everything, and I know that it is not something that you can depend on.  So we’re actually going to nursing school in Puerto Rico because the only way I feel comfortable making fishing a big part of our lives is if we have some sort of back-up plan.  Because things like this happen. It is our Sound, but there is so much going on out there that we don’t have control over.  So I guess for me, it has kind of just taught me a lesson in having eggs in many baskets because otherwise the world could come crashing down.

We were out on the water in Valdez this last month. It was so fun because my brother who is 25 and all of his group of friends have bought seine boats. It is so neat to see them all out there with their boats and realize that this is the next generation and that there is going to be a next generation, which is pretty cool.