The Fishermen's Frontier: People and Salmon in Southeast Alaska

Acknowledgments

Acknowledgments W e live in a postmodern world. As consumers of television, of processed food, and even of nature, we experience much of life as spectators. Corporations—what agrarian writerWendell Berry calls “proxies”—produce our food, our shelter, our clothing, our entertainment . The postmodern mentality suggests that one reality is never superior to another. All realities simply reveal diªerent contexts: a weed in the Disneyland parking lot and a giant sequoia are both “nature”; fishing for salmon and entering data in a corporate cubicle are both forms of “work.” I would not deny this. Yet I am glad to know that somewhere out there, setting out on the ebb tide, someone is doing work that dissolves the distance between humans and nature, between thought and action—work that eliminates the distance, irony, and spectatorlike quality of modern life. I am glad to know that independent, small-boat fishermen are killing fish for me to consume.* I first want to thank all those Alaska fisherfolk whose labors allow the rest of us to enjoy a meal of wild salmon now and then, and whose lifestyles tend to buck against the homogenizing trends of modern life. The contemporary era has seen a dramatic loss of biodiversity: industrial agriculture has transformed complex natural ecosystems into highly simplified cash-crop monocultures. But what about the loss of human diversity, as distinctive occupations are pulverized in the churning gears of globalizaxv * A short note on terminology: I would never call an Alaska fisherman a “fisher” to his or her face. I would be told, rather vehemently, that “fishers” are four-legged animals with thick brown fur. However, in an attempt to avoid excessive repetition, I have used “fishermen” and “fishers” synonymously throughout this book. I have also used “fisherman” or “fishermen ” when referring to female fishers, both for the sake of simplicity and because all the female fishermen I have encountered in Alaska refer to themselves as fishermen. tion? Here’s to the hope that both fishermen and fish continue their annual migrations long into the future. This book would not have been possible without fishermen and fish. It would also not have been possible without the support of Columbia Basin College and the CBC Foundation, which provided me a summer research grant in 2005. College president Lee Thornton granted me a two-quarter sabbatical to work on this book. Vice president Richard Cummins and DeborahMeadows ,deanof theSocialScienceDivision,encouragedmyresearching and writing as a legitimate form of “professional development.” All three had the vision to recognize that even at a community college history teachers sometimes need to be historians. This book owes its existence to an extended community of friends, scholars , and public servants that stretches from Los Angeles to Naknek, Alaska. Norris Hundley, my graduate school mentor and the first person to read the entire manuscript, probably did not realize that he would still be advising me nearly ten years after graduate school. There is no historian whom I trustandadmiremore.OtherhistoriansfromtheUCLAcommunityoªered encouragement, suggestions, and, most important, friendship, including Philip Minehan, Chris Friday, Mark Spence, Edward Hashima, Tom Mertes, andLissaWadewitz.Ithankyouallforyourcontinuingintellectualandemotional support. I owe a special thanks to Julidta Tarver at the University of Washington Press, for simply being interested, concerned, and supportive long before I had produced anything that merited her attention. It was at a conference in Bellingham, Washington, during the spring of 2003 when I told Lita, with firm resolve, that I was giving up any pretense of ever producing anything: teaching and raising a family were enough without the pressure of research and writing, which at a community college were not part of my job responsibilities anyway. For some reason her friendly e-mails did not stop, and a few years later I was able to hand her this manuscript. It was at that same Bellingham conference in 2003 that I became reacquainted with Katie Johnson-Ringsmuth, an old friend from my cannery days in South Naknek. Remarkably, we had both gone from working in the fisheries to researching and writing about the fisheries. Since 2003, Katie has become a great friend whose interest in, and contributions to, this book have been invaluable. Also at that Bellingham conference was Steve Haycox— the avuncular dean of Alaska history—whose suggestions, scholarship, and general knowledge of Alaska history have likewise made this a better xvi Acknowledgments book. Since 1992, Steve’s interest in my own development as a historian...