Mary Peltola, the first Alaska Native heading to Congress, journeys home to the river

Mary Peltola has been fishing on the Kuskokwim since she was a child. (Liz Ruskin/Alaska Public Media)

BETHEL, Alaska — Democrat Mary Peltola could not wait to get out on the Kuskokwim, the river she grew up on, south of the Yukon and upriver from the Bering Sea.

She's pulled gillnets full of salmon from this river every summer since she was a child. Subsistence fishing and hunting is a way of life here, even for people with office jobs.