Join NAMA’s movement for healthy oceans and thriving fishing communities
Enjoyed Cornucopia? In Björk’s words: "The web of life will unfold into a world of new solutions."
It's simple: Know what to look for when buying seafood. Oppose industrial fish farming. Honor Wild Salmon and the Indigenous communities who care for them.
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About NAMA
The North American Marine Alliance (NAMA) is a grassroots, fishermen-led alliance building power to resist big-business control of the ocean commons and to support local, values-based seafood systems. We aim to transform how we fish away from the industrialized sector dominated by multinational corporations to community-driven operations rooted in culture, reciprocity, and care.
Illustration credit: Feini Yin
Buy seafood from community-based harvesters
Eating local seafood contributes to better jobs and a more sustainable way of life in fishing communities. Buying directly from community-based harvesters means fishermen get a better return on less catch, which in turn means the ocean gets a break.
Check out NAMA’s Sustainable Seafood Guide, which talks about taking a values-based approach to buying seafood. The Local Catch Network provides a hub for seafood providers that are rooted in core values such as fair pricing, eating with the ecosystem, and honoring the ocean. Use the Local Catch Seafood Finder to find a harvester near you or one that can ship to you.
Take action against industrial fish farming
Communities around the world have farmed seafood sustainably for millennia. But in today’s hyper-industrialized aquaculture, multinational giants hoard marine resources and operate with little oversight. In the United States, the situation is at an inflection: Big Aquaculture corporations are using political clout to push for intensive, polluting finfish farming in federal waters.
Support the Keep Finfish Free Act of 2025 to block these operations. Plug into Don’t Cage Our Oceans, a coalition of diverse organizations working together to stop offshore finfish farming in the U.S. through federal law, policies, and coalition building, while uplifting aquaculture and wild seafood systems that are rooted in values and led by local communities.
Illustration credit: Pilar Emitxin
Honor wild salmon and Indigenous salmon communities
Wild Salmon used to be abundant across the Pacific and Atlantic, bringing in nutrients that they gather from years in the ocean to bears, birds, seals, forests, and communities on land, especially Indigenous communities who consider themselves Salmon Peoples. With the continued pressure of global capitalism and industrialization, Wild Salmon are in a state of crisis.
In the face of this crisis, Salmon Peoples, fishers from around the world, environmental justice organizations, and grassroots groups such as Block Corporate Salmon are working to stop destructive salmon farming, including the farming of genetically engineered salmon, and to protect Indigenous ecologies, ways of being, and ways of knowing.
Learn more by reading the “Honoring Salmon, Honoring Life” zine by A Growing Culture and Block Corporate Salmon.
Photo credits (left to right): Chris Miller, Joanne Teasdale, Bill Weir. Design credit for theater graphic: Diamante Asberry. Photo graphic for theater slide: Bill Weir
Learn about Melanie Brown’s work
Community-based fishermen live and work in the places where they fish. They run small- and medium-scale operations that match the scale of the ecosystems where they fish, and they are ecological experts attuned to the nuances of ocean rhythms, fish migration patterns, and spawning habitat.
Learn about the fishermen in your community, such as Melanie Brown, a Sockeye Salmon fisherman in Alaska. In the summers, Melanie works with her children to operate a set gillnet site that her great grandfather Paul Chukan staked out in Naknek, Bristol Bay. When she’s not fishing, she is based in Juneau, advocating for Salmon as the outreach director for SalmonState, which protects Alaskan ecosystems as home to the largest and healthiest Wild Salmon runs left on Earth.
Melanie has been deeply involved in the decades-long fight to permanently keep Pebble Mine out of Bristol Bay. Learn more from the United Tribes of Bristol Bay, which works to sustain Yup’ik, Dena’ina, and Alutiiq ways of life in Bristol Bay.
Additionally, Melanie serves as a North American delegate to the World Forum of Fisher Peoples, a mass-based social movement founded in 1997, representing more than 10 million small-scale, artisanal, and Indigenous seafood harvesters globally. Check out the Sustainable Small-Scale Fisheries Guidelines, which provide a compass for sustaining traditional and customary fisher peoples globally who love their work and contribute to feeding the world.