Film
Yukon Kings | by Emmanuel Vaughan-Lee
Emergence Magazine

Yukon Kings

by Emmanuel Vaughan-Lee

For the Yup’ik peoples of Alaska, salmon has been a source of physical and cultural sustenance for millennia. In this film, a Yup’ik fisherman teaches his grandchildren how to fish in the remote Alaskan Yukon Delta. As the king salmon population faces drastic declines, he holds on to the hope that this traditional knowledge will carry forward to future generations.

Director & Producer

Emmanuel Vaughan-Lee is an author, Emmy- and Peabody Award–nominated filmmaker and a Sufi teacher. He has directed more than twenty documentary films including: Taste of the Land, The Last Ice Age, Aloha Āina, The Nightingale’s Song, Earthrise, Sanctuaries of Silence, and Elemental, among others. His films have been screened at New York Film Festival, Tribeca Film Festival, SXSW, and Hot Docs, exhibited at the Smithsonian Museum and London’s Barbican, and featured on PBS POV, National Geographic, The New Yorker and The New York Times Op-Docs. His first book An Offering of Remembrance is forthcoming from Shambhala in Summer 2026. He is the founder, podcast host and executive editor of Emergence Magazine.

Credits

Directed by Emmanuel Vaughan-Lee
Produced by Dorothée Royal-Hedinger & Emmanuel Vaughan-Lee
Edited by Adam Loften
Cinematography by Andrew David Watson
Music by H. Scott Salinas
Sound by D. Chris Smith

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